Video: How to learn anatomy with AI

According to some really smart people in Silicon Valley, AI is about to change everything, and while I actually agree with that sentiment, it doesn’t really feel like it right now at least for most people and in most contexts, right, especially for STEM students. I mean, look, think about it like this. On one hand, it does some pretty cool stuff, but on the other hand, it also does some pretty misleading stuff and it can be really difficult to tell which output is which.

So unless you’re an expert, sometimes you’re just trusting it and that’s obviously not a good way to go for a STEM student, right. If you are blindly trusting AI, well, you’re going to be sacrificing your academic integrity as well as your critical thinking and you might not even get the correct answer.

So, for the past couple of years, I have been thinking this -, essentially since ChatGPT came out - how can AI be used to assist in your studies. Not as a replacement, right? The goal here is not to replace your professor and teaching staff. Instead, it’s to supplement your studies to supercharge them, right. To think of AI like a supercharged study partner, in my opinion, is the best way to approach AI usage.

And so, in today’s video, I’m going to show you how you can take your notes from lecture and you can upload them to a couple of different AIs to actually accelerate the learning process and even the retention process for that information so you can do better on your exams. It’s going to be pretty exciting, so let’s go ahead and get to it.

Now before we get into the meat and potatoes of how this works, I want to very quickly discuss the ethical and legal implications of uploading copyrighted material to an AI. Just don’t do it. And what I mean by this is don’t take pictures with your phone of your textbook and then upload those to an AI, or just download images from websites online and upload those to AI. At best, it’s an ethical problem; at worst, it’s a legal issue. And I’m not an attorney and I’m not going to pretend to be one on the internet, but my personal opinion is that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

But outside of that, it’s actually not even necessary. You have to understand that these AIs have already been trained on all the publicly available information so everything that’s in your textbook, it already knows. You’re not going to be exposing it to new information. Instead, our goal is to focus all of the knowledge from these AIs into something that’s going to be useful to you and we’re going to do that with your notes. So you don’t even need to be sending copyrighted material to these AIs; all you need is your notes. So unless you wrote it yourself or typed it yourself or drew it yourself, don’t be sending it to an AI.

All right, let’s get into this.

So let’s start by looking at the tools that we’re going to be utilizing today and to absolutely no surprise, we’re going to be using ChatGPT. You could use any large language model. If you want to use Google Gemini, if you want to use Claude, that’s totally fine. I’m using ChatGPT because I think that it’s currently the best available one. By the time you see this, it may not be, but that’s what I’m currently using.

I’m also using a paid version; although, GPT-4o is available for free. They just cap your message limit. I think it’s like 30 messages every 3 hours or something like that. But I’m a big fan of free, so everything I’m going to show you today can be done for free.

But if you are a paid user, there’s obviously going to be more advanced models like this o1-preview. Maybe by the time you see this, o1 will be out, and maybe that could be better for you at these tasks. I personally think 4o is perfectly fine. I think it does a great job especially for what we’re going to be doing today. For most tasks, it’s actually pretty good. So ChatGPT is going to be perfect for us.

The other one that we’re going to be using is NotebookLM. This comes from Google; stands for notebook language model. This thing is amazing. Some of the things it does are not all that impressive, to be honest, but it does something that is so incredible, it’s like my favorite thing. You may have seen it but I’m going to spoil it right now. It can create podcasts from your sources. Really, really cool.

Now, what are sources? So what are - what could you be uploading and sending to NotebookLM and ChatGPT? Well, you can see right here, for NotebookLM, it supports PDF, .txt files, Markdown, audio in MP3, so this is actually a really important thing I could bring up. If you have permission to record the lectures of your, you know, from your professor, I really encourage you to do that, and I do say permission, right. You should be asking.

Most professors or teachers are going to be fine with this. I know I let my students do this all the time, but I also tell them that they can do this at the very first class of our course. So make sure you have permission to do it. And then if you can, you got to make sure that it’s going to be an MP3. But what’s really cool is when you upload it to this, it can actually transcribe it for you.

Now there’s plenty of transcription software out there that you could also do that but what I’ve found is most of them really struggle with Greek and Latin and just medical terminology in general. But, it is what it is, right. The technology is getting better and my assumption is that in the next few years that will not be a problem at all, so pick your battles. But at the same time, so those are the types that you can upload here.

Now, ChatGPT will tell you that it can, you know, take audio files. It struggles in my opinion from what I’ve experimented with so I really wouldn’t do that. But the other thing you could be doing is taking pictures and taking pictures of your notes with your phone if you don’t want to type it out.

But here’s the thing: I want to show you what I have also in front of us is I have notes that I did back when I was a student. So I had ChatGPT actually like make it prettier. They were just a giant mess. So, they all look very formatted and consistent among these because ChatGPT made them look better, but these are my notes back from when I was a student. So I have notes on the respiratory system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, and then also on the digestive system.

Now, so again, you can take pictures of your notes, but if they’re typed, that’s also perfect. You’re just going to make sure that it’s in a PDF or a .txt file and then you’re going to want to be able to upload them that way. But these are going to be the things you’re going to need for today. And what we’re - basically, our goal is we are going to get these AIs to help us based specifically off our notes.

Now here is something else though we could add because maybe you don’t take great notes, right. I know plenty of students who are like that and as much as I want everyone to be a great notetaker, sometimes you’re just not. So if you’re not a great notetaker actually, it’s a pretty simple thing you could do is you could actually have ChatGPT generate notes for you. And then you can end up with something very similar to this, again, because ChatGPT helped refine and kind of like reformat my notes.

But like, let’s say, for instance, you wanted notes on, let’s say, the urinary system. So you can say like, “Can you generate some notes on the urinary system? Please focus on the following structures.” And then what you can do, if I can spell, is then come in here and then you can just like list them off, right. So maybe you’re saying like kidney, ureter, urinary bladder, and then urethra, and then you can keep going.

So like say, for instance, like what you could do is like grab your textbook because, remember, we’re not taking pictures of our textbook, but let’s say you have your textbook. You could go through it and just look at all of the structures that you’re going to need to be working on and just start listing them here. So you can get really specific.

So like for the kidney, maybe you just add in here like, okay, renal cortex, renal medulla. Let’s say, minor and major calyces, right. So like you could just - I spelled that terribly wrong - but, you know, like you could just go through this and through your textbook and just start listing off the structures. And then what you could do, let’s see, like let’s just see what it generates. I don’t even know what it’s going to generate here.

So here’s some notes. Certainly, right? And it tells you kidney and it tells you location, structure. So if you do this correctly like you can, again, you’re getting the AI to work for you and you can end up with a note. And then what you could do is, I mean, you can export this. You could copy and paste it like to a Google Doc or something, turn it into a PDF. You can turn these notes into something that we can work with, so it’s really powerful in that sense. So if you don’t have the notes, you can make it. You can make notes for you, but I encourage you to take notes during lecture and then -- but this is what we’re going to be working with for today’s video.

All right, so we’re going to start with NotebookLM, and this is what I would actually encourage you to start with as well. So, you know, like you are back from lecture. You have your notes. You’re getting in front of your desktop which, by the way, this may… there may be an app. I don’t think there’s an app. I think this is only really available through desktop. But you sit down and you open NotebookLM and then what you’re going to do is you’re going to upload your sources and that’s what you can see right here.

So I have those four notes that I showed earlier. And then when I’ve uploaded it, now I’m left here, and so we have kind of like this chat that we have and we can say ‘View chat’. But what I want to do is come over to where it says ‘Notebook guide’. And when I click on that, what we can see is over here, it says ‘Help me create’. You can create an ‘FAQ’, a ‘Study Guide’, ‘Table of Contents’, a ‘Timeline’, a ‘Briefing Doc’ -- these can be helpful and it kind of depends on what it is.

So like let me click on one to show you what it does and how quickly it does it. So let’s say ‘Table of Contents’. So remember, this is going to be generating table of contents based on my four docs of notes. So it’s just going to sit here and generate based off of it. This usually goes pretty fast, but again, it also depends on how much you are providing it. I’ve experimented with quite a bit and this can actually… it can take a little bit of time when you are uploading like really long PDFs, just really long source files. So don’t -- just be aware this can take a decent amount of time. But for us, it really didn’t take too long.

So what you’ll see here, it says ‘The Human Body: Systems Overview’ and it basically just kind of like assembles everything into one note which, again, so maybe that’s useful or not, you know. I’ll leave that up to you as to whether or not you could have any use to it. But then what happens is it’s now up here, so we have a ‘New note’ is what we have. So then I’ll come back to my Notebook guide and then I could do the same thing. I could generate all of these, right.

But the one I’m really interested in is this ‘Deep dive conversation’ and this is where we can generate a podcast. Now, what’s really cool is they recently just updated this where you can now customize the conversation, so this is wild to begin with. What it generates is two characters, a male and a female, having a conversation as though it’s a podcast and it’s very natural-sounding, like when you hear this, you’re going to be blown away. But what we can do now is customize it. So I can come in here for custom instructions and it tells you, you know, ‘Things to try’, like ‘Focus on a specific source’.

So like, for instance, what I could do -- this is where, again, we’re getting our notes to work for us. One of the biggest problems that anatomy students have -- at least in my experience -- is that they know the information but they don’t really know how it all fits together. For instance, like they can memorize things. They can memorize all the structures and they can even do the functions. But then if I were to ask a question about, you know, how is the nervous system regulating this aspect of the digestive system or the urinary system or the reproductive system, they can start to get confused.

When you start actually putting the pieces together and not just keeping them separated, it can get kind of confusing. And I also think this is one of the most useful things you can do to better understand your anatomy is once you’ve de-articulated it, once you have all the pieces, start seeing how they can fit together. This is the power of anatomy. Anatomy is a classification science so we classify things. But now that you have all the parts, now you can start, you know, mixing and matching and you can start seeing how things work together, and that’s what you could do. So we could dictate an entire conversation based around that.

So like, for example, maybe we want to say, “I’d like you to…” No. “Focus on how the digestive and endocrine system… endocrine system work together.” I don’t know. Let’s just say it like that. And then the point here is actually also to use natural language, right. You don’t need to necessarily be too specific with your language, say, like, for instance, you know, just getting down into minutia of the terminology, stay pretty natural. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to click generate.

Now I’m going to have to speed this up because this is going to take as it says a few minutes. It kind of just again depends on how long are the sources, what is it pulling from, and how much customization did you do, but so I’m going to let this generate and then we’ll come back when it’s ready.

All right, so we are back. This took about five minutes to generate and what we see is it came up with a 14-minute long podcast. Now I’m really excited for you to hear this so I’m just going to push play and you’re going to get a real good idea of what this does.

Welcome back, everybody. Ready for another deep dive?
Absolutely. Always excited to jump into some fascinating science.
Well, today, we’re tackling a partnership you might not think about too often.
Oh, let’s hear it.
The digestive system, and the endocrine system.
Interesting. Two systems that, honestly, I usually consider pretty separate.
Right, but they’re actually totally intertwined. We’ve got some in-depth medical text to guide us and, trust me, there are some seriously cool connections to uncover.

This is -- see, I think you probably understand why I get so excited about this, right. Like, this is one of the most brilliant uses of AI that I could have ever -- I can’t… I couldn’t have even imagined it, right. When this happened, I was so surprised and so taken back and so excited about it. I have been playing with this for weeks now since this first came out and then this new customization aspect only came out a couple of weeks ago and I have just been obsessed with it.

And, you know, in terms of retention, it’s just so cool because what you’ll find is they simplify everything without oversimplifying it and it’s spoken in a conversational way. So this is a real effective and easy way to just kind of think about your notes as maybe like you’re on a treadmill or you’re working out or maybe you’re, you know, walking on campus or maybe you’re just relaxing in your dorm room. Like fill in the blank of whatever you do to relax; you just have your headphones in and you are listening to a podcast but it’s a podcast on your notes and it’s done in a very natural way.

This helps with retention because it’s so casual, it’s like it’s… it’s kind of like remembering a conversation as opposed to remembering all of these just tedious details. This is so profound. I have played with this so many different ways.

And what you can do is you can get rid of this one so you can like come over here like it says like delete, so I’m going to download it before I delete it. But you could delete it and then what you can do is generate a new one with new custom instructions. You can dictate the conversation or you could just not even customize it at all and just see what happens.

And what I find when you do that is it just goes over it pretty extensively, and again, I’ve had really long ones. I’ve had this go all the way up to 40 minutes, I think. I think it was about 40 minutes. I didn’t listen to it all but just it’s so incredible what is possible with this. So, if you pair this with this type of stuff here like the Table of Contents, the Briefing Doc, and so on and so forth, I mean like you can get a really, you know, effective study tool ecosystem based purely off your notes.

But this is the feature I’m most excited for. Again, it’s called the ‘Audio Overview’ -- this is so cool.

All right, so let’s now switch to ChatGPT, and you’re going to notice that I’ve uploaded the notes that we’ve had before, but here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not just going to like, you know, press return. I’m not just going to say like tell me about these notes, right. If you’re treating ChatGPT like a glorified search engine, that is the worst possible way to utilize its power and knowledge. Instead what we want to do is get ChatGPT to do things for us that it’s difficult for a human to do.

Now granted it’s difficult for humans to explain things but at the same time you have professors, you have textbooks, you have platforms like Kenhub -- that’s what we do. We specialize in explaining things really well. So instead the goal with ChatGPT is to get it to do something that humans just struggle with.

So, to give you an idea of this, I have been assembling these prompts over the past couple of years. This is not like an exhaustive and extensive list. I’m not going to sit here and pretend like this is the greatest list ever, but I also have been working pretty hard on this because the ideas or the idea that I’ve had is I want to get ChatGPT to do the most difficult things for humans regarding learning.

And to give you an idea of what I mean here, like look at this, ‘Simple Analogies Maker’. “Use my notes to create straightforward analogies that relate anatomical concepts to common objects or experiences.” I’m not saying that all great instructors can analogize, but they -- that’s pretty much kind… that’s kind of what I’m saying. Like it’s amazing when you see a really good teacher, they can almost effortlessly just make an analogy that can cause the students to just, you know, like, “Oh, yeah, that makes a ton of sense.” It’s amazing how a great public speaker can do that.

Analogies are something that is just a very effective teaching tool and it’s also really difficult to do; at least to do at a really high and consistent level. I struggle with it like crazy. I’ve have -- the analogies that I have in my lectures, I have practiced many times. It’s not something I’m necessarily always coming up with on the spot.

Yet, you know, ChatGPT can do that very, very quickly. It can have you like developing mnemonics just right then and there. Telling stories or simplifying it, right; so, “Craft a simple story or narrative using the key points from my lecture notes.” Like if I had a student say like, “Hey, could you just tell me a story about, you know, like the urinary tubules?” I mean, maybe I could do it but I mean that’s really difficult. Yeah, ChatGPT is really good at that, right.

I love this one -- ‘Anatomy Tour Guide’. “You are a friendly tour guide inside the human body. Using my lecture notes as your map, lead me on a simple journey through different systems and organs explaining their functions in clear, everyday language.”

Look, this list has a long ways to go. I’m going to be making changes and edits to this likely for years to come or, who knows? Maybe when AI just gets so intuitive I won’t need to. And in fact, I’m actually -- what we’ll do is we’ll copy and paste this and put it in the description for this video so you can get access to all of these and you can check it out for yourself.

And I encourage you to play with it, right, like don’t treat these like as though they are perfected. If you want to change things here and there or just even expand off of them or just use them as inspiration, I really strongly encourage you to do that because this is how you really start interacting with your notes. This is where you’re getting a lot out of your notes.

Again, platforms like Kenhub, textbook, what we do and what you really need -- and I’m going to be showing you this in a second and how you can use, you know, ChatGPT alongside Kenhub, alongside your textbook -- but what we do is we explain things. We give you the details. We use, you know, our expertise to teach you something.

ChatGPT shouldn’t be teaching you as much as it should just be helping you. It should be doing things that are just really difficult for humans to do in a lot of contexts. And when you start, you know, pairing this with those the expert sources like Kenhub, I mean, I mean this because I have been experimenting with this with my students now for the past like 6 months. I’ve really been kind of like playing around with this in lectures.

It’s powerful. It’s really powerful when you can use ChatGPT alongside. There’s been plenty of times I pulled this up during a lecture and it’s just like, hey, let’s play around with this. Like let’s work on this information, this topic. Let’s try to figure this out in a really unique way that I just am not capable of doing right here right now, you know. It’s powerful. It’s really, really powerful.

So again, I’m going to -- we’re going to go ahead and copy and paste this and put it in the description below so I encourage you to go ahead and check that out. But this is what we want to do. In fact, and let’s just do one to kind of like show you.

So, let’s do the Simple Analogies Maker, right, because analogies again are super challenging. Like these are really challenging to do; at least for me it is. Maybe not so much for other people. But I’m just going to press return on this and some straightforward analogies. And what it’s going to do is it’s just going to very quickly do this, right. It’s -- we have them for ‘CNS versus PNS’, ‘Neuron Structure’, ‘Synapse’, ‘Gas Exchange in Alveoli’. Like let’s look at the ‘Trachea’ one. “The trachea is like the trunk of a tree that splits into two main branches to supply air to each lung, similar to how a tree trunk splits into main branches.” That’s a very simple analogy but it’s also an accurate analogy.

Let’s see, ‘Diaphragm’s Role in Breathing’. “Think of the diaphragm as a trampoline that moves down to create space in the lungs when you breathe in, then moves up to push air out when you exhale.” Again, that’s accurate.

These are simple, but I have found over my, you know, teaching career that simple analogies are often the more powerful ones, right. They don’t have to be the most creative analogy that anyone’s ever heard. You just want something that people are going to be able to relate to. That is the secret; that is the key. And that is the kind of stuff that you want to get ChatGPT to do and there’s many different ways that you can do that.

All right, so let’s now take a look at how you can use AI alongside expertly sourced and vetted information like your textbook or the Kenhub platform because in my estimation this is one of the most powerful ways to use AI because it’s almost like you have this tutor right next to you. But again, like it’s not a replacement for your teaching staff, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help and aid you and nudge you along in certain things, in certain ways.

So, like, for instance, let’s say like we are studying… we’re studying the abdomen, right. So let’s say we’re doing a study unit on the stomach, so we’re in the stomach. So again, like your textbook, Kenhub, we are built to teach you this information very effectively, right. So, I mean, you can see that everything is ‘Learning objectives’. We have videos. We have quizzes’. Like you can see all this stuff that is going to help you.

But let’s say like you’re reading an article, or in your textbook, you’re just reading the text and as you’re going through it, maybe you just want a quick point of clarification on something. So, “Thanks to the stomach, every human is technically capable of corroding metal.” Maybe it’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting… corroding metal.” Like how acidic does something need to be to corrode metal, right?

So maybe you could like just jump over to ChatGPT and you could put that in there real quick, right? It’s a really quick small thing. But maybe also you just want something to be explained a little bit differently, right. Like I think about this all the time where sometimes I’m in the classroom and I’m explaining something and one of the students doesn’t quite get it. So they raise their hand and I try to explain it again, and again, they’re just not quite getting it.

But then another student in the class will raise their hand and mention something that then gets it all to click. It’s almost like it’s like this team effort, right. Sometimes, the way I’m saying it, despite being accurate, is not what that student needs to hear in that moment, and sometimes they just need a third party to come in.

So what you could do is you could have ChatGPT rephrase things a little bit, right. Again, like everything we talked about previously is still valid. You could have it make analogies. You could have it make stories; summarize. You could have it do any of this stuff. And the goal here again is not to teach you anything but it’s more about rephrasing… rewording. I do this all the time with ChatGPT when it comes to writing where I don’t have ChatGPT write for me but sometimes I have it rephrased something to see if I like the sound of it a little bit better or maybe a little element of it, right.

If you’re doing this alongside this material, like think of it like as a companion, it’s really powerful. It is really, really powerful because it’s forcing you to rethink about the same information in a slightly different way and then you’ll come back to it and it’s just going to make more sense. You’re just -- like if you have it tell you a story about the esophagus, duodenum, peritoneum, the liver, like putting it all together. You read the story. You have fun with it. Like, you know, let’s actually -- why not, right?

“Can you tell me a fun and exciting story about the digestive tract? Let’s pretend we’re a bolus traveling from end to end.” I don’t know. I’m literally coming up with this on the fly. Let’s -- I don’t know. I don’t think we’re going to be able to read it all. I imagine this is probably going to be quite a long story.

This is interesting. It even has like levels; like ‘Level 2: The Stomach -Land of Acids and Enzymes’. This is awesome, right? So let’s say, you just have… you have this side by side and you’re going through, you’re reading it, and then you jump back to it and you get to this portion, and you’re like, “You know what? This is making more sense,” right. It’s from the esophagus, the duodenum right where it’s placed. Like you’re able to piece all of this together because you’re - this is how the human brain works.

We work with stories. We’re - our brain is primed for stories and this is just a really cool and effective way to use expert material that you don’t have to worry about ChatGPT getting it right or wrong necessarily. You’re really just looking to help; to aid. It’s such a fun way to do this. Again, I’ve been doing this in the classroom now for quite a bit of time and my students really enjoy it and I find that I’m getting better results and their retention and understanding and it’s immediate too. I promise if you start incorporating it like this, you are going to be blown away with how you can -- like you can really, really just make the material work for you.

I really hope you enjoyed today’s video. I had a lot of fun putting it together and there’s so much more that we could say. And what we’re actually curious to hear is what other things you’ve come up with or other strategies with AI to help improve your studies. So be sure to leave that in the comments below because we are always looking for other ways to improve upon these methods. There’s so much potential with AI. We would love to see what you have to say. But while you’re down there, be sure to like, comment… I mean, comment other things, but also subscribe if you haven’t already.

But thanks for watching everybody, and we’ll see you in the next one.