Cramming is an all-too-common phenomenon among students. A long night of studying for hours on end while reading through the same pile of notes until they become familiar to the eye is enough to make anyone feel confident that they have studied sufficiently for an exam the next day. This feeling is caused by confusion between familiarity and knowledge. Read enough times and words begin to look familiar, but this does not, however, mean that one has learned them.
Marathon study sessions do more harm than good. Cramming a lot of information into your brain in a short amount of time can help you get through a test, but that’s about it. The information will not stick for long, and you will have wasted a lot of time studying. There is a better way to learn, a way that will stick in your head for a long time, but it takes a lot more work.
The Myth of the All-Nighter
Most people think that studying for long periods of time helps them learn more. People mistake familiarity with learning. Just because something looks familiar does not mean that you can apply what you read. Just because you read something a few times does not mean that you can use what you read. This is what happens when you study for long periods without giving your brain a chance to process what you learned.
When you cram, you are relying on your short-term memory. Your short-term memory is like a tiny sticky note that can hold a few pieces of information for a short time, then it’s thrown away. This is exactly what happens when you take a test: you write down your answers on the test, and then the answers on the test are thrown away. A week or two later, you will likely remember very little of what you studied, because it was never moved from your short-term memory to your long-term memory.
How Your Brain Actually Stores Information
To understand why studying in long sessions is not effective for learning, we first have to explain how the brain stores information. Our brain consists of billions of nerve cells, called neurons, which are connected to one another through synapses. Every time we learn something, new connections between neurons are built. The more often we think about the same information, the stronger the connections between the neurons become.
When information is learned for the first time, the connections between neurons for that piece of information form a fragile new pathway. This pathway is fragile because until you use that pathway again (e.g., review the information), the connections can fall apart and thus the information can no longer be recalled. Your brain is constantly deciding what information is important to keep and what information is not worth the space in your brain.
This is how long-term memories are stored in the brain. In essence, learning information is like building a fragile new pathway in your brain, composed of neurons. As you learn more about a topic, these pathways are reinforced, making them stronger. Information that is not revisited is essentially forgotten as the brain dismantles its pathways. This filing process for long-term memory occurs while you are at rest and when you go back to review material you previously studied.
The Power of Spaced Practice
The trick to embedding information in your long-term memory efficiently is to space out your learning over several days or even weeks. In a typical study scenario, you will spend around 6 hours covering a body of material and then be tested on it a couple of days later. A more efficient way to study is to spread the 6 hours over several days and study just an hour a night. You will study for an hour on Monday, an hour on Wednesday, and an hour on Friday, for example.
The first reason is that your brain forgets, and that’s okay. The second reason is that the process of remembering is very good for your brain.
There is, however, a very powerful method for committing information to long-term memory. The magic happens when we are forced to remember information. So, every time we review a piece of information, we test our memory for it. This forces our brain to retrace the neural pathways we formed when we originally learned it. Each time we do this, the pathways become stronger and more permanent. This efficient methodology is known as spaced repetition, and a spaced repetition too can help you put this learning strategy into practice. Scheduling reviews at the right intervals, it removes the guesswork and makes it easier to build a consistent study routine.
Why Massed Practice Feels Better But Performs Worse
This type of study is known as massed practice. It feels so good because it requires very little effort to start. You open up your book, and you start reading, and hours pass by. And even though the information is only in your short-term memory for the time that you’re studying, it feels like you’re learning so much more in that short period of time than you would studying the same amount of time with the space in between.
For example, the practice of spaced repetition is difficult. It makes you realize how little you know and that the things you have learned will fade away. And that’s just not pleasant.
While Massed Practice may feel easy at first, in reality, it merely makes the illusion of competence apparent almost immediately. The reason for this is simple: while you are engaged in studying for long periods of time, the information you are studying is temporarily stored in your short-term memory. When you take a break from studying, the information in your short-term memory will be released from your memory and never return again. Thus, the more you study in a short period of time, the more information will be released from your memory, and the less information will be retained. This makes the information that you do learn in a short period of time appear to be learned very easily, yet be lost very quickly. Conversely, the difficulty of information to learn in the Spaced Practice method actually serves as a sign that your brain is working hard to store the information in your long-term memory for later use.
The Role of Sleep in Learning
No discussion of the efficient methodologies that one can use to maximize learning can occur without the mention of sleep. As you read above, those who choose to study for long hours of the night and only allow themselves to fall asleep just before the exam are basically sabotaging their own brains. While they may be able to retain information learned just before an early-morning exam for a short time, in the long run, all that studying will have done little to help them learn.
Sleep is not just downtime for your body and brain. While you sleep, your brain goes to work processing information that you learned during the day. During the deepest stages of sleep your brain actually replays all of the neural patterns that were fired during your study sessions. This helps to move information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory, effectively storing it for future use. If you were to get no sleep before a test or exam, you might be able to recall information that you studied in a short period of time to score well on an early morning test, but that information would likely not last long after the test. This is because your brain did not have the chance to fully process the information that you studied.
The worst thing you can do for your brain is stay up all night studying in order to take a test the next morning. When you stay up all night studying, your brain is unable to transfer information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. In other words, although you may be able to remember enough to pass a test given the next morning, you will soon forget everything that you studied the night before. The key to studying is to make sure that information is transferred to your long-term memory, where it can be stored indefinitely. This process can only occur during your sleep.
How to Build a Spaced Practice Routine
Changing from marathon sessions to utilizing the power of spaced practice requires a change in learning habits, learning to utilize the methodology of studying in a very efficient manner in order to form lasting knowledge in your mind, instead of merely studying in order to be able to pass a test or complete a project at hand in the near future.
First, plan your study sessions well in advance of the exam date. For example, if you are studying for an exam in two weeks, don’t wait until the 13th day before to start studying the material for that exam. Break down the material that you need to study to learn for the exam into the number of study sessions that you will have before the exam, and then assign each of the pieces of material to be studied in each of the study sessions.
I generally recommend that students keep their focused study blocks to about 30-45 minutes before taking a real break from studying. This means leaving the room where you are studying in order to take a break from focused learning. Go for a walk, get a snack or glass of water, go outside for some fresh air, etc. The point is to give your brain a chance to “rest” so you can return to your studying later with renewed focus and energy.
It is also very important to mix up the topics you study in each session. If you are studying for a three-hour study session for an exam on a particular subject, don’t just spend the entire three hours on that same subject. This will help keep your mind sharp by mixing up different topics of study, so you can stay focused longer instead of losing focus after a couple of hours on the same subject.
Invest in Lasting Knowledge
Learning is not for the short-term; it is meant to last a lifetime and aid in the development of skills. Massed practice for long hours at a time treats the brain like a storage unit. It is filled with information and then immediately emptied after the study session is complete.
So while it takes a little discipline to organize your study time into efficient intervals, the payoff is huge: less stress, better results, and the ability to retain information long after the exam is over. So, go ahead and give your brain the time, the rest, and the practice it deserves to learn in the most efficient and effective way possible.