Serendipity35

In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Ebbinghaus experimented with memory by creating lists of nonsense syllables (huf jeik mek meun pon...) and measuring how long it took to forget and then relearn them. In 1885, he published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology which became part of a new area of study.

He discovered some regularities that allowed him to create some "laws" of memory. He was to draw a learning curve - something that had not been done before. He called one phenomenon he observed "the spacing effect." His theory was that you could significantly improve learning by "correctly" spacing the study sessions. Should you cram for the exam, pull an all-nighter, or study a little bit every day for a week before the test?

This lesson in psych history came to me by way of an article in Wired about Piotr Wozniak. Though it's an article on memory (in an issue about being smarter), what it get me thinking about more than remembering is forgetting.

We have all read or heard that all those things we have experienced and learned are in there somewhere, and the problem is getting access to that little piece of our brain. So, maybe what we need to figure out as learners (students & teachers) is not how to learn but how to not forget.

Piotr Wozniak is a Polish biologist and computer scientist who has been working on techniques to improve memory and learning following the path first opened by Ebbinghaus. He is the inventor of a technique now contained in a software program called SuperMemo.

SuperMemo (as in super memory not memorandums) has many people using it worldwide, particularly for learning languages. It's popular enough to have the dubious honor of being pirated on bulletin boards in China and being illegally cloned with titles like SugarMemo.

SuperMemo is based on the idea that there is an ideal moment to reinforce or practice what you have previously learned. If you do that next session too soon, you're wasting the effort. Wait too long and you have forgotten enough that it relearning again.

In Wozniak-speak, Supermemo "predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time."

So what is the magic moment? It's at that moment when you are just about to forget. Of course, the problem is finding that moment which varies depending on the type of information and the person learning it.

The Wired article uses this analogy: "Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?"

The graph shown here isn't Ebbinghaus' learning curve, but a curve of forgetting. Apparently, it's not new to cognitive psychology. What is new is applying it in some practical way to improving learning.

Supermemo.net is an online version that you can sign up for access in both a pay and free version.

What can we discover from SuperMemo? Let's say we are learning new vocabulary. If we know that our ability to recall a word declines over time according to a predictable forgetting curve, we use the program to remind us to review.

When you first learn that new word, your chance of recalling drops quickly, but if you are reminded at the right times the rate of forgetting levels out. If you (or a program) can track this new decline, you can wait longer next time to review (rehearse? quiz? test?) again.

Wozniak is still at it. He started 9 years ago to keep a detailed record of his sleep. Now he's trying to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions because psychologists believe there's a correlation between sleep and memory, buthaven't been able to discover a mathematical law for it.

Unfortunately, most learners don't have Supermemo around all day to keep reminding them to study. And if we did have those reminders, would we be motivated to take heed of them?

The Wired article first suggests:

"The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme."

That's comforting to aging brains like mine. Too bad it's false.

"The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly."

I think we all overdo the brain as computer analogy. The brain is far more amazing than anything we wil ever build. Still, we do need to load that data into memory to make the associations and do the processing down the line.