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Study With Me - British Airways Business Class

2019-12-31 · Study with me · Ali · recording, 11:45 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Books and reading, Productivity and time) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Evidence-based framing, Aimed at students, Family, Sponsor segment present

On a British Airways business-class flight home from Japan, Ali studies Levick's cardiovascular physiology textbook: he scopes its chapters, tests himself on each chapter's learning objectives before reading it, and explains why his compressed notes are suboptimal but acceptable for now.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A capsule hotel at Narita, the business-class lounge, boarding and lunch on the British Airways flight

  • ★★ Ali wakes up in a capsule hotel at Narita International Airport in Japan and packs to fly back to the UK in British Airways business class. — 00:00:00 · Japan
  • ★★ Ali gets the business-class tickets for himself and his mum with air miles collected over two years and the buy-one-get-one-free companion voucher given to big spenders on American Express. — 00:00:00 · Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★ Ali and his mum chat with a flight attendant who is very excited that they are both doctors. — 00:00:58 · Ali Abdaal's mother

00:01:27 — Scoping Levick's textbook and testing himself on the learning objectives before reading

  • ★★ On the flight, at 8.55, Ali starts working through the physiology textbook Levick's Introduction to Cardiovascular Physiology. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali reads the textbook PDF in Notability on his iPad Pro, with the note-taking app Bear open in split screen. — 00:01:56 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★★★ Ali starts a textbook by writing a quick outline of all its chapters: this scoping of the subject takes little time but pays off, because while reading you understand where each chapter fits into the bigger picture. — 00:01:56 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ After typing out the textbook's table of contents, Ali works out which of its chapters correspond to which of his lectures. — 00:01:56 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ When revising a subject rather than learning it for the first time, Ali often skips a textbook's first chapter, which is often introductory and feels like a waste of time. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Ali tests himself on a textbook chapter's learning objectives before he reads the chapter. — 00:02:55 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali says there is a ton of evidence that testing yourself with questions before studying a topic leads to greater understanding and retention. — 00:02:55 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali says testing before studying works even better for maths and engineering: in many studies, students given maths problems before being taught the subject did better than those taught first and tested afterwards. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ As he tests himself, Ali types out rough answers instead of answering in his head, because forcing himself to write things out makes him actually think them through. — 00:03:24 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali says the act of dredging up old information strengthens memory, and the more effortful recall feels, the more strongly the material sticks. — 00:03:24 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali spends 30 minutes on two pages, which he calls slow going, but says difficult concepts take him ages and nothing replaces time spent grappling with a subject to understand it. — 00:03:53
  • ★★★ Ali says studying has two stages: first understand a topic well enough to explain it to a five-year-old, then memorise it, where active recall, spaced repetition, interleaving and categorisation save a lot of time. — 00:03:53 · active recall, spaced repetition, interleaving

00:04:22 — A break with an audiobook of The Wheel of Time

  • ★ On a break after just over an hour of studying, Ali listens on Audible to the third book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. — 00:04:22 · Audible, The Wheel of Time

00:04:52 — Audible (sponsor read)

  • ★★ Ali listens to audiobooks one or two hours a day, on his hour's drive each way to the hospital and at the gym; fantasy audiobooks are his main way of unwinding. — 00:04:52

00:05:50 — Context versus compression in notes, and three reasons why his textbook notes are acceptable for now

  • ★★★ When taking notes Ali keeps in mind that information balances context against compression: a textbook has much context and little compression, so it takes ages to read; shorthand notes gain compression at the expense of context. — 00:05:50
  • ★★ Ali's shorthand note "calcium initiates shortening via TTM complex" compresses a complex process, the troponin-tropomyosin complex in muscle contraction, into a few words. — 00:05:50
  • ★★★ In his first year of medicine Ali's notes had too much context, almost copies of the lecture notes; with too much material at university, he learned to compress, looking context up when needed. — 00:06:49 · Google, Wikipedia
  • ★ Almost none of Ali's friends at medical school kept up making detailed notes. — 00:07:18
  • ★★ Ali says scientific studies show that summarising content, as in taking notes straight from a textbook, is generally ineffective for retention; the key is testing yourself (active recall) repeatedly over a long period (spaced repetition). — 00:07:47 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali calls his textbook note-taking session suboptimal but accepts it for now, first because compressing the content, categorising and numericising it, helps him understand it. — 00:07:47
  • ★★ Ali's second reason for accepting his textbook notes: he has already tested himself once on the chapter's learning objectives and will test himself on them again whenever he returns to the chapter. — 00:07:47
  • ★★ Ali's third reason: copying the notes into Notion, he will write a question such as "what determines contractile force in cardiac versus skeletal muscle" and hide the answer under a toggle. — 00:08:30 · Notion, active recall
  • ★★ Ali says Notion does not work very well offline, so with no Wi-Fi on the plane he cannot write his questions in Notion on the first pass as he normally would. — 00:08:59 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali studies for around half an hour while listening to his Spotify Study With Me playlist. — 00:08:59 · Spotify

00:09:28 — Two hours of The Witcher 3 and permission to relax

  • ★★ After deciding against more work, Ali spends two hours playing The Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch and tells himself it is okay to relax at least once in a while. — 00:09:28

00:09:58 — Back to the chapter: does this make sense, could I explain it to a five-year-old

  • ★★ At the end of every paragraph Ali asks whether it makes sense and whether he could explain it to a five-year-old; if not, he finds the hole in his knowledge and plugs it. — 00:09:58 · also in: Study With Me - Weekend on-call

00:10:27 — Landing, a doubtful British Airways review, study-with-me videos in unusual places, and sign-off

  • ★★ On the flight Ali makes do with Levick's textbook, which he finds so good that he does not really need external resources. — 00:10:27
  • ★★ Ali films the seat's features for a planned review of British Airways business class but says he might not make it, since his audience seems to care only about tech and studying videos. (hedged) — 00:10:27
  • ★★ Ali likes the idea of study-with-me videos in unusual locations and says that if viewers like this one, he will try to study in more weird and exotic places. — 00:10:56

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · British Airways · Levick's Introduction to Cardiovascular Physiology

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Robert Jordan · Taimur Abdaal

Works: The Wheel of Time · The Witcher 3

Organizations: Google · Wikipedia

Concepts: Feynman technique · interleaving · scoping the subject · spaced repetition

Places: Japan · Narita International Airport

Products: Audible · Bear · iPad Pro · Nintendo Switch · Notability · Notion · Spotify

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