『The Forgetting Curve: How Memory Techniques Help You Beat It (Without Endless Reviews)』のカバーアート

The Forgetting Curve: How Memory Techniques Help You Beat It (Without Endless Reviews)

The Forgetting Curve: How Memory Techniques Help You Beat It (Without Endless Reviews)

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Hermann Ebbinghaus is remembered mostly for discovering the forgetting curve. Open any psychology textbook, any blog devoted to a flashcard app or any study-tips listicle, and you’ll find his name alongside a distinctive graph. Memory expert Tony Buzan called it the most important graph in the world. That’s because its iconic line shows memory plummeting within hours of learning something new, then flattening out over days. Countless discussions of how to reduce forgetting give you the same tidy recommendations. Usually they tell you to review your study materials at intervals, just at the point you’re starting to forget. That way, many authors promise, you’ll beat the curve. The problem, just one of many you’ll discover today, is this: Ebbinghaus didn’t discover the forgetting curve. He discovered his forgetting curve. He was one man, testing his own memory, on one kind of material, using one method. And although the forgetting curve is indeed one of the most repeatable and reproducible principles in the history of scientific studies, reproducibility in laboratory settings does not mean you’ll stop forgetting by using the conventional recommendations. Besides, here’s something almost no one else will tell you: The deepest principles the Ebbinghaus experiments revealed were already written down more than two thousand years earlier by Aristotle. You’ll find them in a short treatise that describes something remarkably close to using a Memory Palace in combination with the same kind of serial positioning Ebbinghaus described as a means for reducing forgetting. So today I’m going to cover a few aspects of the forgetting curve all serious users of memory techniques need to know. These are points I’ve been putting off writing about for a long time. However, a few emails and comments I’ve received over the past few years have convinced me that now is finally the time. Especially since I’ve spent decades memorizing poetry, scripture, mantras, complex terms, the names of people from various backgrounds and vocabulary and phrases in multiple languages. And I’ve done this all while teaching thousands of students to do the same. From where I sit as a practitioner, the forgetting curve is real, useful and badly misunderstood. But treated correctly, it’s an invitation to success. First, however, for the uninitiated, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about the definition of this term. That way, you’ll be able to discover your own curve and work on reducing its impact in your learning life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_qwUkfO65M What Is the Forgetting Curve? In 1885, Ebbinghaus published Über das Gedächtnis (Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology). In this monumental work, he reported years of experiments he had run on a single subject: himself. He memorized lists of sinnlose Silben, the German term for nonsense syllables. These were consonant-vowel-consonant combinations like ZOF and KEB. After committing lists of such invented words, he then tested how much effort it took to relearn them after various delays. Notice two things. First, these were invented words. Nothing with any meaning. Second, pay attention to the word relearn. Ebbinghaus did not measure memory only by asking whether he could reproduce an entire list perfectly. He also measured what he called “savings” in the context of relearning. This study goes quite deep into the nuances and implications of this particular concept for memory. To get the concept in brief, suppose it initially took you 20 repetitions to learn something. If it took only 10 repetitions to relearn it later, some trace of the original learning clearly remained. Your inability to reproduce the information perfectly would not mean the memory had disappeared completely. Keep this idea of “savings” in mind. It matters more than the famous graph, and we’ll return to it when I show you what happened to a long Sanskrit mantra I intentionally abandoned for years. It also connects to some concepts in memory introduced by Richard Semon and studied more recently by Dr. Paul Garrett in relation to the role of fuzzy memory. Back to Ebbinghaus, the result of his experiments is what we now call the forgetting curve. It shows how retention drops steeply at first, then the decline slows. He also documented what we now call the spacing effect. It describes how reviews distributed over time preserve more in long-term memory than the same number of reviews crammed together. All of what Ebbinghaus found replicates, so his science is not in question here. What’s in question is what you and I should actually do with his findings. And that’s where things really start to get interesting. Ebbinghaus Was an Early n=1 Memorizer Notice what Ebbinghaus actually was: A practitioner running experiments on his own memory. In today’s language, he was doing n=1 self-experimentation. He had skin in the game, memorized real material with ...
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