Concept
Forgetting curve
The forgetting curve shows how quickly we forget new things if we don't review them, and when reviewing pays off most.
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Discover
In “For you” you see content from the community that matches your interests, like a story about a book. Whatever grabs you, you borrow.
Discover
In “For you” you see content from the community that matches your interests, like a story about a book. Whatever grabs you, you borrow.
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Rate
In “Yours” the story comes back. You see it again and say honestly how well it sticks.
Rate
In “Yours” the story comes back. You see it again and say honestly how well it sticks.
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Remember
From your answer, Mnemorya works out when you’ll start to forget it and brings it back just before. The curve stays high, all the way to the butterfly.
Remember
From your answer, Mnemorya works out when you’ll start to forget it and brings it back just before. The curve stays high, all the way to the butterfly.
Imagine you learn five new vocabulary words on Monday. On Tuesday you still know quite a few, by Friday almost none. That is exactly what the forgetting curve shows: at first you forget very quickly, then slower and slower.
It was discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a researcher from Germany. He had no test subjects, so he simply learned things himself, namely nonsense syllables like “DAX” or “BOK”. That way no prior knowledge could help him. He measured how much time he saved when learning a second time, and in 1885 wrote the book “Über das Gedächtnis” (On Memory). In 2015, two researchers from Amsterdam repeated his experiment and got almost the same curve.
Your head doesn't keep everything. Whatever you no longer need, it drops bit by bit. If you bring something back up just before it is gone, your head notices: this is important. After that the curve drops more slowly.
Mnemorya plans every review so that the card comes back just before you would forget it. Normally that happens when the estimated chance that you remember drops to about 90 %. Under “How sure do you want to be?” you can set this anywhere between 70 and 97 %. Cards that are due then simply show up in your Feed.
The research behind it
The studies this method rests on. Each one is verifiable through its DOI — looking them up is very much the point.
Ebbinghaus learned lists of nonsense syllables himself and showed that we forget the most right after learning and less and less later on.
Über das Gedächtnis. Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig.
The English translation of Ebbinghaus' book makes his experiments and the first forgetting curve available to everyone.
Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. Annals of Neurosciences, 20(4).
doi.org/10.5214/ans.0972.7531.200408A researcher repeated Ebbinghaus' experiment on himself over many weeks and found almost the same curve, with a small jump after sleeping.
Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0120644.
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0120644
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
