Ebbinghaus Quotes

Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short.

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history

In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled...People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.

As the early memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) wrote, “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” He meant that people have been thinking about human thought, emotion, intelligence, and behavior for thousands of years, but as a discipline based on facts rather than speculation psychology is still in its infancy.

As the early memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) wrote, “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” He meant that people have been thinking about human thought, emotion, intelligence, and behavior for thousands of years, but as a discipline based on facts rather than speculation psychology is still in its infancy. Even

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history." Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don’t soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person’s hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones. There’s even a formula for the phenomena: In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory, and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event.

For example, forgetting something in your short-term memory is a result of insufficient encoding, while forgetting something from your long-term memory is a result of faulty retrieval. This has been dubbed the forgetting curve by scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Ebbinghaus posited that memories will fade or not be retained if there is insufficient rehearsal and practice. He estimated that people typically remember only 50% of newly learned information three weeks after exposure, and they remember only 10% eight weeks after exposure. Additional studies have confirmed that it’s possible to retain up to 80% of newly learned information if you review and rehearse it within twenty-four hours after exposure.