Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in 1850 in the Kingdom of Prussia. He is noted today for his pioneering work in the study of memory. Using himself as a subject, he would memorize nonsense words formed by a consonant-vowel-consonant combination that had no meaning (e.g., ZOT). Then he would test himself on the number of these words he could remember after a given amount of time.
What he found was that he experienced a sharp decline in word memory in 20 minutes with more forgetting within one hour. After one day little was remembered. This study was done from 1880-1885. Ebbinghaus developed a formula to describe this phenomenon.
Ebbinghaus believed that the forgetting rate did not significantly change from one person to another. However, he did believe that factors like stress and sleep did impact the forgetting rate. He also believed that some events are fixed in our memories, such as the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers.
He later studied what it would take to improve retention and reduce forgetting. He found that word associations and repetition could improve retention. Later it was discovered that a review of the material within the first 24 hours would reduce the forgetting.
What Ebbinghaus discovered close to 150 years ago has been validated by recent studies. While few may know the name of Hermann Ebbinghaus, what he hypothesized as the forgetting curve is something that nearly everyone has experienced.
Why then do we test a person’s knowledge on something they are likely to forget? Is it because we have always done it that way? Maybe it’s because it’s easier to assess factual knowledge than the analytical use of that knowledge. Have we become a society where judgments of knowledge need to be “legally proofed”? Or is our measure of knowledge designed to maintain our elitist class society?
And perhaps the most fundamental question is this: what difference does it make if we fail to retain factual information? Does that mean we are stupid? Just imagine how our society might change if we recognized that forgetting is a human trait that we all share and that the retention of information is more of a product of resources that are available to a person than their intellectual potential. Might we begin to realize how we are perpetuating a corrupt intellectual assessment industry to maintain a caste system in society? May it destroy the myth of our so-called meritocracy? Or might it allow to flourish the talent that has long gone untapped?
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“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.’” – Confucius