Ebbinghaus pioneered landmark research in the field of retention and learning, observing what he called the forgetting curve, a measure of how much we forget over time. When we learn something new-when a teacher delivers a fresh lesson to a student, for example-the material is encoded across these neural networks, converting the experience into a memory.įorgetting is almost immediately the nemesis of memory, as psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in the 1880s. But they’re actually more like spiderwebs, strands of recollection distributed across millions of connected neurons. We often think of memories as books in a library, filed away and accessed when needed. “Rather, it may represent an investment in a more optimal mnemonic strategy.” “From this perspective, forgetting is not necessarily a failure of memory,” explain Richards and Frankland in the study. In this model of cognition, forgetting is an evolutionary strategy, a purposeful process that runs in the background of memory, evaluating and discarding information that doesn’t promote the survival of the species. According to Richards and Frankland, the goal of memory is not just to store information accurately but to “optimize decision-making” in chaotic, quickly changing environments. In a recent article published in the journal Neuron, neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland challenge the predominant view of memory, which holds that forgetting is a process of loss-the gradual washing away of critical information despite our best efforts to retain it. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget-highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick. Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten.
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