Mini Ep. 44: Effortful Retrieval

Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And in this week's mini episode, I'm continuing with another key concept for how to learn Jiu-Jitsu more efficiently and effectively. On BJJ Mental Models, we broadly break down the concepts we discuss into four key categories: mechanical, learning, strategic, and social. So for the next few mini episodes, we're going to continue talking about the different learning concepts that can really help us maximize our training time and study time in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu. Today, I want to talk about a concept called effortful retrieval. You may have heard this if you've studied psychology before. You may have also heard this if you've listened to some of our podcast episodes with Cal McDonald. He does a great job of explaining what effortful retrieval is. The basic idea is, if we want to get better at recalling information, and in Jiu-Jitsu, when we're sparring, ultimately what we're trying to do is recall information fast. If we want to get better at that, then the best way to practice that is to have a practice where we have to work to recall that information. Not just to recall the information, but it has to actually make us work our brains. Much like how if you want to strengthen your body, you have to work your muscles. Well, if you want to improve your ability to recall information, you also have to work your brain. And the more you work it, the stronger those mental connections will get, and the easier it will be for you to recall information in the future. So let's talk briefly about how this would map to something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. In many classes, the way that the instructor might organize things is they have a unit, they spend a few days training something, and then they kind of move on and you might not see it again for a long time. If you're lucky, they've got a curriculum and they'll cycle back through and they'll cover that topic again, but that might be six months from now, which doesn't really help you get better today, and that doesn't really line up with our goal of learning Jiu-Jitsu quickly. So with effortful retrieval, our objective is to create a practice where after training or studying, we go back and we revisit what we covered, but we make sure that we have to actually mentally work to do it. This is part of the reason why people sometimes encourage you to take notes in Jiu-Jitsu. You may have tried this and you may have thought, well, I can take the notes, yeah, but I'll never go back and read them again. Honestly, when you're taking notes, the value of the notes is not creating some document that you can go back and study five years from now. The value is that the practice of writing notes after practice is a form of effortful retrieval. You are making your brain work to recall information. That will strengthen the neural pathways used to collect that information in the first place and make it easier for you to recall that information in the future. So if you've ever had the problem where you're sparring with someone and you know there's a move that you can do here, but you just can't remember all of the details of it, and by the time you remember it, the other person has already moved on and advanced position. If that's happened to you, that could be because you need to focus on effortful retrieval more in your learning. So let's go back and give a practical example of how to do this. Again, taking notes is a great way, but the idea here is that you don't necessarily want to just take notes as you go. And that can be helpful, but it's much more valuable to recall the information later. So here's how I like to take notes. I don't always do this as much as I used to, but I do find this to be a helpful practice if I feel like I'm getting overwhelmed by information. If I'm in a class and my instructor is showing something that I want to remember, your inclination might be to sit there and write down notes about everything they're saying as they teach. The problem is that's not really effortful retrieval. You're collecting information at the time you receive it, so that won't really actually help you recall things on the fly later. In fact, arguably, it could prevent you from gathering the information in the first place because if you're so focused on writing down notes, it can be hard to focus on what your instructor is saying. So here's how I'll go about effortful retrieval. If my instructor is teaching a topic that is particularly interesting to me, while I'm sitting there listening, I will keep track of the number of things that I want to remember. Not necessarily what the things are themselves, because it's hard to hold all of that in your brain, but the number of things that I want to remember. So let's say that my instructor shows me five key details for improving my arm bar. I'm not going to sit there in class and try to commit to memory the list of those five things, because an hour later after class, I'll probably have forgotten those, and I won't even remember how many details there were. So I'll sit there and I'll just remember the number five. I will remember as a mental to-do, there were five things that my instructor taught that I need to remember. What I'll do then is later on, not during the class, but afterwards, ideally the day afterwards, because I like to give it a bit of time, but even an hour or two afterwards is fine. I will sit down and take notes and try to remember what are those five things. I remember the number five. I remember there were five items that I wanted to recall, and because I know that number, I know when I'm done recalling. If I can recall all five things, then I'm good to go. And I will sit there and keep writing down notes until I've documented those five things that I wanted to remember. If one of those things has completely slipped my mind by that point, that's okay. I'll contact my instructor and I'll say, hey, what were the main details that you showed me for that thing I wanted to know about? And once I remember what all of those five things are and my notes are complete, then my effortful retrieval practice is done. And I can come back later and try that exercise a week from now if that's something that I really want to focus on remembering. What are the five things? By doing that, you are forcing your brain to recall. Instead of trying to commit a whole bunch of stuff to memory at once and then forget it immediately after, like what would happen if you were cramming for a test. Instead, with effortful retrieval, you're setting up a practice where you're trying to force your brain to work to recall that information. And that is the important part. You are forcing your brain to work. If I write down those five key details on some notes and then a month later I come back and I quickly skim them, that's a form of retrieval, but it's not really a form of effortful retrieval because I'm not making my brain do the work. And what effortful retrieval tells us is if we want to actually recall information quickly, we need to make our brains work in that process of recall. That strengthens the quote-unquote muscle and it makes it easier for us to recall that information later on. So I always encourage that people think about this when it comes to how we want to improve our ability to recall information. Don't worry too much about trying to capture the information perfectly the first time by notes or just by memorizing it. What is better is to create a practice where you come back later and then try to recall that information. Give that a go and what I think you'll find is that it makes it much easier for you to not just recall information in Jiu-Jitsu, but also to do it quickly, which as we know, is really the key to grappling effectively. You cannot hesitate when you roll because if you hesitate, your opponent is already moving on to the next thing while you're stuck on the last thing. That's not a cycle that you want to be stuck in. So one good way to remove hesitation is to improve our recall. And a great way to improve our recall is through effortful retrieval. Now, there's a lot of literature on effortful retrieval out there. This is a topic we've discussed before on the BJJ Mental Models podcast and we have a full write-up of this in our database of concepts. All of that information is available at BJJmentalmodels.com. I will put a link in the show notes. And of course, if you want to work with us and you want to get access to the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses, plus a ton of other stuff, please do consider signing up for BJJ Mental Models Premium. Again, all of that is at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you in the next episode.