Richard The Forgettinging Theory: The Memory Of Human Memory

Audrey is a student studying in Beijing 101 Middle School, currently in Grade 10. To be ready for her Toefl, SAT1 and AP tests, she recites 30 vocabularies every week meticulously. She usually recites them on the subway to school, her way back home, and even when she exercises in P.E. class. It seems she spends all the time looking at vocabulary cards, in order to get a satisfied score in her weekly quiz. However, her memory never lasts more than two weeks, if without reviewing, and obviously she will forget anything she has recited. “Most people talk about memory as if it was a thing they have, like bad eyes or a good head of hair. But your memory doesn't exist in the way a part of your body exists -- it's not a ‘thing’ you can touch,” Richard …show more content…
Ebbinghaus developed the formula based on the memory experiment he did on himself in 1885. He created a set of 2300 tree-letter, which were all meaningless words to memorize—in order to test himself how much he could recall them at different time intervals over a period of one year. According to the curve, human’s forgetting rate was the highest on the first day (the reciting day). It is also obvious through the graph that people forget 40 percent of what they learn after the first 20 minutes, and their memory remains only 30 percent of the information after six days. It can be a vivid explanation of Audrey’s case—without reviewing, forgetting all the vocabularies she recited after two weeks is prosaic. The slope of the forgetting curve becomes less steep after a period of time, which means the forgetting rate becomes slower. Perhaps beside the curve indicates how difficult it is for us to remember information without any pattern (Fortunately, vocabularies aren’t random information without pattern, as most of them are related by etyma, same origins and pronunciation), the most important consequence we can get is how fast we can forget in the first several days after reciting. (The data stored in long-term memory is relatively stable.) From this, we can infer that the review on …show more content…
A major problem is, still, how to make ourselves concentrated when we get to know an information, and perhaps the best method is related it to an information that is originally inside our mind. For example, when we recite the vocabularies “oligarchy”, we can connect it with “hierarchy”, since they’re all with “archy” and both germane with the subject politic. So what we can do is to try our best to join the information into a long-term memory instead of restoring it in our brain as a brand new