Andrew Huberman and Cal Newport on active recall

I recently listened to a podcast episode with Andrew Huberman and Cal Newport.

One of the things they talked about was studying and specifically active recall. 

They talk a lot about how effective it is. The method worked shockingly well for us and completely changed our studying. It was cool to also hear their experiences with it.

Here's a link to the specific part of the podcast. Below I've created a transcript, which I edited in places for brevity. I hope you find it useful.

HUBERMAN: If I want to learn something from a manuscript I read or a book chapter - I used to highlight things and I had a very elaborate system of stars and exclamation marks and underline that mean a lot to me - but a few years ago I was teaching a course in the biology department at Stanford, and for some reason we had them read a study about information retention.

And I learned from that study that one of the best things we can do is read information and then to take some time away from that material and just try and remember specific elements, how much does one remember? Then go back to the material and look at it.

And I've just been um positively astonished at how much more information I can learn, when I'm not simply underlining things and highlighting them but stepping away and thinking and then it's crystallized

As I say this I realize, of course this should work, this is the way that the brain learns. But somehow that's not the way we are taught to learn.

NEWPORT: I'm smiling because when I was 22, I wrote this book called how to become a straight A student.

And the whole premise of the book was, I'm going to talk to actual college students, who have straight A's, who don't seem completely ground out, like not burnt out, and I'm just going to interview them. How did you study for the last test that you studied for? How did you take notes for the test? I was just asking them to walk through their methodology.

The core idea of that book was active recall. Replicating the information from scratch as if teaching a class without looking at your notes. That is the only way to learn.

And the thing about it was it's a tradeoff. It doesn't take much time, but it's incredibly mentally taxing. This is why students often avoid it. it is difficult to sit there and try to replicate and pull forth "okay what did I read here? how did that work?". It's mentally very taxing. But it's very time efficient. 

If you're willing to essentially put up with that pain, you learn very quickly. And not only do you learn very quickly you don't forget. It's almost like you have a pseudo photographic memory when you study this way.

You sit down to do a test and you're you're replicating whole lines from what you what you studied. The ideas sort of come out fully formed because it's such a fantastic way to to actually learn.

One of the things I did to get serious about my studies is I said "I'm going to systematically experiment with how to study for a test" And active recall was the thing that turned me all around. And so I went from a pretty good student to 4.0 every single quarter. Sophomore year, junior year, senior year. I got one a minus between my sophomore year through my senior year. It was like this miraculous transformation, it was active recall.

I rebuilt all of my studying, so if it was for a humanities class I had a whole way of taking notes, it was all built around doing active recall. For math classes my main study tool was a stack of white paper. "All right do this proof", white piece of paper and just can I do it from scratch. If I could, I know that technique. If I don't, all right I'm gonna come back and try it again later

You know I did so well academically that's why I ended up writing that book that basically spread that message to other people. So I'm a huge advocate for active recall. It's really hard but it is the way to learn new things 

HUBERMAN: And as you pointed out it is very time efficient.

NEWPORT: Oh, yeah. I mean it was a problem, it was a social problem for me. That I would have to pretend, during finals period, that I was going to the library to study because I would be done studying.

This active recall it's brutal but it's incredibly efficient.

You sit down there I would have my cards, I would mark it: "okay I struggled with this" I'd put it in this pile. "I got it done" I'd put it in this pile. And so then you would just go back to the "I struggled with it" pile and work on that and then make a new "I struggled with it" pile and these would exponentially decay.

And so in like a few hours you could really master the material pretty quickly and then what am I supposed to do? I didn't do all nighters. like it wouldn't make any sense.

Active recall is how you prepare. It's going to take four hours and it's going to be tough. Do do it in the morning when you have energy and then you're done.

HUBERMAN: I love it. I learned essentially all of neuroanatomy looking down the microscope at tissue samples. and then I would try and take photographs with my eyes, I do not have a photographic memory, but then I would get home in the evening, look through the neuro Anatomy textbook, lie down and try and fly through the different circuits in my mind and then if I arrived at a structure in the brain that I couldn't identify, I would then go check my notes and go back. so I just so basically I learned neuroanatomy because there's a mental map, I move through it you know fly through it dynamically, and it's the same process.