By: Amanda Yang

Have your parents ever told you to keep practicing your school subjects? They probably have. Why, you may ask? (Or should be asking!) It’s because of the Forgetting Curve. The Forgetting Curve was a model created by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus to explain how our memories fade over time.

Ebbinghaus decided to start by learning a bunch of nonsense syllables, then test his ability to remember them. He found that those memories, over time, weakened. Without trying to relearn information, it will soon gradually fade from your mind.

He also found out that the way you feel and how something is presented play a big role in remembering, too. Sleep, stress, and anxiety will affect how well you remember. When people get too nervous, they can forget what they were going to say, because their anxiety is affecting how they remember.

What’s so important about memory? Remembering things is critical for our survival, and it’s the same for some other animals as well. For example, sheep don’t need to remember very well, since their food is mainly grasses, which are everywhere, and also they are dependent on us. But squirrels are independent, and they need to remember where they store nuts during the fall. If one doesn’t remember, it will probably go hungry and maybe even starve to death. If we didn’t remember what foods were toxic, when to start farming, how to pass on knowledge, and what animals not to approach in the wild, we wouldn’t have come as far as we have today.

Then, if memory is so important, how do we keep it? By doing what your parents said. Keep practicing! The first time you learn something, you’ll keep part of the information, and with no practice, you’ll forget it. This is what reviewing is for. Reviewing information plays a key role in remembering, since the more reviewing you do, the more likely you’ll keep that information for a longer time.

If reviewing is important to keeping memories, will previewing help too? It will! When you preview, you figure out what you know and what you don’t know. The questions you have about what you don’t know will be answered when you learn, and by looking at the subject earlier, you’ll be able to remember it better, and more efficiently due to spending extra time on it.

Another way to remember is to overlearn. What is “Overlearning?” It’s when you put in more than the usual effort into learning something. This will improve retention, and it will be less likely to be forgotten.

The reason why you should try these strategies a bit AFTER learning something? It’s because the deepest drop on the memory curve is after you first learn it. If you practice it after you learn it, then a while after, it’s more likely you’ll remember it better.

Doing these things will improve your memory greatly, and by challenging yourself to remember things daily too, you may actually be able to chew more than you can bite, or in this case, remember more than you can learn.