How to study Anatomy? 🧠

Why should you study anatomy?

Well, I know many of you have heard this before from seniors that most of what you learn in anatomy you will forget in a year or two. It's quite hard to have a positive and motivated attitude toward memorising thousands of pages word by word knowing that it won't stick. Whilst it is definitely true that you will forget a bunch of things about anatomy, let me tell you why is it important.

Imagine you are in Tokyo, one of the busiest cities of all, with the most complex subway route map in the world. This is your first time there, you've never taken any of the metros, you have no idea about any street name or junctions whatsoever… You have to go from location A to location B, you have the map with you, but finding the fastest and most efficient route would still be an impossible challenge. Now imagine someone who is a local there, someone who takes these lines every single day, someone who might not know the exact names of every street and might not remember the exact shops on every corner but knows the lines and connections by heart. Try giving him the map to find the best possible route from A to B. He might need to take a quick look but in just a couple of seconds he will tell you the exact route to take. 🚇

This is anatomy as well, if you have learned every ligament, every muscle, and every connection once, whenever you see anatomy terms in your life, you will have a good understanding of where that might be, and if you pull up an anatomy diagram, a ‘map’ you will understand it in seconds since you have learned it once completely.

For reference, let me just attach a picture from the Tokyo subway routes and the cranial nerve routes. 😂

Some basic tips ✅

Before diving deep into my complete 3-step memorisation technique, I would like to just give some basic tips on studying anatomy which you probably heard before but I just couldn't leave them out.

1️. Study week by week

Its extremely important to study anatomy week by week, whilst you can probably cram a couple of days for a cell biology or genetics exam, to understand and to master anatomy, you have do it constantly. 😬

2️. Understand, DO NOT CRAM! ❌

Anatomy is usually picked on with the fact that it is the subject that does not have to be understood… only crammed. Well that’s not true at all! Anatomy might not be a mathetical equation derivation but it can and should be understood! It might surprise you but there are a couple of tricks to do so. 🙌

• Understand the latin phrase! It is extremely important to not just memorise the words itself but to understand why some old anatomist gave that particular name. As an example: collum chirurgicum ossis humeri might sound pretty horroristic as you first hear it. 😅 But the meaning of it is actually straight forward: collum means neck, chirurgicum means surgical, os means bone and humerus means upper arm. If you put that together: The surgical neck of the upper arm bone… It’s not that scary anymore, right? 🥳
  The only word that could be a little unique is surgical, but if you understand that this is the part of the upper arm bone that is most likely to get fractured thus most likely to go under surgery it makes perfect sense.
• Another great thing to understand anatomy better is to study embriology, embriology gives meanings of interventions and the development of each anatomical structure.
• Study clinical references as well, understand why is it formed the way it formed, whats the role of that little ligament and why is it there.

A quick example to sum up these steps

The Rethzius line is in the enamel layer of the teeth and it is formed by the ameloblasts, whenever there is lack of nutrition for these cells, they are not able to function perfectly, thus creating these Rethzius lines.

But why is it important? Well at the event of childbirth, there is huge amount of stress which results in lack of oxygen and nutrition towards the ameloblasts. Because of this they form this huge Rethzius line called the neonatal line.

Clinical reference: If a newborn is found dead, doctors look for this neonatal line, if the baby was born before birth, there should not be a neonatal line present, but if the baby died after birth the line is visible in the developing teeth. This can help to distinguish crime from natural causes.

My 3-step memorisation technique to study anatomy extremely quickly 🚀

Now that we went through the basic tips, let’s get to my unique technique!

✅ Step 1: The lazy part

The first step for me is always to watch a video on youtube or go in class and listen to the teachers explanation, but the main idea about this step is to get a basic understanding of the topic!

This is an essential part because when you read the textbook later, you will be able to imagine and understand the concepts much easier. I can recommend some amazing youtube channels for you! There is Sam Webster who is great with explaining structures on anatomy models, but there is also the Noted Anatomist who just makes the greatest presentations which help a lot in understanding the topic. Plus both of them are pretty funny! 😃

✅ Step 2: My unique multitasking technique of reading and creating flashcards

The most important part of my memorisation technique is the second step. This is the part where we will focus the most on. The summary of this step would be is reading while creating flashcards simultaneously… but in quite a unique way so that it takes the least amount of time possible. Flashcards will be very effective in the next step, but more on that later! ⬇️

I read only one paragraph at a time, I understand what is written there perfectly and then I create the flashcards from only that paragraph. I know it sounds quite time consuming but trust me its not, let me tell you why:

When you actually want understand what you are reading does not take a lot more time, just a little bit more effort and it makes a huge difference. Make sure to always ask yourself after every paragraph: what did I just read? …and if you can repeat, that’s when you understand it well.

The next part is creating flashcards. As you might have guessed I am using Voovo to create flashcards with but to be honest with you as far as this article goes, the main idea is to use some form of flashcards to utilise spaced repetition and active recall. It does not really matter if you use Quizlet, Anki, Brainscape or Voovo…

How do I create flashcards in seconds? 🤓

I know that when you read about creating your own flashcards the first thing that comes to mind is who on earth has the time?? …right? 😟

Well this is what I thought as well and that’s when we decided to create Voovo, the only app that focuses on the speed of flashcard creation so it literally takes seconds to turn the paragraph you just read into flashcards that you can practice later. Let me show you the easiest ways to do so:

Basically there are 3 kinds of flashcards I usually create. I turn the anatomy diagrams into flashcards, I turn the text to fill in the blanks and I write questions and paste the answers. I will attach some videos and go through them all one by one.

🫀 How to turn diagrams into flashcards:

I love Goodnotes, it’s my go to note taking app! So usually I have Goodnotes open on one side and Voovo on the other. What I do is simply dragging and dropping the diagrams from one app to the other. Once I dropped the pic into Voovo, it automatically recognises all the texts on the diagram and I can create multiple flashcards in one click. 🚀

🧠 How to turn texts into fill in the blanks:

Right after I read a paragraph, I check for the most relevant parts and I copy the text from my note taking app, paste it into Voovo and I just start hiding the information I want to be quizzed on! 🧐

🎉 How to create a more detailed card on a bigger topic:

When I want to create a card of a more detailed information, for example the parts of the prostate gland. I might want to add some more text and a couple of pictures as well. What I usually do here is that I only type in the question: “Parts of the prostate gland:”, after that I just paste and drag&drop the relevant parts of the textbook and voilá the card is ready just like that! 🔥

🤖 Artificial Intelligence Flashcards:

You can also use Artificial Intelligence to automatically create flashcards from the inputted text, it saves sooo much time 🚀

✅ Step 3: The revision part

Once you have done the first 2 steps successfully, you should jump into Step 3 immediately.

Go through your cards until you know each and every one of them. You can do so by starting a study session and rating your knowledge on every card, the ones that you rated lower will keep on popping up until you say you know them perfectly.

Once you went through all the cards, the learning is finished for that day, but what makes the information stick comes now! To retain the information long-term, you need to use spaced repetition, meaning you need to repeat these cards days, weeks and months later as well (most importantly before an exam 😝). But since you have every piece of information in your hands, you can learn wherever and whenever you want.

I hope you found my tips useful! Make sure to give this technique a try — you will see the results in just a couple of days. Honestly, it has been the most efficient way for me and hope it will be for you as well. Of course you can add some other techniques along, like drawing, mnemonics or pin tests but all of those should come in the second step, where you understand the topic completely… 🙌

Thank you so much for reading this article and make sure to leave a like if you found it useful! Please share your technique in the comment section as well, so we can learn from each other!