📚 How to Study and Memorize Effectively
One of the biggest pieces of advice I give new students is: you have to learn how to study.
When you begin TCM school there's so much to remember -- it's overwhelming! So you need to figure out an effective study strategy and what methods work for you, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Some people like flashcards, and some people like to color-code their notes. I'm one of those boring people who likes everything in black and white in charts and tables.
But whatever tactics you prefer, here are some general strategies that I give to students to make sure your study time is effective in the long term:
How to Study - Learning & Remembering
As you get flooded with information throughout school, there are two basic things that you want to do with that information: learn it and remember it.
That means we need to develop strategies for both understanding and memorization. Often students are good at one or the other, but not necessarily both.
(For example, because I have a background in mathematics, I was good at thinking abstractly and making connections. So I would always try to understand why things were the way they were. But when it came to memorizing point locations or herb functions, I found that I was terrible at rote memorization.)
So let's take a look at each:
Step 1: Actually Understanding the Material
When you're first introduced to new concepts and information, step one is understanding. You want to try to understand why things are the way they are, or how they connect to other things that you already know.
(I believe people who study studying refer to this process as encoding. As in, you want to encode the knowledge in your brain for later retrieval.)
This part takes effort and a little extra time, but it's totally worth it. When you understand and make connections, it's so much easier to remember the information when you need it.
For example:
- If you're learning about blood deficiency, instead of just memorizing a list a symptoms, try to understand the process by which each symptom occurs. For example:
- 👀 Blood is stored by the Liver, and the Liver is connected to the eyes. If there's not enough blood to nourish the eyes, you get dry eyes and floaters in the vision
- 💪 The Liver governs the sinews. If there's not enough blood to nourish the sinews, they dry out at get stiff. So you have weakness, spasm, and contraction or the muscles.
- 💅 The Liver blooms in the nails (or the nails are the surplus of the sinews). So insufficient blood can lead to brittle nails. Etc.
- If you're trying to remember the functions of SP-8, remember that this is a Xi-Cleft point. Xi-Cleft points treat acute conditions and pain. On yin channels they also regulate blood. If you combine this with the fact that the Spleen "controls blood" and the Spleen channel goes to the lower jiao, then it makes sense that SP-8 is a very good point for painful menses.
- 🌿 If you're studying herbs, try to make connections between the taste, temperature, and entering channels of an herb and its main functions.
Of course, there a couple problems here. Number one, this takes a lot of extra upfront time and thinking to make these connections or understand the why. Number two, a lot of teachers just aren't very good at explaining these connections.
But if you can figure these things out or take the time to read it in your textbooks, that makes the second part so much easier.
Step 2: Memorizing
Trying to understand the material is a great approach when you're introduced to material for the first time. But after that, you still need make sure that you can recall that information weeks or months later. For that there are two strategies: spaced repetition and active recall.
1. Spaced Repetition:
The idea here is that you want to repeat the information, but you want to have some time between each session. Basically you learn something, take some time to forget it, then re-learn it.
There's some research behind this (they call it the "forgetting curve"), but basically, spacing out your study sessions is more effective and more efficient than having one marathon session.
I've found this to be especially true when you want to keep the information long term. When I studied the night before, I would pass the test but then immediately forget everything. When I spaced out my studying, it was easier to remember it for finals, year-ends, and boards.
2. Active Recall
A mistake I've seen a lot of students make is that they just passively flip through their notecards and say, "Oh yeah, I remember that." But then when they get to the test it turns out that they don't remember it.
It turns out that there's a difference between recognizing the information and recalling the information.
So when you study, you want to make sure you can actually recall the information from nothing. If you close your book and put down your notecards, can you still repeat the information?
There's a couple ways you can practice active recall:
- Take notes with your book closed. After you read a chapter, close the book and try to write down the important points you remember.
- Take practice tests. There are a lot of these on tcmstudy.net, and each questions has an explanation for why it's correct.
- Write your own questions. Think about the important points in a section, then write questions you think you might get asked.
Active recall is especially easy for acupuncture. When you're done studying, you can close your book and point to each point on your body. Can you recite the location and function of each point as you touch it?
Conclusion
If you want to make it through school, you need to learn how to study. If you want to remember the information long term (and not just forget it after you pass your test), you need to both understand the material and have a way to remember it.
Here are some other YouTube videos you can watch for more information:
