The Forgetting Curve

So what is learning?

Learning is essentially converting information into knowledge.

That is, consuming information, primarily through reading or listening and converting it into long term memory.

Now there are a few important things to know before we arrive at how we can learn optimally.

The first is the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. The curve shows how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it.

What we can see is that we lose almost 70% of the information we’ve been exposed to within the first 24 hours. This then further declines until we’ve lost nearly 90% of that by the end of the first month.

Memory is the reactivation of a specific group of neurons, formed from persistent changes in the strength of connections between neurons.

It refers to the processes that are used to acquire, store, retain, and later retrieve information. > encoding, storage, and retrieval.

Sensory memory is the earliest stage of memory. During this stage, sensory information from the environment is stored for a brief moment (4 secs max). We tend to only retain some aspects of this memory, allowing some of this information to pass into the next stage; short term memory.

Short term memory / active memory / working memory is essentially the conscious mind. Paying attention to sensory memory generates information in short-term memory (20-30 secs). Many of our short-term memories are quickly forgotten, but attending to this information allows it to continue to the next stage; long term memory.

Long term memory refers to the continuing storage of information. It is the unconscious and is outside of our awareness but can be called into working memory when needed.

When we read and think, we tend to do it with verbal language. Your eyes can track faster than you can verbally say it in your mind – You can see it faster than you can read it to yourself. If you’re speed reading, you’re not processing the information deep enough.

As we saw earlier with the forgetting curve, short-term memory rapidly declines, and it would be inefficient to continually read a book or notes we’ve made over and over in the same day. Our goal is to convert our short term memories into long term memories. What we are doing is attempting to get our neurons firing again and again in order to strengthen the connection. The below graph displays memory retention with each subsequent review of the material over a period of days.

What we find is that we can expose ourselves to the material in the first day, review it the following day, and then continue that at increasing intervals until consolidation into long-term memory is complete.

The optimal and most efficient way of doing this when reading books is to write down and condense the important parts of the book you are reading into short paragraphs or bullet points which can be quickly read over in the future.

Essentially what we want to do is condense a 300 page book down into maybe 50 or 100 bullet points, short paragraphs, phrases or quotes. This then enables us, when we return to our notes later, to read an entire book multiple times in an hour.

In practice, that looks something like this;

• When reading a book, copy down the important material into a spiral notebook. When copying down notes, you are in effect, having a conversation (auditory/verbal) with yourself.

• Next day, preferably in the morning you should then read over the notes. In my experience, this can be brief. Just skim over the notes and remember what you wrote. This helps us recall memories from storage and strengthens the neuronal connection.

• Following that, you’ll be reading other books etc, but you should make a point of going back to that same spiral notebook within the next 7 days and once again recalling that information.

To finish, ‘it’s in your best intentions to pay attention’- The average attention span is about 15 minutes so don’t be afraid to get up and move around every so often, but make you should try to develop tools to train your attention over time. Lastly, make sure to write things down- ‘The faintest ink is better than the best memory.’