Memory, Learning Strategies, and Sleep

obviously you study a fair bit um on in terms of memory and returning information do you have any tips tricks tools that you use for that number one get plenty of sleep man that's that's the big one and that's the one that people people are willing to sacrifice their sleep to try to get ahead one of the big things is turning short term memory into long term memory and for that you need deep sleep I tell a lot of people, I had a buddy the other day because I've come up with some pretty crazy brain stacks over the years and I've gotten to the point where now that I prioritize sleep I don't need the brain stacks anymore so one thing I take pretty often is Thorne Research Neurochondria that tends to be really good for memory there's a product from the states which is qualia i was using that for a while but it's it's god awful expensive with the exchange rate and the shipping and all that so i don't use that anymore i basically i just use the neurochondria really and and the crazy amount of caffeine like i i drink enough caffeine to kill a small child and i will i do nicotine right i do the little many laws there's nicotine so when you do nicotine it serves a couple of purposes for me a it helps to suppress my appetite a little bit and b it stimulates memory and learning by stimulating acetylcholine receptors so but it's definitely it's not for everybody some people just really hate it i like it so i'll typically take you know a few of those a day and just sit around and study and the last thing is repetition the hardest part about learning is the initial building the initial foundational knowledge but once you can build that really wide it's very easy to layer new knowledge on top of that so like once i once i taught myself the basics of biochemistry and i knew that really well like drawing out glycolysis through krebs cycle through electron transport chain and also you know where fat enters that protein oxidation all that once i built a solid foundation of that then when you start looking at metabolic regulation through other means when you start looking at the excess metabolism portion, you read it one time and you remember it because you're so familiar with that information. Anatomy is not my thing. I hired a therapist to teach a lot of our anatomy stuff because he an anatomy wizard I know I like the normal personal trainer I know just enough anatomy to be dangerous And so now, but the foundation was big enough to where now that I'm really studying anatomy, once I see something, it clicks and it stays in there. So for a lot of people, you just have to understand that just like building a championship physique, building a championship level of knowledge just takes steady, obsessive work. and in repetition i guess you are yeah you're building those neural links over time just a little that compound effect interest every sort of single day yeah absolutely and there's uh there's a um a good book about it um a mind for numbers by barbara oakley um that's a really good book about like focus versus diffuse learning how to learn things that you're not really great at like I'm not good for I'm not good with numbers my wife Zoe is I'm more of a more of an English rhetoric type of person so when I'm learning new ways of math it's it's very difficult for me but the more I work on it the easier it gets to that and then start doing numbers in your head and things like that so I've actually gotten way better than I was my earlier times which is is really important for science because there's going to be a lot of calculations and things that go into learning a science, especially chemistry. Right. So important to know, but for a lot of people, just understanding that adults don't like to feel ignorant. Um, adults don't like being bad at something. So if you think back at when you were a kid and you first learned how to ride a bike, like, you know, your father and your mother, someone, someone had training wheels on your bike and that, that allowed you to figure out how to pedal and how to steer. Then eventually they had to take the training wheels off, and they pushed you, and you were really happy because you could get a few meters, and then you'd fall over and bust your knee up, you know. But when you're a kid, you don't understand what feeling humiliated is when you're that young. You just get back on the bike, and you keep trying again until you can... like to feel adequate but they don't like to feel ignorant um but if you really want to learn something you got to let go of that because if you if you like hold on to that stuff for a long time that's going to get in your way of actually truly learning something and you just need to go balls deep and just repetition and had just get an obsessive thirst for knowledge and then it then And man, learning gets great after that because you just want to know more and more and more, right? So you just get layers and layers of knowledge on top of each other.