Exactly how to use BLURTING explaining the neuroscience the best study method I use every day

Flirting is one of the simplest and most powerful active recall strategies that you can use, but so many people are doing it in way that is less effective than it can really be. They are not unlocking the true power of this technique. This is something that use all the time as second year student at the University of Cambridge, when I'm studying for economics, when I'm doing my law papers. Blurting is something that fundamentally rely on. And in this video, I'm going to explain some of the neuroscience behind why this is such successful strategy. But most importantly, I'm going to demo exactly how you can be using it in way that is super effective and that is going to mean that you are hitting all of your academic goals. You probably know what blurting is in abstract. It's when you take bunch of ideas that are currently floating around your brain because you've learned about certain topic and you condense them all. You write them all down onto piece of paper. It's messy. It's random. It doesn't need to look neat. You never need to look at this singular piece of paper with all your blushed ideas on it ever again. You just want to be testing what you know. That is the essence of blurting. The reason it works so well is because neuroscientifically your brain works through repeated use of neural pathways. So the more you fire certain neurons in certain order, the stronger the wiring between those neurons becomes. So what this means in practice is that because you're thinking back to certain memories, you're thinking about certain concepts, you're then translating that into what is written down. You're taking it from your mind to the page that's firing that neural connection and it's making it stronger. And this is hard process. It sits in the boundary of desirable difficulty, which is when things are just about hard enough for your brain to be super duper focused in on them. So your brain operates on bit of spectrum. Some things are too easy, some things are too hard. When things are too easy, you get distracted very quickly. When things are too hard, you struggle. You're not able to complete the tasks and your brain gets bored. So you want to be somewhere in happy equilibrium in the middle. This is desirable difficulty. That is exactly where blurting fits. That's bit of the neuroscience behind why you should be using blurting. But let me tell you exactly how to use it. And for that, I'm going to be demoing. I'm going to be demoing using GoodNotes on my iPad. This is not sponsored. just use GoodNotes on my iPad quite lot. So, I'm going to be using this. But obviously, you can just use any piece of paper and any pen you could possibly want. So, let's get into things. You're studying topic. You want to do blurting. What are you going to do? First thing you're going to do is familiarize yourself with the topic. Now, you're only going to do this step if it is something new or something that you've not looked at for very long time. If you've looked at something quite recently, don't go back to the material before you start blurting because then you're not testing recall. You're testing shortterm memory. What do you do recognize? What can you hold in your brain for couple of minutes? That's not the benefit of blurting. So, that is the first mistake lot of students make. They go to their notes and then they blurt. Only go to your notes if you genuinely don't remember anything about the topic. If you remember even the smallest things, all of the diagrams, you're going to start with blurting because more is going to come from it. And this is how you're going to get the real benefits of active recall. So, what you're going to do is you're going to close all of your notes if you have been looking at them. If you haven't, you're not even going to get them out. You are going to set timer because you want time limited period in which to do this. Otherwise, you could be sat here blurting all day drawing connections between absolutely everything, which is great exercise, but most of us do not have all the time in the world, so we can't be doing this. So what you're going to do is you're going to define period of time. Generally what will do if it is for single subject, single topic area, 10 minutes. by this mean something that will cover perhaps half chapter in textbook. If I'm then moving on, if it's full chapter, I'll probably give myself half an hour. Half an hour is probably the maximum amount of time that will spend blurting. Mainly because blurting works well for concepts that are fundamentally interlin, meaning it works for the breadth that you would get in about textbook chapter. That's kind of the sweet spot for your blurting. And then what you're going to do is you're going to be very very clear and you're going to define in the middle of your page exactly what it is. Let me use bigger pen so you can see exactly. You're going to define what what is the subject that you are going to be blotting about. And that is going to go in the middle of your page in big. Then the amount of messiness doesn't matter. The amount of diagrams, lines, it doesn't matter. You are just all in one color going to be fanning out drawing little arrows out from the title and explaining here's concept idea and maybe that links to definition so you're going to write that definition and maybe that then links to diagram so you're going to draw that diagram and maybe that particular diagram you can annotate that or you can think about real world case study you're trying to build complex web inside your brain and translate that web onto the piece of paper because your brain doesn't remember facts in isolation it remembers things like web. So that analogy that you've been given about how your brain works is like filing system. That's not how your brain works. It's not that you have this drawer and it'll go through and it'll think, where's that particular fact about that? here's that partic. No, your brain doesn't work like that. Your brain operates through web. Well, okay. So, remember this diagram and that links to this definition, which links to this concept, which also links back to the original You're trying to build up map, mental web. That's how you strengthen your neural connections. That's how you make recall easier, and that's how you get better grades. So that's what you're trying to do whilst you are blurting. Now once you've got your initial sort of blurting, this is everything that you've taken out of your head. If you stop there, you're not realizing the true benefits of the blurting method. What you need to do now is you need to go to your notes. So whether you'd looked at them before or you'd not looked at them before, doesn't matter. You're going to do the same thing. You're going to get open your notes. These might be class notes. They might be textbooks. It might be some videos. It might be PowerPoint slide. Whatever it is, get it up and you're going to go through the material that you've been down. So everything that relates to your big topic area, you're going to go through in your notes and you're going to add in different color. Ideally, this different color is going to be blue or red depending on what you'd used originally. And you're going to go through, you're going to add in new points. You're going to add in things that you had left off, things that you didn't remember. And this is going to be bold because it's in different color. It's really going to be memorable in your brain. Crucially, that's not the only thing you're going to do. in another separate color. Again, normally will do my initial in black. will add in in red and then will now change in blue. So some of the time you will realize that actually your brain it didn't remember things completely correctly. It might have got definition slightly wrong. It might have drawn diagram slightly incorrectly. The worst thing you can do is leave that there because your brain has nothing no benchmark with which to correct. It's going to remember the wrong thing. Even if you look at your notes and you see okay yeah that got it wrong. This is what is right. Unless you physically make the correction, your brain is going to find it very difficult to override that neural network. So, you're going to go in with your other color and you are actually going to change it. You're going to cross it out and you're going to change it to what is correct, no matter what it is. So, you're adding it in one color, you're changing in and correcting in different color. That is the fundamental part of the blurting, the actual recall out of your head. Yes, that's super super important. But this is where you learn. This is where you really consolidate your understanding and understand, okay, do actually understand this topic area? Do actually know it? Where can improve? And that's how you make those incremental gains moving towards an exam. What can be really useful as well is if you're trying to blur with really big sort of topic area. So fundamental concept in law or something big in econom sometimes just writing down the title isn't going to be enough to prompt you because in an exam you're prompted by the style of questioning. You're prompted by the key words that are given to you. What can help in this instance is alongside writing down the big title, the big thing that you're focusing in on, writing down couple of little subheadings that relate to many topic areas within this broader one can be really useful for promptbased blurting. But only do that if you need to. If you don't need to do that, don't do it because it's even better for your brain for you not to be doing it. This is just something you can do to guide the process if you're feeling like you're missing out entire chunks. Not because you don't know them, but because you forgot that they were linked to the main topic because it's so broad. Now, big question that get asked lot is when should you be blurting? And there are three key time periods within which you want to be doing that. The first is within 24 hours of learning something new. Now, this is not going to be long blurting session. This can be as little as five minutes. And actually, recommend it being as little as 5 minutes. All you're doing this for is to avoid the steep decline of the forgetting curve. If you review content within 24 hours, then you are less likely to forget it. In fact, if you don't review within 24 hours, you're going to forget about 80% of the content. If you do, you're only forgetting about 40 to 50%. So that is massive saving that for five minutes of effort is totally worth it. So that is the first instance. The second instance is generally within about 3 to 5 days you want to go back to this material. Perhaps you'll do the blurting for slightly longer. Perhaps you'll combine it with blurting for slightly different topic area and do this prompt based blurting. And then moving forward from that it is just regular increments. will try to revisit concepts about once every two weeks to make sure they're fairly fresh in my mind and to make sure that I'm never learning from scratch when it comes around to exam season. So that's exactly how you can use blurting to be super effective to improve your grades. And this is study method that you can utilize no matter what you are learning, whether it be maths, whether it be law, English, history, economics. It is useful for absolutely everyone. And really hope this video has helped you understand why they're so powerful and how you can be implementing it in the best possible way. If you want me to focus in on any other specific study methods, then do let me know in the comments. would be really happy for some suggestions because I'm going to be making quite lot of these videos over the coming weeks and just want to tailor them as much as possible to you. As ever, please do like this video if it helped. Do subscribe and share my channel with people that you think would benefit from watching.