What is your method for efficiently absorbing information?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Whether it is studying for school or researching a new subject for work, how do you do it?

More importantly, how do you do it really well?

Ever since I hit law school I’ve been pressing up against the limits of how much my brain can absorb. The problem is that after five to six hours of studying my brain will go, “collateral estoppel precludes the… oh fuck you and your mother, I don’t give a shit.”

Now I can study for 5-6 hours a day and for 5-6 days a week, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t do better right? So this is my attempt to pry the brains of smart dopers to see if you know something I don’t.

Here is my method:

I know my weaknesses. I know that I won’t study as well after 6pm as I will if I start right after breakfast. I know that I will not study so well if I have internet access within arms reach. If I have candy next to me, what will happen is I will compulsively eat the candy until the sugar crash makes me want to stop studying. I know these things because after years of telling myself I can ignore the internet and take notes on my computer, I’ve never been able to actually pull it off. Eventually I realized I should stop trying.

Now right after breakfast I grab a notebook and my textbook and head to the library. And this is how I manage to stay focus. The library is also a better place for me to study than my dorm room, because there is less I can do in a library to distract myself from studying.

I’ve also been trying to incorporate study breaks into my routine. But when I’m in my “study zone” I hate to take a break and ruin it. I’m also finding that a break consisting of watching a few TV shows on hulu doesn’t do anything to help me start thinking clearly again.

How do you guys do it?

2

Usually, most people have one of 3 distinct ways to get their highest (albeit it may not be “good”) retention rates:

Aural (Listening to something)
Visual (Reading or watching)
Kinesthetic (Moving or doing)

For me, I get my highest rates through Kinesthetics, mainly by writing what I want to remember. So, I take notes…lots and lots of notes.

In recent years, I’ve been training Aural and Visual as well, and I’ve been getting especially good at recalling movies based on seeing 1-2 seconds of any given film I’ve seen before.

If you are studying with less than 50% retention, I would advise switching to another style.

3

Heh, I’m studying law too. I could have written this.

I take lots of notes too, otherwise when I go back to revise something I did a few weeks ago I find that whatever I have read in textbooks has vanished from my brain. The problem with this is that there is already a lot to read, and taking notes makes the process much, much slower. Also, you may waste your time taking notes on things which end up just being background info and not hugely relevant.

Similar to notes, but possibly more helpful: Flowcharts. Flowcharts can be sexy. Good to have on hand for problem-style exam questions. Quicker to make than a set of notes, and a glance at a diagram can refresh your memory more efficiently than reading through a block of text.

Maybe instead of watching TV in your study breaks, do something like take a walk, cook, do some simple chores? (Ok, so doing chores is not really a fun ‘break’ :)) For some reason I find it easier to get back into study after doing something like this, whereas TV just makes me more sluggish.

Last suggestion - TALK to people about what you’re studying. Discuss it. Study alone for a little while, then talk to people about what you just read. Obviously this works best with people in your course and not randoms.

Good luck! I too shall be watching this thread.

4

I find that writing things down helps to imprint them in my brain. When I was in school I would make a habit to rewrite my class notes (which are usually messy and full of scribbles). As I transcribed my own notes I made an effort to understand what I’m writing, and if there were gaps in my understanding, I would look for answers in the textbook or other sources. Drawing diagrams or pictures to represent the info also helps.

5

Using my free bump.

6

I keep copious notes during lectures and as I’m reading texts. Just writing them imprints the information somewhere in my brain. When I study for an exam, I skim through my notes and make one- or two-word summaries in the margins next to important points, and after that I’m pretty much good to go. I have a strangely constructed memory, so it’s the act of writing that actually helps me retain the information, even if I can’t read what I’ve written afterward.

I had a friend once who could only study in the kitchen while the dishwasher was running because the noise blocked out any distractions.

7

90% of all the studying I’ve done falls into “Graps the Concepts”. I read, I get it, I go on. I don’t need to cram. I seldom need to re-read it.

The remaining 10% usually falls into “Memorize the Bullshit”. Examples of these include

• Memorizing which Constitutional amendments were which. There’s no ‘concept’ involved in knowing ‘that one was the 9th’ or whatever. Tedious. [7th grade History]

• Memorizing the baroque-classical rules for chord progression as a “map” with arrows pointing from each chord to each “legitimate” following chord, in the exact arrangement shown in the music theory book. Yeesh. [Freshman Music Comp]

• Memorizing exactly what the new Script Triggers introduced in FileMaker 10 are by their official name, which ones’ triggered scripts execute BEFORE the triggering event and which ones immediately AFTER, and what order they execute in if a single act happens to invoke multiple script triggers. Anal. [Filemaker 10 Certification]

Nothing to do with those nasty bit except write them, study the ones done wrong for a few minutes, write them again, grade yourself, write them again, again, again, again, again until you’ve got them down the same way you got your locker combination, mindlessly committed to rote memory.

8

Just for the fun of it, I’ll note that Richard Nixon’s law school nickname was “Iron Butt”, a name conferred by his classmates in recognition of the long hours he sat studying.

9

Get enough sleep.

Seriously. The brain restructures itself, strengthening neural connections, during sleep. If you miss out on necessary sleep, all the previous studying was for naught. So, don’t bother staying up late. Don’t pull an all nighter. You’ll only fuck your neural connections up and lose it all between now and then.

In the meantime, if I have to learn by reading, and it’s not very interested, I force myself to take notes - usually Cornell notes - and draw diagrams, flow charts, cartoons, or charts. If that’s not doing it, I grab an innocent bystander and begin explaining it to them.

10

I was a very medicore student in school (Bs and Cs mostly), so take my advice with that in mind.
Exercise at least 150 minutes a week, that’ll improve your mental ability.

Eat a decent diet, eat a high fiber whole grain breakfast each day and take vitamin supplements so you are not deficient

Start playing dual-n-back for 10-15 minutes a day, 5 days a week

Keep your stress levels low if you can, and get decent sleep.

This book is supposedly pretty good, but I’ve never read it. Oh the irony.

And (I never got to try this in college) there are meditation CDs called ‘binaural beat’ cds that put different wavelengths of music in each ear, confusing your brain and manipulating your EEGs.

Theta is supposedly able to help with mental fatigue by helping reset potassium/sodium channels.

I did find meditation in the morning with a theta meditation CD when I was sleep deprived helped me concentrate the rest of the day.

11

Read It, Write It, Say It™

Read It: read/watch/listen to the material; take notes, if that’s your thing.
Write It: write a blurb, page, or paper on the material in your own words.
Say It: have someone read the output of the Write It portion, then (without referring to it or your notes) tell them about it. encourage them to ask questions and form a discussion.

12

Just graduated from law school this year. My first suggestion: relax. But I think that’s a lesson we all have to learn on our own; I was a 1L once, so I remember.

My method, such as it was, was as follows. First, read the material closely and take careful, detailed notes. I did that usually by going over the case/etc. once with a highlighter, then writing a comprehensive brief from short-term memory with the highlighting as “notes” to help. How comprehensive should the brief/notes be? Depends on lots of things. You’ll probably write more detailed notes at the beginning of law school than the end, for a number of reasons, including the shift in pedagogical methods that tends to occur after 1L year and your own growing confidence. When you’re done reading and noting, close your books and go relax.

Second, go to class. Try to pay attention, and take notes as needed. You’ll find that if you can learn how to read a case and take solid notes on it, you won’t need to take many notes in class, but you can get a feel for what your professor is going to emphasize, and some nuances you might have missed. I’ll admit that I didn’t always pay a lot of attention in class. I did just fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a strategy.

Third, make an outline. This step, and the next, are key. You’re going to see a lot of people’s outlines; they float around law schools all the time. Some of mine are presumably floating around my school even now. Most of them look like someone took their case briefs and cut and pasted them together into one, generally massive 100 page document. This is, IMO, just what you don’t want to do. When you write an outline, you want to digest, condense, and synthesize the information into a streamlined, (relatively) easy to understand, manageable form. Mine were rarely, if ever, longer than twenty pages; fifteen or less was fairly common. Cut-and-paste, while not entirely forbidden, should be resorted to rarely. This is where a lot of the work of learning the information goes on.

Oh, you’ll want to do that about a month out from exams, perhaps. Until then, I wouldn’t worry about studying your class notes or reading notes. Once you’ve got your outline, and you’re coming up on exams, you’ll want to start studying it.

Finally, arrange some time to meet with a small group of your friends/classmates to review the material. Work through practice problems, talk about the things that you don’t understand. Try to figure out the Erie doctrine. Doing this, you’ll deepen your understanding of the material by working with it. It’ll also show up the holes in your understanding. You can all benefit from each others’ strengths, and supplement for each others’ weaknesses. It’s just as important as the outlining, IMO.

So that’s how I did it, or at least the broad outlines of how I did it. It’s not how everyone did it–as you’ll notice, I focused heavily on the reading, and essentially taught myself to some extent. Some–perhaps many–of my friends neglected the reading, paid close attention in class, and did just fine. You’ll figure out what works for you.

Which brings me back to my original point: relax. Law school’s really only as bad as you make it.

13

There are a lot of mental tricks for memorizing things. A few I’ve used are flash cards for random bits of information, mental pictures as tags for lists (basically this technique), progression tagging for things that need to be kept in order (use a path you know well and associate the things you need to remember with landmarks along the line of travel). Other mnemonic devices like word association and first letter phrases have their place too.

As far as reading, the only thing you can do is to read the material. You don’t necessarily need to read it in depth, as long as you can understand and retain the information you need. If you don’t read very quickly, you might consider taking a speed-reading course.

A couple of people earlier said to make sure to get enough sleep. That’s very important, and one of the main reasons people don’t retain information for very long if they crammed for a test. Exercise is also important. People who exercise regularly show better cognitive function than people who are more sedentary.

Another point to remember is that your attention span is only good for about 20 minutes, especially with dense material to process. Build a couple of short 5–10 minute breaks an hour into your schedule, because you’re going to zone out for a while every 20–30 minutes no matter what you do. You might as well get some benefit out of them and avoid feeling guilty for something that has nothing to do with self-discipline.

14

Those are two completely different animals, for me.

The research, I’ll check up relevant bibliography, check it out, pick a method which seems good and perform a test run using it and documenting the process and the results. I’m a chemist by training; even in college, memorization was required in a few items but not required in others and frowned upon in many; we were expected to always, always, always document everything.

The studying, I do it through exercises as much as possible. This is going to be a problem with my current course of study, as one subject is PoliSci and there’s no exercises; what I’m doing is read the books and take notes in .doc files.

15

Well I bought it. The topic was too good to pass up, and from the reviews it looks like it is very informative.

16

You’re off to a good start by identifying situations that cause you problems. Most people never figure that out.

Breaks are important. Set yourself a time range after which you will take a break, so you can stretch the studying a bit if you are “in the zone”. For example, take a break every 60 to 90 minutes. Try playing a video game. First person shooters are great, especially in a cheat mode so you get the fun without the frustration. TV is typically not interactive enough to “flush the brain”.

Also, six hours of actual studying is pretty good for a single day. Even though a working day is typically eight hours, it is rare for someone to concentrate single-mindedly for that long.

Good luck with the studies!