Many people experience a familiar phenomenon during their time in school: they start to forget what they learned the moment they learn it. The process of forgetting facts is swift, unforgiving, and difficult to combat. Even with the best memorization techniques, getting information encoded into long-term memory is a struggle for most people. To address this issue, a few questions are essential to understanding the forgetting curve: How quickly is information forgotten? Is that information even forgotten at all?
Much of the education system is based on memorization. Tests incentivize students to study and memorize to pass the exam. Eventually, as time passes and students learn about other things, most things are forgotten or replaced with additional information. Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took a mechanics class during their freshman year, and they lost about 50% of their knowledge from the course when they took an exam during their senior year, according to the American Physical Society.
Students at MIT are not the only ones who forget information. People worldwide experienced this phenomenon, especially during COVID-19. The pandemic forced students to memorize information and learn through a computer. One of those students who partook in distance learning online is Rien Gupta, a freshman at Design Tech High School. Gupta, like many others, struggled to remember any information he learned during that time.
“I feel like the time between seventh grade and the start of freshman year just disappeared for me, and I don’t remember anything I did in the pandemic. Because of that, I really don’t remember anything that happened through middle school,” Gupta said.
A study from the 1800s by psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus shows that people can forget information at an exponential rate, with up to half of the recently learned information being forgotten within the first hour. After the initial exponential decay, the information that people retain remains with the curve flattening out. Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros later replicated the study with similar results, showing how quickly a person can forget.
Diana Chu, a professor of molecular biology at San Francisco State University, said that she forgets many things, even in science.
“If I have to teach something really basic, like photosynthesis, I have to go back and look at it again. I don’t have it all memorized, and I have to go back and look at the details because I forget,” Chu said.
