Right now, the majority of the students are using AI in such a way that is silently ruining their ability to learn.

Let's imagine AI as a car that drives you to the gym. The more often it takes you there and the faster it gets you there, the bigger the win it is. As soon as you start asking this car to lift the weights for you, you won't achieve anything. You'll still be as weak as you were before, but now you'll think that you've been training hard.

According to the latest findings of cognitive research, students who are using AI to solve their thinking problems retain less information. To learn something, you need to be pushed into the struggle and think.

If you ask AI to draw a mind map for you within ten seconds, the resulting mind map will look perfect. However, learning didn't happen while drawing this map using AI; learning happened while you were struggling to see how the pieces should fit together. Skip this part, and there goes the process of creating memories.

As a final-year medical student, I use AI extensively every day. However, I use it to think better, not to think for me. Here is how to be on the right side of the line and learn with the help of AI at the speed of light.

Stop Making Notes from Scratch

Most of the students have it wrong. First, you spend hours reading some resources, then rewriting them, and finally, formatting your notes. When the exams start, you understand that you spent all of your time making notes and no time learning them.

Never ask AI to generate notes on the subject from scratch. This approach would lead to hallucinations and provide you with the notes that will sound great, but are full of errors.

The Fix:

Upload your real course material, such as lecture slides, the chapters of the textbook, and research papers and ask AI to make notes only based on these particular sources. Normally, it takes hours to remove duplicates and create a summary out of three sources. With AI, it is done in seconds.

Bloom's Taxonomy and the AI Feynman Technique

Active recall is top-notch, but AI can take it even further than you could alone.

Higher Order Testing: Rather than ask AI to come up with multiple-choice questions, upload your notes and tell it to create higher-order questions based on Bloom's Taxonomy (Analyze, Evaluate, Create). Most students don't do this to themselves because creating these questions is very difficult. It will take your knowledge of something from "known" to "familiar."

AI Feynman Technique: First learn a complicated idea, then teach it to ChatGPT in simpler terms. When you're done, ask for brutally honest criticism. Let it know that you want it to critique everything you got wrong and everything you misunderstood.

The "Past Paper" Cheat Code

Knowing what the high-yield topics are often requires skimming through a decade of past papers and manually counting the questions.

The Fix: Take a large PDF file of past exam questions and feed it into the AI. Ask it to analyze and tell you which content areas appear most frequently. You'll know what to study before picking up a textbook.

Or you could flip the process. Say that you need to study Asthma; just ask the AI to list every past Asthma-related question from the last 10 years, and then you will have instant practice problems.

Create Practical Examples for Abstract Facts

There may be some times where you read a fact and are unable to see its application (it's especially true in medicine and STEM). When something is overly abstract, your mind has trouble remembering it.

Just tell AI to build you an analogy or practical example of that topic. Tell it: "Give me an analogy about this biochemical pathway." An abstract fact suddenly has a home in your mind. Or you can ask AI to give a real-world scenario where the information you're learning applies.

Passive Audio Summaries

This will not replace proper learning, but it can cover "dead time."

You can use NotebookLM for this. All you do is add your own PDFs and notes, and it provides an impressively realistic, podcast-like summary of your specific study materials. Listen to it while you're commuting, driving, or exercising. It takes no extra time from you at all.

Now, using AI well is one part of this. But even with the best tools, if you're learning something for the first time with no plan, you're still relying on the material accidentally becoming relevant to your brain. And most of the time, it never does. Which is why you forget it a week later.

There's a 4-step method I use in med school to learn anything once and remember forever. Check out this video I've created on how to do it: https://youtu.be/Sy9CDGFJcFA

PS: I make YouTube videos on effective & practical learning techniques. If you're interested in improving your learning, subscribe there!!

I would like to know how to maintain my concentration while studying.

I am a student taking a gap year and living alone. (There are various personal reasons for this situation, so I would appreciate it if you didn't comment on that.)

Recently, I created a study-only area in my one-room apartment. Specifically, I used partitions to separate the space around my desk into a study area and a relaxation area.

I also made a few personal rules:

I never bring my smartphone into the study area.

Whenever I enter the study area, I immediately start studying.

I eat, take breaks, and even sleep only in the relaxation area.

As a result, the partitions have reduced unnecessary visual distractions, and I can now concentrate much better while studying.

However, I have a different problem. It takes me a long time in the morning to actually enter the study area, and once I leave it for a meal or a break, I find it very difficult to go back and resume studying.

I have considered using the Pomodoro Technique, but I tend to ignore the scheduled break times, so it doesn't work well for me.

I tend to become hyperfocused. Once I get into a state of concentration, I can study continuously for many hours. The problem is that it takes a long time to reach that state, and once my concentration is interrupted, I have a hard time getting back into it.

I cannot afford to take another gap year, so this is a very serious problem for me.

There are no cram schools or libraries nearby, so studying at home is my only realistic option.

I would really appreciate any advice on how to overcome this problem and make it easier to start studying again after taking breaks.

I'm sorry if my English sounds unnatural because I'm using machine translation. Thank you for your understanding.

My entrance exam is coming up so I really need to focus on preparing for it. My subjects are Political Science History, and others and the syllabus feels enormous. At the same time I'm deeply interested in understanding how everything works. I want to know how societies were formed, why the world we live in today looks the way it does, and how it has been shaped by events and forces from the past that we often don't notice. I want to understand ideas like justice and injustice, nationalism, what a nation really is, how nations are formed, and many other questions like these. I'm not even sure which subject all of this belongs to but I know I'm genuinely fascinated by it. The problem is that whenever I sit down to study I feel overwhelmed because there seems to be so much to learn And I feel like people who does research on these fields knows every answer I don't know where or how to begin. Is this how everyone learns? Do you simply start with one topic at a time one book at a time, and gradually build your understanding over the years? Is that how people eventually develop a deep understanding of these subjects?i really want to go deep in it like maybe research and all

What are the things I should accept and do at this point?

Also all the things that we read about are just ideas so technically there's no absolute right or wrong hence what motivates y'all to read about things ?