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If you have ever spent hours highlighting a textbook the night before an exam, you have probably forgotten most of it by lunchtime the next day. Research dating back to Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 suggests we lose roughly two thirds of new information within twenty-four hours unless we actively bring it back to mind. Modern cognitive scientists have shown that the most popular study habits – rereading and highlighting – do almost nothing to slow this loss.
The single most reliable fix has a dull name: retrieval practice, sometimes called active recall. Instead of reading a chapter for the fifth time, you close the book and force yourself to recall what was on the page – ideally in writing or aloud. In a 2008 Science paper, Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger showed that students who tested themselves remembered far more a week later than students who simply restudied the material.
Retrieval is even more powerful when you spread it out over time, a phenomenon known as the spacing effect. If you need the information for an exam in a month, the research of Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues suggests reviewing it every week or so rather than cramming for six hours the night before. Apps like Anki are built on exactly this principle: they schedule each flashcard right before you would have forgotten it, which is why a few minutes a day quietly beats a weekend marathon.
None of this works if your phone is buzzing every two minutes. Sophie Leroy's research on what she calls attention residue shows that when you move on before a task is finished, part of your mind stays stuck on it, so you arrive at the new task already half-distracted. Techniques such as the Pomodoro – twenty-five minutes of focused work followed by a short break – are popular because they protect a small block of time from this constant fragmentation.
Finally, the most underrated study tool is the one most students sacrifice first: sleep. Neuroscientist Matthew Walker has spent two decades arguing that slow-wave sleep is when the brain replays the day's experiences and moves them into long-term storage. Skip a night before the exam and you are not just tired – you have skipped the very stage at which your brain was supposed to file what you spent all week learning.