What Is The Forgetting Curve in Psychology (And How to Overcome Forgetting)?
“Shit. I forgot!” How often do you say these words? Me, personally? A lot. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re stupid. Simply, there is this thing called the forgetting curve. As mysterious as it might sound, the concept is quite easy to grasp. In short, the forgetting curve model explains that what we know slowly disappears from our operating memory when there is no attempt on our end to retain the information. Plainly, it’s unlikely to learn, and remember, how to hand-forge a Damascus steel katana by watching a single YouTube video on the subject. You need to continuously expose yourself to the information, plus actually practice hand-forging, to master the subject. And this applies to everything we want to learn and remember. The more we practice, the more we won’t forget. But there is more to that if we want to overcome forgetting…
Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory. And yes, you guessed it, he’s the person who actually discovered the forgetting curve phenomenon. 1
