You remember things like your best friend’s birthday, but often lose your car in parking lots. There is a reason why you forget these little details, but there is a great way to learn to remember everything.
Hermann Ebbingus was a German psychologist whose work resulted in the development of scientifically reliable experimental methods for the quantitative measurement of memory.
At the end of the 1870s, Ebbingus became interested in the functioning of human memory and decided to study it experimentally.
Ebbingus has created lists of nonsense words (consonant-vowel-consonant) like taz, bok and lef. He used these meaningless syllables to assess pure learning, that is, meaningless learning and the rate at which we forget.
This led to the creation of what Ebbingus called the forgetting curve (pictured above), the speed at which we begin to forget new information. Ebbinghaus discovered that a significant amount of information he learned was then forgotten in 20 minutes.
More than half of the meaningless words he had learned were later forgotten within an hour. Although he forgot almost two-thirds in one day, the retention did not decrease much beyond this period. In other words, if the information is kept for one day, it would remain in memory for a long time.
In addition to the forgetting curve, Ebbingus also came up with another theory called the spacing effect. This indicates that we learn things better and more easily when we study it several times, spaced out over an extended period of time compared to trying to learn something in a short period of time.
That said, the spacing effect is more used for information that you want to keep for a long period of time, but if you only want to store something in your memory for a short period of time, cramming might do the trick. .
The spaced repetition technique:
Spaced repetition is a learning technique that involves being asked less often than you master the question. This method starts from an apparently obvious observation: human memory is not perfectly reliable and we often forget what we have learned.
On the other hand, forgetting is rarely complete, because if we learn again what we have already learned, we forget less quickly. So let’s combine the two principles to help you remember everything, this is the spaced repetition technique.
Quick memorization:
– 1st rehearsal just after learning
– 2nd repetition after 15 to 20 minutes
– 3rd repetition after 6 to 8 hours
– 4th repetition after 24 hours
Long-term memorization:
– 1st rehearsal just after learning
– 2nd repetition after 20 to 30 minutes
– 3rd repetition After 1 day
– 4th repetition after 2 to 3 weeks
– 5th repetition after 2 to 3 months.