What is the Forgetting Curve, and can you use it to your advantage?
Has someone ever come up to you at a party and you have no idea who they are? Sir Richard Attenborough famously called everyone darling because he was not sure of their names. Similarly, I’ve learnt that by saying “lovely to see you” instead of “nice to meet you” you can save yourself a lot of embarrassment from memory lapses at social occasions.
It seems that the human memory has an infinite capacity for many things, especially ABBA lyrics, but not necessarily remembering vital information at the appropriate moment. Why is this?
A German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in 1885 that people on average forget 90% of what they learn within a week and two-thirds of the information they encounter in a day. Though this is great if your day involved a 4-hour root-canal, it’s something we should be aware of when exploring learning and retention.
When I grew up, there was a gulf between how the best teachers communicated and how the worst did. Some made their subjects come alive, others seemed to be reading monotone from a script, whereas the class’s favourite was the one who’d put a video on and leave us to our own devices. Yet, how information is presented has a momentous impact on how it’s remembered.
Ebbinghaus’s work is critical in understanding how some teaching sticks whereas other lessons are forgotten. These are the critical factors he identifies in how we absorb and retain information:
1. Does this information have any meaning in people’s lives?
Ebbinghaus found that when he memorised meaningless three letter words, his memories faded much quicker than if he memorised recognisable words. If information seems to have no relevance to people’s lives, you cannot blame the human mind for deciding not to store it.
Humans are wired for stories. In fact, we’re 22 times more likely to remember stories than facts alone. A Danish school vividly demonstrated this. Instead of just reading off a list of dates to teach children history, they got them to act out the stories through live action role play complete with Roman and Viking costumes.
Though a quarter of this school’s students have learning difficulties, this school outranked local selective schools in multiple subjects. They did this through considerate teaching that immersed the children in the subjects they were learning and made them part of the story.
2. Is it communicated well?
Like the teachers in Denmark, marketers understand a fundamental truth about human beings. The same information can have a remarkably different impact depending on the way it is presented.
Take the example of Al Fielding. He tried to sell a new material he invented as textured wallpaper in the 1950’s, but found the market was not what he hoped. He then tried to sell his product as insulation, but still he had no luck.
It was only when he repackaged the idea, he found success. When looking at the new IBM computers he realised that fragile components would need protective materials when they were being transported. The material that had been rejected so many times finally found success. What was the name of the invention that Al Fielding had pitched so many times? Bubble-wrap.
3. How well did you sleep before you tried to learn something?
As a child, going to bed early was a punishment – now it’s an aspiration. The role of sleep in our overall health is being increasingly recognised. Bill Gates used to take pride in his lack of sleep, but now admits that this was a huge mistake.
As Matthew Walker says in his game-changing bestseller “Why We Sleep”: “More than exercise, diet and wealth, science has shown that sleep is the most important factor to our physical and mental wellbeing.”
The Perelman School of Medicine confirms what you may have suspected. Going without sleep is destructive if you wish to study anything. In 2019, two MIT professors found a correlation between sleep and test scores observing students over a semester. The less students slept during the semester, the worse their scores. Sleep has an integral role in how we absorb and recall information.
Yet being aware of how we absorb information can only be the first step. The next question is about how to retain important information in the days and months to come. A key aid to memory is the use of mnemonics and spaced repetition. Even just spending 10 minutes reviewing what you’ve learnt in the day after can shift retention rates dramatically from 33% to nearly 100%. Ebbinghaus particularly praises active recall and frequently testing yourself on what you’ve learnt.
Another method with similarly dramatic results was learning information with the expectation of teaching others. A study at Washington University divided students into two groups. One learnt material expecting to be tested, the others were told they’d have to teach someone else what they’d learnt. Learners expecting to teach recalled more material correctly, they organized information more effectively, and they had better memory for especially important facts.
On that note, what you forget can be as important as what you choose to remember. Anyone who has ever downloaded a dating app can tell you sometimes it’s better if you can’t easily recall certain interactions or experiences. We are lucky to live in an age where technology is available, and you can look up what you need when you need it. Not so long ago you’d have to rely on a distant memory of a textbook for professional knowledge or an A-Z with no traffic updates if you needed to get anywhere. In some senses we can relax knowing that it’s fine for us to forget things that are only a google search away.
To conclude, Ebbinghaus’s research is as relevant now as it was in 1885. There is an irony in that the knowledge that we are likely to forget what we learn can make us remember what is important. By embracing the mechanics of human memory, we can understand what to teach, how to present information and continue to learn as best we can in a constantly changing world. This is why 42courses provides a full set of notes to complement their entertaining online courses for any course you complete. That way you can choose to learn or forget as much as you wish.
