Effective Study Habits & Memory Boosting Techniques | Weekly Group Meditation Program

Effective Study Habits & Memory Boosting Techniques | Weekly Group Meditation Program

Join us LIVE every week for a transformative meditation session with Banani Tanzima Rahman, hosted by Quantum Foundation! 🌟
In this unique program, we combine the Timeless Wisdom of Spiritual Masters with Cutting-Edge Scientific Discoveries to cultivate peace, health, success, and fulfillment in our lives. 🌿🧘‍♂️

📚 Today's Topic: Effective Study Habits 🧠
Did you know that learning effectively is not just about how much you study but how you study? Scientific research reveals that active recall and spaced repetition are the keys to boosting memory and long-term learning. 🔑✨

🔹 The real challenge is not storing information but retrieving it when needed.
🔹 Active recall: Don't just read—form questions about the material you learn!
🔹 Repetition is key: Move information from short-term to long-term memory with scheduled reviews.
🔹 Smart students don’t cram! Learn, revise after 7 days, then revisit again at longer intervals.
🔹 Struggling to retain information? Review it sooner—it will stick better!
🔹 Breaks matter! Your brain absorbs more when you take intentional pauses while studying.
🔹 Memory depends on two key principles:

Primacy (we remember the first things we learn)
Recency (we recall the last things we study)

✨ Through meditation and mindfulness, we can train our minds to absorb knowledge effectively and achieve greater clarity in learning and life.

🕰️ Join us LIVE every week and discover powerful techniques to enhance your focus, memory, and personal growth!

📌 Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more enriching sessions! 🔔💛

#QuantumFoundation #Meditation #Mindfulness #BananiTanzimaRahman #EffectiveStudy #ActiveRecall #MemoryBoost #StudentSuccess #SpiritualWisdom

alikum welcome to the weekly sakon program organized by Quantum meditation Society London where every week we learn some lessons from the teachings the Timeless teachings of spiritual Masters and Cutting Edge scientific inquiry to help bring peace health success and fulfillment in our lives today we are talking about effective study habits uh a lot of our listeners are students and um in the past few decades there has been systematic research on how we can study more effectively how we can learn things more quickly and today we are going to go through some of the um uh lessons uh that came out of those research uh so let's just jump in the one of the first lessons I would say very important lesson that has come out of this inquiry into effective study habits is the importance of active recall what scientists call Active recall so what does that mean those of us who are regular in um in joining the quantum programs uh uh know quite a bit about how our brains work and we know that the way brain um brain um grows brain learns is by new neural connections we know that neurons that fire together wi together so whenever we're learning something new be information or a new way of being a new way of uh feeling emotions new a new set of neurons are firing together and when that happens repeatedly uh those neurons get wired together a new neural connection is being formed in the brain and if we do it repeatedly those circuits those new neural circuits become very strong and uh become a permanent almost permanent part of our brain although the brain is always either pruning or uh strengthening its neural circuits based on how much we are using it now when we are learning something new when we are studying um three things need to happen in the brain so first when you're studying you're taking in the information your that new knowledge new information is being encoded in your brain so the first step is the encoding of the information the new information the new knowledge the second thing that needs to happen is for that encoding the new information that's been encoded to be stored in the brain so first it ISS to come in it needs to be encoded then it needs to be stored by the by the brain and also very important for academic success is is the retrieval of the information so when we are not we're having difficulty answering a question in an exam for example we would think with our traditional thinking that oh the information we may think that the information didn't really go in like there was some problem with what we now call encoding but that might not necessarily be true what might be causing you problem is that you at that moment are having problem retrieving that information from your brain because of that scientists have found researchers have found that the more active recall you include during your study the more effectively you learn the longer you uh remember it the better you remember it so what does that mean in in practical in a practical situation so when I was young people used to um uh I heard of my parents my mom saying that people used to uh read very loudly and and they just kept on repeating things and when I was growing up still people would still be like oh King so and so King so so that is an example of someone a maybe without understanding just focusing on the encoding and they might not be even be encoding because their mind might not be on whatever they're repeating again and again game but that used to be uh in past generations for for a for a group of people obviously not everybody uh how they studied like you were just repeating reading something repeatedly reading something uh what the studies say is that that because that does not focus on the retreat Evil part that is a much less effective way of studying now how the people who are most effective in studies think of think of someone studying medicine and in in Cambridge University obviously medicine is something where you need to learn a lot of information right and retain a lot of information what they're doing is they may be reading it reading one paragraph once or twice then immediately closing the book or metaphorically closing the book covering the book um setting the book aside and trying to recall what they're studying and and to facilitate this recalling you can use certain techniques one is like create questions create questions so say my my year six um uh son he's he starting a paragraph on um history so they're learning the history of the Crusades now they'll be learning the Christian perspective they will learn the Muslim perspective very interesting to me coming from a different country but say you you were you were reading a paragraph on that what you can do is as soon along with reading the paragraph you create some questions in your mind that the information in this paragraph answers create some questions in your mind that the information in the paragraph answer so um maybe um it this the paragraph you're reading are giving you the background of the First Crusade so you um um so you you create this question in your mind like how did the first um crus uh Crusade start and in your mind when you're reading you create a step-by-step answer like okay first this happened then this happened then this happened like like what just read the paragraph and see how many points it is it giving you in answer to that question then what you do is you try to without looking at the book or whatever resource you're using for as a source of your information you answer that question in your mind this is a much harder way of learning right this will make you learning much harder but just like when you want to build muscles right you can't you can't um you can't build a muscle without actually lifting weights up without giving it some resistance right you can't you can't build the muscles in your biceps for example without um um just by reading about muscles right similarly because there is a biological Foundation right to your learning the a biological Foundation to how new information is encoded stored in your brain and what you can do to create the U circuits to recall it effectively because they might involve different parts of the brain you have to make it work during your study process make those parts of the brain work during the study process and the more you make them work the stronger they become and the easier you you find in the future to do the retrieval so the first point is this so instead of using passive techniques some people uh some people uh just read other people may be taking notes but they're actually looking at the book and taking notes or listening to somebody and taking notes and what again Studies have found is that active recall is more effective than these techniques not that these are not not useful not that they're totally useless but active recall uh uh really helps you learn much more effectively so whatever you are studying you should make testing yourself as an integral part of your study don't wait till sometime in the future the test date or mock exam date to see how much you have actually um absorbed you make it a part of your study uh you can you can do it by creating questions and answering them in your mind you can do it by summarizing the thing in your own way without looking you can do it by creating a timeline uh after you've studied you can do it by creating a mind map of what you have you have um studied uh where you are relating all the concepts I go this is the this is the first crusade okay this happened and this happened and this happened so it's in the middle and those are in the bubbles and then here you can put the consequences and then here in the middle you can put some from descriptions like these are these are the people this is where this is where it happened these are the people who who participated and so on and so forth so um um um so that's the first point is make active recollection actively recalling an integral part of your study process and that's what successful students do okay second point is spaced recollection so the way our memory works is that we have short short term and long-term memory so maybe today you learned about how your heart works right and this is but you're taking biology and you you you've learned the the structure of the heart structure and functioning of the heart that's what you're studying now so uh you may still remember it maybe an hour for now from now or maybe tomorrow but what this memory you have now maybe in your shortterm memory but what happens with our memory what scientists have found is that eventually if it's not being used it it starts fading from your memory so the shortterm circuits fail to uh transform into long-term circuits in your brain because every day we're absorbing lots and lots of new information your brain cannot keep all of them it decides what to keep based on what it thinks is important for you um and the one way you can make it think is important is through repetition make it it think like oh this is something that's being used so the way you can make sure that whatever you're learning goes into your long-term memory is is letting it like forget it a little bit and then review it again so your your um your heart thing you're you're starting it today and then uh uh you after a while when you're more likely to to U maybe forgot a little bit go back to it revise that and then you like it it's like your connection was becoming kind of a little like the neural Circ was becoming a little weaker but then you use used it again now it's stronger and then do it again and again and again and because of that successful students um don't learn at the last moment it it doesn't work like uh there was a culture um I think it was in this country too and then my some of my parents generation got it when they they came to came here to study and then when I was growing up in schools like the some of the kind of the Stellar students would say oh I just study before the day of the exam and and it seemed like there was a little bit of um little bit of uh Pride associated with that it seemed like it showed that oh you were very very intelligent and that was definitely there in in the culture of certain schools and stuff like that people didn't want to want to say that they worked very hard or they studi repeatedly those type of things you know you can you can get by with them maybe when when you're younger but you cannot like if that is the Habit you develop you will it will be very difficult for you to success be successful in life be successful as you take on more and more and more um responsibilities uh it would be very difficult for you to be successful if you if you do not change those habits so we in Quantum say that start studying from the first day of school you know the day you get your syllabus start studying study regularly and if you do that then you have that chance of maybe uh you learned a topic when it's first introduced three months before the test you you you you you learned it for the first time one day and then maybe seven days later you go back to it you when you're forgetting and then your circuits get one chance of one chance of strengthening then you get to it one more time one month before and what will happen with this spaced Rec Space recollection so basically what that means is you are recol recollecting revising with some space in between you are not studying the same thing for five hours in a row you are studying you're there's some space there's some break and you're revising it later what will happen is that when the time of the exam comes or the interview comes when you need to recollect it for some reason you will see that oh by that point it's it's become part of your long-term memory and you are finding it much easier to recollect it and you can go to your exam your interview or your presentation or whatever it is with a lot more confidence because at that point is part of your long-term memory now obviously a very relevant question is uh what's the how much space so scientists don't have definite answers to that question what they say is how much space you should give between uh learning something for the first time and then going back to it recollecting it uh is depends on how difficult and complex you find the thing you're studying so the rule is if it's something that feels very difficult to to understand to understanding is different thing will come to it later or to remember to retain you come back to it sooner come back to it sooner rather than later and sooner can even be later in the same day uh a little later but if you uh uh but if it's relatively easy F you can come back maybe a week later and then the second rule about how much space you should put between your studing is you should at first the spaces should be less so at first you you there's less space between when you first learn and you come back then the the second recollection the third recollection the fourth rection the space you can make it longer and longer because by that time it's you know it's a little stronger in your your brain so it will take you a little longer for the for the circuit to start becoming weaker and you want and you want to come back when it's becoming weaker so that it's not redundant you're coming back to the recollection is not redundant so hope you found that hope you found that useful and you'll be able to utilize it in your in your in your studies now very important in studying is the role of breaks again like the ineffective study habits is cramming a lot at the last moment like we're not studying from before we are not we uh and we we are not doing active recollection active retrieval when we're studying we haven't done space recollection we're just like one week before the week where of the exam we're just sitting there and then then we pledge that I own I don't get up from my table um for uh until at least this many hours have passed and often times we think that oh pulling all nighters will solve all problems I've done it too to be fair uh that if I'm up all night I'll magically somehow be able to cover everything and it will have no adverse impact not true it has a lot of adverse impact studying is learning is based best done when you're taking taking breaks in between so say you you are going to one evening you are going to study for 2 hours maybe if you're when you're getting older maybe 3 hours maybe on a weekend you are you know you'll be studying in the morning like you will you will be studying 4 hours take breaks in the midst of studying in the midst of studying now how how often you need to take breaks will depend on obviously your focus you know if you're like those Zen Masters who who can just focus uh for hours without any distraction uh great you may not need as many breaks but typically our what happens is the focus starts to wear off with time and what what we have found with studying is that uh our memory Works in an interesting way say you you um uh study for 20 minutes in those 20 minutes all the things you learned in those 20 minutes uh what will remember um will depend on two things one is Primacy I mean several things but in between the in amongst those several things are two things one is Primacy and one is recency so what is Primacy Primacy is are the things that you learn when you first first started when you first started studying right you were you you were you know you you start learning about the heart and you the first maybe the first paragraph you you you you learned after you started studying you are more likely to remember it recency is the last thing you studied so you're also more likely to learn um remember the thing you you studied last in those 20 minutes or 1 Hour 2 hours so what happened when you take breaks say you take after every 20 minutes you take a 5 minute break or a 10 minute break even what you're doing is you are giving yourself more pracy time and more recency time because every time you're turn coming back you get a new Primacy time right if you if you study for 2 hours in a row maybe uh you have the first 10 minutes and the five minutes or 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes that you remember very well and in between you have uh an hour and 40 minutes that you don't remember so well but but if you gave yourself those breaks of every 20 minutes then for every 20 minutes of studying you you remember 10 minutes the five maybe the first five minutes and the last five minutes because you have more Primacy times and more recent times so that's one of the reasons that is important to give ourself breaks and when you're having the break get off walk or do something like that and then come back the second thing about breaks why breaks are very important and this is this doesn't just it's not about just short breaks during your studying but just breaks in your day when you're not actively trying to learn something okay this is very important uh or actively not actively trying to learn something or not actively trying to produce something not actively trying to write your dissertation because our brain has um different states of being when you're actively trying when you're actively working right you're actively either trying to absorb something trying to learn or recollect or to maybe produce something write an essay or solve a problem uh a scientific problem a math problem an algorithm problem you are what the scientist called a in the focus mode you are actively focusing on one specific thing which is important because that's when you're giving your brain the problem to be solved or the thing to be recollected now there are other times when you are washing the dishes you know washing dishes become quite mechanical you can wander around in your head when you do that or uh you're out for a walk or the most famous you're in the shower when you may not be thinking about that problem that you're trying to solve directly we think that at those times we are we are not working on the problem we our minds are just wondering but what scientists have found is that's not actually not true even though your conscious mind may be wondering thinking about other things it is in those times what they call the diffused mode right focused mode actively trying to learn produce diffuse mode that when you're letting your mind be you're letting your mind wonder when you are in that state that's when your subconscious mind is trying to put everything together you know something from beforehand you learn something new that's when they're doing the synthesizing even without you knowing and that is why if you it in your own life if you read scientists life if you read successful businessman's life uh my my mentor our Mentor our Guru you always get This brilliant ideas during those focused states of being when you're in a focus mode because that's when your subconscious is still working on it and what is doing is it's drawing upon all the knowledge you have the new knowledge the old knowledge past knowledge through synthesize and to work on the the problem that you gave it the challenge that you gave it so because of that if you want to do high quality uh essays high quality presentations high quality uh books how or you want to solve a problem it's very very important to put be in diffus stat of being throughout the day I remember my brother um he he he studied in Engineering University in Bangladesh and then he went to he got a full bright scholarship and he went to do his PhD in computer science in um in the University of uh California at Berkeley which has a very strong very strong computer science program so he was you know for for applying to us universities you need to write a personal essay say about why you want to do something so I remember like he he wrote and he gave it to us to me and my husband to to go through his essay and see if we could suggest any improvements uh so he wrote about this incident there where he said he was he's um he was trying to solve a problem related to an algorithm and he had worked hard on it and he just couldn't solve it he just he just couldn't figure out how to do it and then he lives in a part of taka which is quite far from the University where he used to study and he had to spend a long time every day caught in taka's traffic jams and one day he was just you know he had given it a lot of time he had a problem a lot of time he couldn't solve it but he was sitting in the traffic jam and then suddenly the solution came to his mind and I still remember he wrote like I will never ever look at traffic jams the same way again like because traffic jumps are people find them super annoying right but he because he he F the solution came to him while sitting in a traffic jam um uh you know it completely changed his is how he view traffic jams so so that's how the diffuse state of being works and everything I'm I'm you know saying today is backed by hard signs so give it a try uh try because it may seem like oh you know am I wasting my time but no it's like it's about working smarter anything you want to do in life is about uh a smart uh you know will be improved by a smart way of approaching it so so that's that's the importance of breaks now another thing that's related to this is the importance of sleep um uh again this is something that researchers have been re researching a lot over the past few decades and we now know that when we're sleeping is when everything that we learned during the day is Consolidated in our mind when we're sleeping that is when the uh the brain is taking all everything that went in that day and then trying to related to everything that it already knows and also trying to decide whether it should go through the to the long-term memory or not so if your sleep deprived it will that doesn't work um Matthew Walker is a very very famous sleep scientist he says you know just like um sponges absorb water right but if your sponge is already super wet will you be will it still be able to absorb the same amount of water no so that's the same thing happens when you're sleep deprived you are like a sponge that is water logged so depending like if you don't get enough sleep your ability to learn can be up to 40% less that's that's a lot less so one more Point against cramming at the last moment uh uh staying up all night it doesn't work because sleep is an integral part of your learning process and some people they even take naps um um some people you know if you take a little bit of nap in the afternoon you start something you do a few versions of reading before that and then you do uh a few repetitions after that you will probably learn a lot better if you are starting a new topic try this do a few like go through it once or twice uh or several times in the evening then keep the next morning to go through the same thing again in between you get a full night sleep you will see that you are learning it much faster so that's the importance of sleep so we don't want to Pro long too much because we you know last week our our our our um you know we it was too long I would say um one last two last points one is a footnote is like make sure you understand and how do you know you understand what you're studying uh this is Richard Fineman the super super famous physicist says that that the test uh of whether you really understand something or not is whether you can explain it to a 5-year-old or not someone who has really understood something can explain it in very very easy language so if you can go and explain what you just learned to your fiveyear old niece or brother you're in good shape okay but if you can't you need to resort to technical language then you're like maybe you you're still a little there's still some lack of clarity in that part where you're going back to using technical language and jargons that a 5-year-old won't understand so maybe you need to spend a little more time trying to understand that now um if you know what often happens is that you change schools you change countries you change systems or you were not that serious in your younger grades uh and you suddenly you're older and now you're very motivated you want to do well but you're finding it very difficult to understand things and at first it can be very frustrating but that is happening because you lack foundational knowledge okay knowledge is built on on top of you know on on top of stacks of previous knowledge if that happens don't give up people can learn a lot um in a short amount of time but do go back and learn and try to learn the foundational knowledge there there's this very interesting story from the life of one of Bangladesh's most famous writers uman Ahmed who who was a very good student went to study do a PhD in chemistry in the US and and in one course in in you know in the after the first term he got zero he failed or he I think he actually did get zero and everybody advised him to to drop that course they're saying like listen there is a lot of foundational knowledge a lot of background you need to succeed in this course uh you don't have it why don't you choose an alternative course but what happened was that in the same course there was um a a a guy who was visually impaired and he got the highest highest MS and um hum told himself if he can do it being visually impared I can do it but what he needed to do over the next time is spend a lot of time learning gaining the foundational knowledge and then came the day when he got the results from the you know the end of term exams and the next time and guess how much he got he got 100 out of 100 so you can do it too okay the last point is in everything in life your State of Mind matters the state you're in while doing something matters if you're studying in a Bard state if you you don't know why you are studying you won't be able to absorb this absorb the things you know it will like probably won't be even encoded um so re make sure you know what your goal is make sure you know why you are studying uh and spend a little time before you're studying just getting your mind in the right State try to study at the same time every day that will condition your mind to go in that focus more during your study time um um uh and um keep your environment nice keep yourself nicely hydrated drink lots of water and so that you are ready to study the final thing you can do to sort of focus and bring your mind back to in a in a prime state to prime your mind for studying H are are a couple of things that we Quantum graduates have been using for a long long long time the first thing is a technique where we we we call uh getting to the zero point and for that what you need to do is to draw a spiral take a piece of paper start drawing a spiral from the outside and start going in in in and in and in without the lines overlapping or touching each other until you get to the center and while you're doing it you tell yourself that when this my pen or pencil reaches the center my mind will be free from all distractions and will focus on only this this being the topic that you are going to study now start doing it like and you will see that you know with time you really and not long either you are really really being able to be very focused in those times and learn the things you're supposed to learn much more quickly and the the other things Quantum graduates use a lot is being is meditating so we simply go in the meditative State we go to our Quantum home then we give ourselves Auto suggestions that I'm going to study this topic now everything I study will be encoded in my brain very well and will be stored encoded and stored very well and whenever I need to I will be able to recall it retrieve it easily uh fully accurately um and you can modify uh you can modify this being the central message you can modify your Auto auto suggestions but take this state seriously and do this buildup we even have meditations for students unfortunately the English ones were not ready yet but you can do it yourself you know the steps of going to the quantum home go there give yourself this Auto suggestions then open your eyes without counting from Zer to seven so you're not coming back to the normal normal conscious State just open your eyes and study and tell yourself I in this state I'll be in this state for the next this you know this many uh minutes or this many hours and start with smaller smaller times and then do it for longer and longer lengths of time okay so that is our our um topic for today effective study habits active recall spaced recollection importance of breaks importance of sleep importance of understanding and importance of being in the right state of moment uh and and the state of being for studying and for that using the spiral technique getting to zero technique or uh going to your Quantum homes technique So today we're um we are going to just again practice relaxation because everybody just loves deep relaxation okay so I hope you love it too you have grown to love it too so let's do that because we do everything better learning better when you're in a relaxed State as always give me a minute and if you have any problems please um uh write in the chat and I'll try to fix it

#Effective #Study #Habits #Memory #Boosting #Techniques #Weekly #Group #Meditation #Program

source

SaveSavedRemoved 0