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24 HOURS AFTER LEARNING SOMETHING, WE FORGET TWO-THIRDS OF IT

   In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus became the first psychologist to systematically study learning and memory, by carrying out a long, exhausting experiment on himself. Philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume had argued that remembering involves association – linking things or ideas by shared characteristics, such as time, place, cause, or effect. Ebbinghaus decided to test the effect of association on memory, recording the results mathematically to see if memory follows verifiable patterns.

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Memory experiments

   Ebbinghaus started by memorizing lists of words and testing how many he could recall. To avoid the use of association, he then created 2,300 “nonsense syllables(音节)”, all three letters long and using the standard word format of consonant(辅音)–vowel–consonant: for example, “ZUC” and “QAX”.

   Grouping these into lists, he looked at each syllable for a fraction of a second, pausing for 15 seconds before going through a list again. He did this until he could recite a series correctly at speed. He tested different list lengths and different learning intervals, noting the speed of learning and forgetting.

   Ebbinghaus found that he could remember meaningful material, such as a poem, ten times more easily than his nonsense lists.
He also noted that the more times the stimuli (the nonsense syllables) were repeated, the less time was needed to reproduce the memorized information.Also, the first few repetitions proved the most effective in memorizing a list.

   When looking at his results for evidence of forgetting, Ebbinghaus found, unsurprisingly, that he tended to forget less quickly the lists that he had spent the most time memorizing, and that recall is best performed immediately after learning. Ebbinghaus also uncovered an unexpected pattern in memory retention.

   He found that there is typically a very rapid loss of recall in the first hour, followed by a slightly slower loss, so that after nine hours, about 60 per cent is forgotten. After 24 hours, about two-thirds of anything memorized is forgotten.Plotted on a graph, this shows a distinct “forgetting curve” that starts with a sharp drop, followed by a shallow slope.

   Ebbinghaus’s research launched a new field of enquiry, and helped establish psychology as a scientific discipline. His meticulous(严谨的) methods remain the basis of all psychological experimentation to this day.

   Learning material and committing it to memory within an hour of hearing it, Ebbinghaus showed, will mean that we remember it for longer and can recall it more easily.

MORE TO KNOW…

APPROACH

Memory studies

BEFORE

• 5th century BCE The ancient Greeks make use of “mnemonics(记忆术)” – techniques, such as key words or rhymes, that aid memory.
• 1582 Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno in The Art of Memory gives methods for memorizing, using diagrams of knowledge and experience.

AFTER

• 1932 Frederick Bartlett says that every memory is a blend of knowledge and inference.
• 1949 Donald Hebb, in The Organization of Behavior, describes how learning results from stimulated brain cells linking up into “assemblies”.
• 1960 US psychologist Leo Postman finds that new learning can interfere with previous learning, causing “retroactive interference(倒摄干扰)”.

HERMANN EBBINGHAUS

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   Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, Germany, to a family of Lutheran merchants.At 17, he began to study philosophy at Bonn University, but his academic career was disrupted in 1870 by the Franco-Prussian War. In 1873, he completed his studies and moved to Berlin, later travelling to France and England, where he carried out research on the power of his own memory, starting in 1879.

   He published Memoryin 1885, detailing the “nonsense syllable” research, and in the same year became a professor at Berlin University, where he set up two psychology laboratories and founded an academic journal. Ebbinghaus later moved to Breslau University, where he also established a laboratory, and finally to Halle, where he taught until his death from pneumonia(肺炎) at the age of 59.

Key works

• 1885 Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
• 1897–1908 Fundamentals of Psychology (2 volumes)
• 1908 Psychology: An Elementary Textbook