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term and short-term memory, which is how and why the taxi driver
wasn’t able to remember the lecture.
Long-term memory:
Long-term memory is where the information is stored for a longer
period of time. Committing information to long-term involves
strengthening the chemical bonds within the brain. For study purposes,
this typically occurs during the review and rehearsal
of the
information you want to learn.
Why do we forget?
Sometimes we forget a phone number we just dialled; other times we
forget our own phone number after many years. We know that
review and rehearsal of information is a good way to store the
information in long-term memory, but that doesn’t always explain why
we forget. There are two main theories on why we forget.
Interference:
The interference theory is the belief that when we leaned the
information it was competing with other information at the same time.
Because we have a limited amount of things we can learn at any
given point in time, chances are the most unfamiliar piece of
information is the information that would be forgotten.
Forgetting a telephone number just after you dialled it is a perfect
example of the interference theory.
You are focusing on dialling the
telephone number, and not the remembering of it.
Decay:
The decay theory is the belief that we simply forget over the passage
of time. The old expression, “If you don’t use, you loose it” applies
here. If we haven’t dialled someone’s number for a very long time, in
most cases you’ll just forget it.
It is therefore very important to review and rehearse information that
is learned. So how often and how many times should we review
information that we have just learned?
Ebbinghaus curve:
A 19th century German memory researcher has already identified the
relationship between review and memory retention. His research has
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