Visual thinkers.

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There aren't enough visual cues in my lectures so I have to make notes. And my auditory memory is poor.

Visual thinkers usually get lots of images in their minds when reading text, listening to people talk, looking at slides in lecture, so the physical images are not really needed, as long as they have a store of images already in their minds on which to base related concepts and create more images, like in cell signaling, if you have seen one cell signaling figure, then reading about cell signaling will generate mental figure automatically, one after the other in quick succession, and it is not needed to spend time and effort drawing them, which is not a good investment of energy if dyspraxia makes drawing hard, but a bester investment might be learning to create and manipulate mental images, starting with the ones you have stored and imagining new perspectives on them, then making up new ones that you have not seen before, and this is both fun and useful, I think.

I do the mental images with maths. I never ever made notes in maths lessons, never. I can learn new formulae just by a brief glance. I rarely write working out as the solutions form in my head through mental images, even calculus I only have to write down the question and a few symbols.

Also I learnt the Periodic Table and all of south east England train maps just by observation for 15-20 minutes. I wish I could apply this photographic memory to uni work (although I do partially use it for uni I suppose).

I haven't really tried it with lectures as lectures = severe anxiety for me and I didn't have a support worker last year so my anxiety was hell. This year I'll get a support worker if uni works out. So I will try using mental images.

I use mental imagery mostly when answering questions. So would going through example test questions in my head be a good way to study?

I'm great at psychopharmacology and neurology, only need to read them once quite quickly and it stays. But with biochemistry and immunology, my brain seems to be blocking a lot of input. However I did some protein structure revision today which was ok.

How do you study textbook material? I've just been reading it through as it seems the only way that isn't really slow. If I let mental images form in my head, they dorm at every sentence and it slows me down. I don't like very slow study.

For reading textbooks, I skim the main text and look at pictures, and from these I understand the concepts and tend to automatically remember small details, and these are what you need, not the written text itself or the book figures themselves. I think that 99% of words in textbooks are unnecessary for learning.

While reading, I don't try to commit things to memory through conscious effort, but just read/look through without worrying about memorizing, and the storing process seems to be automatic this way, like if I scroll through a webpage of a baseball game for a minute, I tend to automatically store most of the things on it without trying to memorize them.

I say forget the study techniques and conscious efforts, but let your brain do its thing more automatically and see if that works well.
I really never used any study techniques in any subject.

Also, I don't like to read for hours in a row, but just a chapter at a time, then switch to doing something else that activates different brain networks, usually calculating or programming, so you could try that too, as doing same thing for hours may tire out a network and cause diminishing returns.

Thanks. That is really good advice.

I put too much effort into studying sometimes. So I totally get your points.

And frequent breaks sound right too. How many minutes should I study in one go?

I don't revise as such, as if I try I don't tend to remember much. I tend to listen to the lecture and read the powerpoint and I pretty much know everything. Failing that I re read the powerpoint and then I stop. I also depending on the subject do a few practice/example questions.

What do you mean by diagrams, are you meaning spider diagrams(I think some people call them mind map)? If so, on dsa I was offered a mind map software that could make fancy lists and spider diagrams, I didn't take it purely because it wouldn't be useful to me. That might be an idea but you say you tried making those on the computer so you might already have something like this.

All my teachers and lecturers said to revise for about 30 minutes-1 hour and then take a 10 minute break. But that doesn't work for me, if I can revise I can only do it for around 5-10 minutes so it's obviously different for everyone. It's probably easier to find the best amount of time for you to revise.

Thanks. I've got the software but I've got a phobia of revision techniques now so don't really want to use it. I'll just rely on reading and visual stuff.

I usually do one chapter at a time in a science textbook.
If the chapter is really long and would take more than an hour to read, then I would flip through and decide where to stop, and stop when I get there.

Another thing that helps me is flipping through each page of the chapter, reading the section headings, and glancing over the pictures before I start the chapter.
It seems to help get the big picture of what is covered, so your mind may be more prepared to take in the details and fit them into the overview as you read later.

Also, I find that reading or writing a lot tires me out more than programming or drawing or building, so I try to manage the language things into smaller chunks.

Going over your notes afterward, and maybe turning some things into pictures may help. But if you cant draw, AND you cant write fast. Jeeze I dunno.

I took a bunch of ccllege radio classes some years back. Everything came down to sound. And sound comes down to variations in the frequency in sound waves. So my impulse at the start of the semester to pin a big diagram of the sound spectrum on my wall turned out to be a lifesaving study aid in organizing my mental absorbtion of the material. The diagram (Xeroxed from some book) showed the bass, midrange, and treble, and what ranges musical instruments cover ,the vibrations per second figures and so forth. I could draw in additional stuff on it- like the range of the human voice (less than I thought -just upper bass, and lower midrange). There might be some equivalent foundational thing in what you're studying that you can make a wall poster of so to speak.