The Forgetting Curve

Don’t you hate how you learn something and then forget half of it the next day? Well, there's actually a reason for that phenomenon, and it’s called the “Curve of Forgetting”. Rolling back to 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, decided to conduct an experimental study on memory and what he found was the “Curve of Forgetting”. Basically, the “Curve of Forgetting” was a graph that modeled the decline of memory retention over time, decaying exponentially. It showed that by the first day, almost 50% of what you’ve learned the previous day was forgotten, and then 65% and so on until the seventh day. At the end of the week, you would’ve forgotten nearly 90% of what you learned the very first day. To combat this, we are going to use a method we talked about in the “How to Study More Efficiently” section: Spaced Repetition. By relearning/revisiting the information again, we can interrupt the forgetting curve. When that happens, the forgetting curve resets, but now instead of forgetting nearly 90% of it in a week, it will take much longer. For example, say you’ve just learned something new today. Since we know much of it will be gone by tomorrow, we would try to review it that day. This will reset the curve and instead of forgetting 50% the next day again, it will take perhaps a week for your memory to lose that much information. In a week, you would review the information again and it would now take a month to forget 50% and etc. By using Spaced Repetition, not only would you not have to study every day to retain information, but you would actually remember the information better!"

Memory Palace

Now that we know the patterns of remembering something, what about how to remember it? Turns out our brain is really good at remembering small chunks of information and if they’re connected in some way, even better. The more connected a memory is to another, the better you will remember it. One of the most unique aspects of our memory is its ability to remember a location. This leads us to a very popular technique utilized by memory champions all over the world: the “Memory Palace” technique or sometimes called the “Method of Loci”. The way this technique works is by doing the following:

1. First choose an environment you’re familiar with; people most commonly choose their home.

2. Next, you would want to assign a specific information to an object in your home. For example, if you wanted to remember that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, you could associate it with a treadmill in your home.

3. The third step, probably the most important step, is to create a weird image of the mitochondria with the treadmill. You would imagine a mitochondria on the treadmill constantly running, trying to “provide energy” (my example may not be the best, but hopefully you get the idea).

4. Finally, when you do the second and third step for whatever you’re trying to remember (could be more than one thing), try to close your eyes and imagine yourself walking through your home on a certain route. As you walk along the route, recall the certain pieces of information associated with the objects in your home. Perhaps, as you walk through the doorway, you see the mitochondria on the treadmill and remember the function of the organelle.

No matter what, the image has to be weird so that you can easily recall the information. Once you have mastered the “Memory Palace”, you have successfully become significantly better at memorizing anything!

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