Study Prof

I recently recorded a live webinar revealing six of my most powerful (and immediately useful) study skills.  Just click the image below to watch it.  Premium Members Only! Use this link to watch the webinar. You’ll have to log in to see it.

Revised and Updated

Taking frequent breaks maximizes your brain’s ability to recall. Hundreds of variations on experiments first performed in the late 1800s have confirmed that taking a 5 to 10 minute break every thirty or forty minutes will help you get the most out of your overworked and underappreciated neurons.

To help you remember to take study breaks, take a look at the free online app, Unforgetit. It’s perfect for setting break reminders to get you up off your duff on a regular schedule.

Want more details about breaks and maximizing your memory? Watch my free study skills video. It will take 45 minutes to watch and save you HOURS this week!

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

Good news!

Researchers have developed a game that’s been shown to crank up your smarticle particles. That’s right, the Dual N-Back game–downloadable gratis–actually increases your short term memory AND your fluid intelligence (in layman-ese, “smarts”).

Or read the research for yourself in the peer-reviewed article from the engagingly-acronymed PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science). Apparently, the more you play the game, which involves recalling a square’s position on a grid while simultaneously recalling a spoken letter, the brainier you get.

I’ve played for 18 hours straight, and now I’m remotely writing this blog post using only my awesome-tastic mental powers [not really]. So download and play, mental ninety-pound weaklings of the world, and become the cerebral Adonis you were meant to be while lesser mortals drool into their Cheerios. [Not sure about the punctuation in that last, suspiciously run-onish sentence. A few more hours of play should take care of that.]

Part five of 5 Easy Review Tricks series — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

5. Talk about it. Please log in or sign up to read the rest of this content. Find out more.

Part four of 5 Easy Review Tricks series — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

4. Draw it out. If you aren’t taking a pencil and making your own charts, graphs, illustrations, diagrams, mind maps, topical doodles, etc. then you are losing out on one of the best memory mastery techniques there is.

Most students only draw in their notes what the professor draws on the board or shows in her PowerPoint.  For shame. Copying down what you see before you will help recall, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as coming up with your own illustration. Recall from earlier posts, the most powerful way to recall info is to use elaboration–doing something with the info. So do something with the info–illustrate it.

“But I ain’t a good drawrer,” you protest. Pshah! You don’t need to be. These pictures aren’t for anyone but yourself. Use stick figures, basic geometric shapes, and labels. You’ll be fine. For an in-depth how-to, take a look at The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam. My own review of the book ended up at, “not worth buying, but definitely worth looking through.” You may decide to buy … more power to ya. BONUS: Most of us recall images much more easily than words.

Take a look at these examples. Note that we ain’t talking Mona Lisa here; legible is all we are going for. The one from the NASA engineer led to a tremendous breakthrough in the aerospace field.

Never Forget

Part Three of 5 Easy Review Tricks series — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

3. Follow the Triple The Time (TTT) Rule Long Term. Continue to learn/review in loops over days and weeks, not just during a given study session. Review a given set of notes/flashcards/vocab list 24 hours later, 3 days later, 9 days later, etc. (more…)

Part Two of 5 Easy Review Tricks series — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

2. Learn in loops. Learning a fact is like repeatedly squashing flat a blade of grass until it stays flat. If you try to squash that grass flat by stepping on it once a week, it will recover each week and you’ll have to squash it anew. If however, (more…)

Part One — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

Choose the answer below that best completes the sentence:

Aaaargh! I’ve been through this ____________ 50 frakkin times, and I still can’t remember it all!

A. Asinine text book chapter

B. Drool-inducing stack of flash cards

C. Styooopid vocab list

D. Bummunching set of notes

E. All of the above

(more…)

See if you can best me in a memory test and lend a helpful brain-cell to University of Edinburgh psychologists in the process. Schlepp on over to the BBC memory test and take twenty minutes to test out your memory muscles. Then click “more” below to see how I did.

Take a screen shot of your results, so you’ll be able to compare yours with mine, and make sure to read through the short article after you submit your results … valuable memory stuff there. (more…)

Dust off those synapses and belly up to the brain bar, pardner. You’re going to like this. Website Smart.fm takes some of my favorite learning principals (staggered review, automaticity, the Ebbinghaus learning curve, and more) and puts them all together in one slick and sociable site. Enter in whatever info you want to sear into your cerebellum or take advantage of the memory sets others have already created.

Take a peek at the intro video and then go give it a whirl. Click the pic to watch the video at YouTube.