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Train Your Brain to Remember

Anything You Learn With This
Simple, 20-Minute Habit
Scott Mautz

4-5 minutes

Photo by Getty Images

Not too long ago, a colleague and I were lamenting the process
of growing older and the inevitable increasing difficulty of
remembering things we want to remember. That becomes
particularly annoying when you attend a conference or a
learning seminar and find yourself forgetting the entire session
just days later.

But then my colleague told me about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting

Curve, a 100-year-old formula developed by German
psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who pioneered the
experimental study of memory. The psychologist's work has
resurfaced and has been making its way around college
campuses as a tool to help students remember lecture material.
For example, the University of Waterloo explains the curve and
how to use it on the Campus Wellness website. I teach at
Indiana University and a student mentioned it to me in class as
a study aid he uses. Intrigued, I tried it out too--more on that in a
moment.

The Forgetting Curve describes how we retain or lose

information that we take in, using a one-hour lecture as the
basis of the model. The curve is at its highest point (the most
information retained) right after the one-hour lecture. One day
after the lecture, if you've done nothing with the material, you'll
have lost between 50 and 80 percent of it from your memory.

By day seven, that erodes to about 10 percent retained, and by

day 30, the information is virtually gone (only 2-3 percent
retained). After this, without any intervention, you'll likely need to
relearn the material from scratch.

Sounds about right from my experience.

But here comes the amazing part--how easily you can train your
brain to reverse the curve.

With just 20 minutes of work, you'll retain almost

all of what you learned.

This is possible through the practice of what's called spaced

intervals, where you revisit and reprocess the same material,
but in a very specific pattern. Doing so means it takes you less
and less time to retrieve the information from your long-term
memory when you need it. Here's where the 20 minutes and
very specifically spaced intervals come in.

Ebbinghaus's formula calls for you to spend 10 minutes

reviewing the material within 24 hours of having received it (that
will raise the curve back up to almost 100 percent retained
again). Seven days later, spend five minutes to "reactivate" the
same material and raise the curve up again. By day 30, your
brain needs only two to four minutes to completely “reactivate”
the same material, again raising the curve back up.

Thus, a total of 20 minutes invested in review at specific

intervals and, voila, a month later you have fantastic retention of
that interesting seminar. After that, monthly brush-ups of just a
few minutes will help you keep the material fresh.

Here's what happened when I tried it.

I put the specific formula to the test. I keynoted at a conference

and was also able to take in two other one-hour keynotes at the
conference. For one of the keynotes, I took no notes, and sure
enough, just shy of a month later I can barely remember any of
it.

For the second keynote, I took copious notes and followed the
spaced interval formula. A month later, by golly, I remember
virtually all of the material. And in case if you're wondering, both
talks were equally interesting to me--the difference was the
reversal of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve.

So the bottom line here is if you want to remember what you

learned from an interesting seminar or session, don't take a
"cram for the exam" approach when you want to use the info.
That might have worked in college (although Waterloo University
specifically advises against cramming, encouraging students to
follow the aforementioned approach). Instead, invest the 20
minutes (in spaced-out intervals), so that a month later it's all
still there in the old noggin.

Now that approach is really using your head.