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Memory is a tricky thing. Scientists have figured out how many units of information you can store in your short-term memory (around seven, though there are great workarounds for remembering more than that), but if you really want to remember something, you have to go over it a bunch of times until it lodges deeper in your brain.
There are quite a few ways to do that if you have some time to devote to the practice of repetition, but if you’re getting ready for a test at school or a presentation at work, you might not have too long to go over the content again and again and again—but you do, if you make a personal podcast. This technique requires you to make an effort only once, then calls on you to relax and absorb the information more passively, making it ideal for studying or reviewing when you are short on time or heavy on other tasks.
How to make a “podcast” to help you study
Next time you want to retain the details of something you’re studying, open up the voice notes feature on your phone, because you’re going to make yourself a little study podcast. You could simply read your notes out loud into the mic; it’s the simplest option, and a good one. (If you’re memorizing a speech, just perform the whole thing. That’s what I did in high school, when I was a forensics nerd and felt that using even a single notecard during a speech meet delegitimized my entire presentation. For what it’s worth, I won a lot, which I partially attribute to being off-book while everyone else used aids.)
You do have other, more intensive, options though. You can record separate “episodes” for each mini-topic you’re studying, which will help you organize your thinking and provide an easy way to focus if you need brushing up in a particular area. Use your preferred note-taking method or a reading-and-retaining technique like SQ3R to create outlines that are concise but make sense and hit on the points you most need to study, then write your scripts according to those notes. That part will take a while, but all of it, combined, will help you start to remember what you’re supposed to be remembering.
You don’t have to worry about the thing actually being pleasant for others to listen to, so make it useful for your own study style. A few approaches you could take include asking yourself review questions out loud, pausing, and stating the right answer or reading entire passages from your textbook into the mic. You could even try out different characters and turn it into a role-playing scenario. Don’t get too involved with it, though, unless that sort of creativity helps you focus; it’s better to stick with facts and straightforward audio.
The most important part comes after you’ve recorded your personal podcast: You have to listen to it. You have to listen to it a lot. Play it through the speakers of your car or through your headphones on the train to make your commute productive. Play it at the grocery store, when you’re doing errands around the house, and when you are relaxing at night. Fall asleep listening to it. The first few times, you’ll listen pretty actively, but even having it running as background noise will shove that information into your brain.
A second option for your study podcast
If you’re going to do this, a major component of what makes it valuable is the part where you have to review the material, outline the script, and say it all out loud into your microphone. That’s a big chunk of the studying right there. Still, if you don’t have time for that or you are worried you won’t highlight the most important parts if left to your own devices, there’s another option that works well.
Google’s NotebookLM is an AI tool that pulls only from the material you give it. That means that unlike competitors such as ChatGPT, it doesn’t answer your questions by searching the entire internet. Rather, it searches through PDFs, YouTube videos, links, and other resources you provide—and that’s it. One of its coolest features is that it can create “podcasts” for you based on those materials, in addition to its ability to create flashcards and quizzes. These podcasts sound like real ones you might listen to in your everyday life: They have different voices and characters who speak conversationally but factually about the content of whatever you uploaded to the software. I love NotebookLM and use it all the time to organize my work. It’s free to use and generates podcasts quickly, so it’s worth considering here, too.
Why a personal study podcast works
Picking things up from your personal podcast is an example of rote learning, the process by which we memorize things based on repetition. But it has other advantages, too.
For instance, even when you’re compiling the notes and deciding what to include in the mini podcast, you’re studying—you’re making decisions about which concepts are most important, how they flow together, and how you can present your mastery of them to others. Even if you choose to let NotebookLM do it, you’re still making decisions about which materials from your class or project to upload to the software and how to organize it, which is also studying.
Reading is all well and good, but you remember things better when you process them in a variety of ways. From organizing your notes to speaking them aloud and listening to them read back to you, every part of this process will help you more thoroughly process and recall the content. Each of those is commonly used on its own as a standalone study technique, so imagine how effective they’ll be together.