It seems obvious that the longer you go without recalling a memory, the harder it becomes to retrieve. But it wasn’t always one of those things we just knew to be true. In the 1880s, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus studied the phenomenon and published his findings , giving the world the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. The curve is a simple graph of how information is lost over time, but it proved that time-related forgetting is real (and has since been confirmed by further research). Want to fight the curve and hold on to your memories, especially if you’re a student? Here’s how.
Spaced repetition in learning theory
Ebbinghaus concluded that how quickly we forget something depends on factors such as how difficult or meaningful the material was, but also how tired or stressed we are. So there is no clear answer to the question of how many days you retain a piece of information if you do not think about it.
We also know that the order in which information is presented matters a lot when it comes to how long we store it in our short-term memory, so there are quite a few factors that influence our ability to retrieve and retain memories. To master them, Ebbinghaus and contemporary educators agree on at least two approaches.
The first strategy you can use to better retain information is called spaced repetition. This is an evidence-based technique that allows students to absorb multiple pieces of information and store them in their memory.
