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I've heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance?
— Ronald Reagan
Forgetting is a formidable opponent. We owe our present understanding of forgetting to Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who spent years of his life memorizing lists of nonsense syllables ( Guf Ril Zhik Nish Mip Poff ). He recorded the speed of forgetting by comparing the time it took him to learn and then later relearn one of his lists. His“ forgetting curve”is a triumph of experimental psychology, tenacity, and masochism:
The curve reveals how rapidly we forget and what remains once we've forgotten. The right side of his curve is encouraging: even years later, Ebbinghaus could expect old random gobbledygook to take him measurably less time to learn than new random gobbledygook. Once he learned something, a trace of it remained within him forever. Unfortunately, the left side is a disaster: our memories rush out of our ears like water through a net. The net stays damp, but if we're trying to keep something substantial in it—like telephone numbers, the names of people we've just met, or new foreign words—we can expect to remember a paltry 30 percent the following day.
How can we do better? Our instinct is to work harder; it's what gets us through school tests and social occasions. When we meet our new friend Edward, we generally remember his name with rote repetition; we repeat his name to ourselves until we remember. If we need to remember—perhaps Edward is our new boss—then we can repeat his name continuously until we're sick of it. If we do this extra work, we'll remember his name significantly better … for a few weeks.
Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn't help long-term memory at all . Can you remember a single fact from the last school test you crammed for? Can you even remember the test itself? If we're going to invest our time in a language, we want to remember for months, years, or decades. If we can't achieve this goal by working harder , then we'll do it by working as little as possible .
Hermann Ebbinghaus's 1885 study has been referred to as“the most brilliant single investigation in the history of experimental psychology.”He sat alone in a room with a ticking metronome, repeating lists of nonsense syllables more than six million times, pushing himself to the point of“exhaustion, headache and other symptoms”in order to measure the speed of memorization and the speed of forgetting. It was the first data-driven study of the human mind, and I suspect it made him a blast at social events.
• Rote repetition is boring, and it doesn't work for long-term memorization.
• Take the lazy route instead: study a concept until you can repeat it once without looking and then stop. After all, lazy is just another word for“efficient.”