Professor of psychology on the magic of memory-adpenhot's forgotten curve post)

The human brain is a treasure of memories. Things, questions, emotions, and exercises that the human brain has experienced can all become part of people's memory. For example, words, phrases, sentences, and even Article The contents are all completed through memory. There is a process from "NOTE" to "Recall", which includes memorization, persistence, recognition, and recall. While learning English, many people only pay attention to the memory effect at that time, but they do not know that it is time to do a good job in the memory of learning, simply paying attention to the memory effect at that time, and ignoring the persistence and recognition at the later stage cannot achieve good results.

In terms of information processing, memory is the process of encoding, storage and extraction of input information. From the perspective of information processing, the first learning and reciting of English is only a process of input encoding. The ability of Human memory is physically amazing. It can store 1015 bits (byte, byte) of information, but each person's memory treasure is only 10% mined, there is more room for memory. This is because some people only focus on the effect of memory at the time, but ignore the bigger problem in memory-the issue of memory firmness, it involves the laws of forgetting memories that are often described in psychology.

1. Explanation of ebbinhot's memory curve

A famous German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) published his experiment report in 1885, the Study of memory has become one of the most widely studied fields in psychology, and ebbinhot is the first person to discover the law of forgetting memories.

According to what we know, memory persistence is different in terms of time. There are two types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Our usual memory process is as follows:

After learning the input information, it becomes a short-term memory. However, if you do not review the information in time, the information you have remembered will be forgotten, after a timely review, these short-term memories will become a kind of long-term memory for a long period of time in the brain. So, for us, how can we call it "Forgetting"? The so-called "Forgetting" means that we can no longer recognize or recall what we have previously remembered, or wrong recognition and wrong memories are all forgotten. When he was doing this experiment, he took himself as the test object. He came to some conclusions about memory. He chose some meaningless syllables, that is, combinations of many letters that cannot be spelled out, such as asww, cfhhj, ijikmb, and rfyjbc. He obtained some data through his own tests.

Then, according to these points, ebinhot depicts a curve, which is a very famous curve for revealing the forgetting Law: The Forgotten curve of ebinhot, in which the vertical axis indicates the number of pieces of knowledge remembered in learning, the horizontal axis represents the time (days), and the curve represents the pattern of Memory changes.

This curve tells people that forgetting in learning is regular. The process of forgetting is not balanced. It is not a fixed day to lose a few, but to lose a few, however, at the initial stage of memory, the forgetting speed was very fast, and then gradually slowed down. After a long period of time, it was almost no longer forgotten. This is the pattern of forgetting development, that is, the principle of "first fast, then slow. Observe this forgetting curve and you will find that after one day, if you do not pay close attention to the review, only 25% of the original knowledge will be left ). With the passage of time, the forgetting speed slows down, and the amount of forgetting will decrease. Some people did an experiment. The two groups of students studied a text. Group A did a review shortly after the study. Group B did not review the text. After one day, group A kept 98%, and group B kept 56%; after one week, group A kept 83%, and group B kept 33%. The average forgetting value of group B is higher than that of group.

2. Different materials have different forgetting Curves

In addition, ebbinhot also found in his experiments on memory that he had to repeat 12 meaningless syllables for an average of 16.5 times. In order to remember 36 meaningless chapters, he had to repeat 54 times; the memory of the 480 syllables in the six poems only needs to be repeated eight times on average! This experiment tells us that everything we understand can be remembered quickly, comprehensively, and firmly. Otherwise, attention is hard to remember, and it is also hard and thankless. Therefore, it is easier to remember those meaningful materials, and those meaningless materials are more effort-consuming in memory and will not be easy to remember in the future. Therefore, the adpenhot forgetting curve is a kind of curve about forgetting, and for meaningless syllables, for comparison with other materials, ebbinhot has drawn different forgetting curves of different materials, but they are basically the same.

Therefore, ebbinhot's experiment fully proves to us that learning should be diligent in review, and the better the understanding of memory, the slower the forgetting.

3. Different people have different ebbinos memory curves-personalized ebbinos

The above-mentioned ebbinhot memory curve is a curve generated by different memory data after a large number of tests in the laboratory. It is a common group rule. This memory curve does not consider the individual's personality characteristics, but seeks a memory pattern at the equilibrium point.

But the memory pattern can be specific to each of us. Because of our physiological characteristics and different life experiences, we may have different memory habits, memory patterns, and memory characteristics. Laws can only play a catalytic role for the actions of natural persons to transform the world. If they are consistent with the memory characteristics of each person, they will be like sailing with the water and flying with a thousand miles. If they are contrary to the characteristics of personal memory, the memory effect is compromised. Therefore, we need to find our own Alibaba Cloud memory curve based on different characteristics of each person.