We’re a quarter of the way done with our first year of residency, and needless to say, it’s been thrilling and humbling. We are pretty much at the hospital for all of our waking hours, and certainly for all our daytime hours. This uneven distribution of time has us thinking about the best ways to study, even though we now rarely have uninterrupted chunks of personal time to focus on learning, much less utilize the pomodoro method.
I’m trying to recapture hidden time throughout the day, during times I might have spent reading my favorite website (shoutout to Longform.org). This means studying when in line for coffee for the team, when waiting to pick up my car from the body shop, and when sitting alone in the team room on rare unbusy afternoons.
As much as I love taking advantage of these moments, I’ll admit I still long for the days when I could study uninterrupted in my home office with a cup of tea and my dog by my side. That said, there are some hidden benefits of studying away from my desk. Here’s something I read during college in the NYT about one of Robert Bjork’s classic studies that has always stuck with me:
“For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.
The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.”
Seems like good motivation to keep doing what I’m doing! Luckily, Anki’s mobile app makes it easy for me to do on the go. Side note: We’ve long attributed part of memory palaces’ effectiveness to the above idea—you essentially study different things in different places, just virtually!
Here’s a post about ambient noise while studying.
How do you feel about studying in different places?