The Curve of Forgetting

Our brains protect us from information overload by deleting information that we either don’t use or isn’t connected to something we already know. It’s a phenomenon that neuroscientists refer to as “forgetting.” Perhaps, at some point today, you read an interesting statistic or dialed a phone number for the first time and are absolutely certain that tomorrow you won’t be able to recall that information—congratulations, your brain is functioning exactly as it should. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus hypothesized a phenomenon he named “the forgetting curve”, which shows how information is lost over time if we don’t revisit or establish connections to it. Read more...