FunFactsAl

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@hawkblogger Notoriety is not the word here. I’d use fame. Notoriety is a highly negative descriptor.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet.

His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard.

The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language.

Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort.

Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes.

After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in.

Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter.

She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying.

The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it.

The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works.

Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them.

You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank.

He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort.

Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning.

The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely.

This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique.

The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies.

Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words.

Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work.

His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning.

He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about.

He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that.

The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours.

They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@GregBishopSI Great articles. Your article about JSN in the Super Bowl issue says he and Witherspoon were teammates at Ohio State. Witherspoon went to Illinois.

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@mattforney @DKThomp If Trump “closed the border” in January as his administration claims, how do we have these surges so many months later? Shouldn’t cases be lower now? Also do you think these diseases have never been here and only exist in other countries?

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@FieldGulls No tush push on that 4th was a miss

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@Ingrid_Jacques your article about NPR and not having conservative views is interesting. Should NPR have Diversity in political views, give Equity to those views so it can be free, and Include a spectrum of thoughts with open arms?

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@DKThomp This is exactly what our adversaries want. America to decline and cede ground in innovation and prosperity. Says a lot that this administration wants this. Who are they beholden to? Adversaries or Americans?

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@russell_nm sounds like you want Harvard to purposely and deliberately hire people who reflect a conservative ideology in order to retain funding. Is that adding Diversity for the sake of it? To Include diverse opinions? Sounds like a big chunk of DEI which you say is wrong.

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@Danstringer74 @MatthewSpira @JonBryant421 @secupp @StacyBradley_ Way more than 15% participate in the stock market. That is laughably inaccurate. Infrastructure help? Let me tell you about bills passed in the last administration for exactly that. What is trump doing on infrastructure or consumer buying power? Absolutely nothing but destruction

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@SecDuffy you need to resign. The crash in DC was while you were in charge. Your response to this tragedy has been disqualifying. Leaders must be held accountable and your position needs to be filled by someone qualified to lead. We were safer before Trump and you took office.

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@RonFilipkowski the Biden economy must be great if farmers can fly from Oklahoma to DC and pay inauguration weekend surge prices

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@AlaskaAir Message sent

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@AlaskaAir my plane’s flap track fairing was vibrating while in flight. It’s the one on the starboard side closest to the body of the plane. The other two on that wing were not vibrating.

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@FieldGulls Rams playing second string at most spots. Hard to get a good read on performance

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@hawkblogger how many INTs have come from throwing to DK in critical moments? And mostly on him running the wrong route?

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@FieldGulls How has he been on the roster this whole time?

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@seasidejoenews Explains why he hired local UW coaches. Not a coincidence

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@hawkblogger people forget Carroll’s USC teams didn’t have top pick OL. Led with skill position talents and LB and safety talent. All that informed direction of franchise which JS learned from his time here. Early tenure showed some lightning in a bottle that doesn’t evolve

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@hawkblogger why is JS supposed to act differently without Carroll? Premise is that JS and Carroll are very different and Carroll’s vote won. JS spent 14 years here and built success with Carroll. JS came from Favre gunslinger in GB. That worked with Wilson’s style. 1/2

[FunFactsAl @FunFactsAl]

@hawkblogger @RealHawkTalk This team is JS’s doing. Same as last year. The coaches are not too different than last year in the offensive play calling. How does he escape accountability for his poor signings and devaluing of the OL.