Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning

Best study methods are counterintuitive: what feels like learning often isn't

Re-reading feels productive but testing yourself is far superior. The best learning strategies offset forgetting, not build familiarity.

"Most of what we believe about the best ways to study are absolutely false. The best way to study is to offset forgetting."

Yoga nidra restores mental vigor without the grogginess of napping

NSDR for 10-20 min restores mental and physical energy without the tiredness from conventional naps, making it ideal for study breaks.

"I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I, and so many other people love about the waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from. And those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes, because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap if you'd like to try the waking up app please go to wakingup.com slash huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial again that's wakingup.com slash huuberman to access a free 30-day trial. Okay, let's talk about how best to study and learn. And of course, people have different learning styles. Some people prefer to learn by reading. Some people prefer to study in a group. Some people prefer to highlight. Some people call themselves auditory learners. Other people consider themselves visual learners. But guess what? When one looks at the research on preferred learning styles, pretty much all of that melts away. It turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium in which that material arrives, whether or not it's auditory or visual or combined, whether or not you review slides or a textbook, or you watch small videos, it turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory systems that offset forgetting. This is a theme I'm going to return to over and over again throughout today's episode. Rather than think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind, cognitive or motor learning, musical learning, math, et cetera. Okay, so keep this in mind throughout today's episode. The best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information. You're trying to inoculate against forgetting. That is the way to remember things, that is the way to gain mastery over them. And I'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer-reviewed literature. Now, before I do that, I want to talk about what learning is. I promise to make this fairly brief because I've covered learning and so-called neuroplasticity before on this podcast. For those of you that have heard those discussions, this will serve as a refresher. For those of you that have not heard those discussions, this will be thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information. Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system, which of course includes your brain and your spinal cord, which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response to experience. So any form of learning involves neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity, we sometimes hear as neuroplasticity, two words, or neuroplasticity. Those are the same thing, essentially. The change that underlies neuroplasticity, two words, or neuroplasticity. Those are the same thing, essentially. The change that underlies neuroplasticity at the level of cells, which we call neurons or nerve cells, generally involves three different mechanisms. One is the strengthening of certain connections, what we call synaptic connections. Synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another. It's actually a gap between the neurons. It is technically called the synaptic cleft. It's a gap. And within that gap, chemicals are passed across that gap that allow one neuron to activate other neurons or many neurons to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity of other neurons, okay? So one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons. Another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons. And yet a third form of plasticity, which is often discussed in the media, but is very rare actually in the nervous system, especially the adult nervous system of humans, is neurogenesis or the addition of new neurons. Let's just get this out of the way upfront because the addition of new neurons, again, grabs so much attention in media articles, but it's responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion, or frankly, for most all discussions. It is true you have a specialized set of neurons in your olfactory bulb that are responsible for smell, as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of your hippocampus, an area of the brain that's important for memory, in which new neurons appear to be added throughout the lifespan. But this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans. Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans. Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening of existing connections and the weakening of existing connections or the formation of new connections between already existing neurons, not new neurons, okay? Now, the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of neuroplasticity is very important for sake of today's discussion. I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections, we often think, well, that means forgetting, or that means the brain is getting less good. However, so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies, for instance, the acquisition of a new motor skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections. So we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections, removing new connections. Let's just leave it at this level mechanistically. When you hear about neuroplasticity, just know that it could be the consequence of strengthening of connections as well as weakening of connections. And that neither strengthening of connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections can map directly to the formation or removal of say memories or information. Just know that these are the important mechanisms. In fact, if you look at a baby that is, let's say, I don't know, nine months old, their motor skills are not terrific typically compared to the motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old. Just look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort, or eat anything when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus an adolescent or teen. Despite the poor table manners of some adolescents and teens and some adults for that matter, they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant, of course. And believe it or not, the improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans and other species for that matter, from birth until the adolescence and teen years and adult years is largely the reflection of the removal, that's right, the removal of neural connections as opposed to the formation of neural connections. However, the neural connections that remain become much more robust, They become much more reliable. Okay? So that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about today, which is how to study and learn. And as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information. So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information. So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion right now, and for reasons that will become clear later, I want you to take a brief quiz. Now, the moment people hear quiz or test, typically it spikes their adrenaline, they start feeling stressed, but don't worry, you're going to keep your answers to yourself. And you're doing this for a very specific purpose. Here's my question. This is a two question quiz."

Meditation since age 15 profoundly shaped Huberman's focus and learning ability

Thousands of studies confirm mindfulness meditation improves focus, stress, and mood. Huberman has practiced since his teens.

"I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I, and so many other people love about the waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from. And those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes, because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap if you'd like to try the waking up app please go to wakingup.com slash huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial again that's wakingup.com slash huuberman to access a free 30-day trial. Okay, let's talk about how best to study and learn. And of course, people have different learning styles. Some people prefer to learn by reading. Some people prefer to study in a group. Some people prefer to highlight. Some people call themselves auditory learners. Other people consider themselves visual learners. But guess what? When one looks at the research on preferred learning styles, pretty much all of that melts away. It turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium in which that material arrives, whether or not it's auditory or visual or combined, whether or not you review slides or a textbook, or you watch small videos, it turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory systems that offset forgetting. This is a theme I'm going to return to over and over again throughout today's episode. Rather than think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind, cognitive or motor learning, musical learning, math, et cetera. Okay, so keep this in mind throughout today's episode. The best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information. You're trying to inoculate against forgetting. That is the way to remember things, that is the way to gain mastery over them. And I'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer-reviewed literature. Now, before I do that, I want to talk about what learning is. I promise to make this fairly brief because I've covered learning and so-called neuroplasticity before on this podcast. For those of you that have heard those discussions, this will serve as a refresher. For those of you that have not heard those discussions, this will be thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information. Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system, which of course includes your brain and your spinal cord, which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response to experience. So any form of learning involves neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity, we sometimes hear as neuroplasticity, two words, or neuroplasticity. Those are the same thing, essentially. The change that underlies neuroplasticity, two words, or neuroplasticity. Those are the same thing, essentially. The change that underlies neuroplasticity at the level of cells, which we call neurons or nerve cells, generally involves three different mechanisms. One is the strengthening of certain connections, what we call synaptic connections. Synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another. It's actually a gap between the neurons. It is technically called the synaptic cleft. It's a gap. And within that gap, chemicals are passed across that gap that allow one neuron to activate other neurons or many neurons to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity of other neurons, okay? So one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons. Another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons. And yet a third form of plasticity, which is often discussed in the media, but is very rare actually in the nervous system, especially the adult nervous system of humans, is neurogenesis or the addition of new neurons. Let's just get this out of the way upfront because the addition of new neurons, again, grabs so much attention in media articles, but it's responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion, or frankly, for most all discussions. It is true you have a specialized set of neurons in your olfactory bulb that are responsible for smell, as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of your hippocampus, an area of the brain that's important for memory, in which new neurons appear to be added throughout the lifespan. But this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans. Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans. Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening of existing connections and the weakening of existing connections or the formation of new connections between already existing neurons, not new neurons, okay? Now, the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of neuroplasticity is very important for sake of today's discussion. I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections, we often think, well, that means forgetting, or that means the brain is getting less good. However, so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies, for instance, the acquisition of a new motor skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections. So we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections, removing new connections. Let's just leave it at this level mechanistically. When you hear about neuroplasticity, just know that it could be the consequence of strengthening of connections as well as weakening of connections. And that neither strengthening of connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections can map directly to the formation or removal of say memories or information. Just know that these are the important mechanisms. In fact, if you look at a baby that is, let's say, I don't know, nine months old, their motor skills are not terrific typically compared to the motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old. Just look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort, or eat anything when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus an adolescent or teen. Despite the poor table manners of some adolescents and teens and some adults for that matter, they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant, of course. And believe it or not, the improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans and other species for that matter, from birth until the adolescence and teen years and adult years is largely the reflection of the removal, that's right, the removal of neural connections as opposed to the formation of neural connections. However, the neural connections that remain become much more robust, They become much more reliable. Okay? So that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about today, which is how to study and learn. And as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information. So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information. So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion right now, and for reasons that will become clear later, I want you to take a brief quiz. Now, the moment people hear quiz or test, typically it spikes their adrenaline, they start feeling stressed, but don't worry, you're going to keep your answers to yourself. And you're doing this for a very specific purpose. Here's my question. This is a two question quiz."

10 min daily meditation improves focus and memory, per NYU research

Wendy Suzuki's lab showed 10 min/day of mindfulness meditation improves focus and recall. It trains the nervous system to sustain attention.

"People who do a 10 minute meditation per day improve their level of focus and their memory and recall ability."

Top students study alone, eliminate distractions, then teach peers to test mastery

The best students study in isolation without distractions, then teach the material to other students as a form of self-testing.

"So they're managing their time, they're eliminating distractions, and they're studying for a consistent amount of time, at least five days per week, okay? Presumably they're taking some weekends off, although that wasn't made clear from this paper. The other thing that they do, and this is very important, is that they make an effort to then teach their peers, to teach other students in the class. Now, some of you may be thinking, and I'm thinking back to college here, mostly, that if you spend all this time learning the information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other students, that teaching them the information is kind of a freebie for them and it's harder for you, meaning you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage or you're giving them an unfair advantage for not having done the work. Now, while this paper didn't do an analysis of whether or not these students that served as the learners from the other students got an unfair advantage, it's very clear that students who make it a point to learn material in isolation, then bring that material to other students in the same course and teach them, perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other students. So don't be afraid to be a teacher of your peers in order to test, this is key, to test and develop mastery of the material. Now, in my laboratory for years, we used to have a saying, which I simply picked up from the laboratories I was trained in, I didn't come up with a saying, which was watch one, do one, teach one. And that was referring to doing surgeries or suturing or doing an antibody reaction or a Western blot or things that you do in laboratories."

Testing yourself beats re-reading: even getting 40% right outperforms four re-reads

Students who studied once and tested three times dramatically outperformed those who re-read four times, despite feeling less confident.

"It's not about how many times you study the material. Students who study once and test three times outperform those exposed to the material four times."

First test yourself immediately after learning to offset the forgetting curve

Self-testing right after first exposure offsets natural forgetting. Familiarity from re-reading is not the same as actual mastery.

"Test yourself on the material very soon after your first exposure, because that offsets the natural forgetting of new material the brain is exposed to."

Medieval practice of throwing students into cold water after learning -- it actually works

Emotional arousal strengthens memory consolidation. Dynamic teachers are easier to learn from because they deploy neuromodulators in the learner.

"The point being that we all have those really wonderful dynamic teachers. Yes, it's much easier to learn and remember that material. You still need to test yourself on it, but it's much easier to learn and remember that material. You still need to test yourself on it, but it's much easier to learn that material for the very reasons I say before. It's a lesser example of more deployment of the neuromodulators in you, the learner that is exposed to that material, okay? So emotion matters. So much so that in a beautiful review about learning and memory from the great James McGaw, one of the luminaries in modern neuroscience and psychology of memory, he talked about a medieval practice. This is pre-wild, whereby people and kids, kids are people of course, but adults and kids were taught information and then thrown, literally thrown into cold water. Why? To deploy adrenaline and consolidate memory of the material they were exposed to. Now, I know we've covered deliberate cold exposure on this podcast before. No, I'm not saying you need to do a cold plunge after being exposed to new material, but guess what? They were doing that many hundreds of years ago, and it makes sense logically based on all our understanding of the neurobiology underlying things like PTSD, underlying emotion-laden memory formation and consolidation and our ability to remember things that were emotionally laden much better than things that were less emotionally laden. So if you want to take a cold shower after learning some material or even better testing yourself mentally on that material while in a cold shower or cold plunge. You certainly can, just don't stay in there too long. Use best practices. If you want to know what those best practices are for deliberate cold exposure, you can check out our deliberate cold exposure newsletter at hubermanlab.com. It's completely zero cost. You don't even need to sign up. You simply go to newsletter in the menu tab and you can find that PDF. And now, because you are becoming proficient in an understanding of neuroplasticity and learning and testing and neuromodulators like epinephrine, yes, drinking caffeine will increase your levels of epinephrine. Not strikingly so, but enough that it probably helps you learn things a little bit better. Should you drink the coffee after? Listen, that's getting a little bit too down in the details. The most important components to learning are that you be alert so that you can attend, so you can pay attention to the material you're trying to learn and then testing yourself later. And of course, the other component, which is getting sufficient amounts of great sleep each night. And I highly recommend doing NSDR. I mentioned gap effects before. Those are very, very cool."