Learn how to memorize fast and easily using repetition. Is a mnemonic strategy always the most useful? Examine rote memorization and how it differs from mnemonics in this video from the course Understanding Memory and the Human Lifespan with Professor Steve Joordens by The Great Courses Plus.Have you ever wondered why politicians like to repeat talking points? Well, when you hear something repeated often enough, it becomes committed to memory. And we think it's a fact.
But to better understand how memory works, we should to look at how humans forget.
Hermann Ebbinghaus, a 19th century German psychologist, pioneered memory study. His most famous finding is the "forgetting curve," which outlines a mathematical formula that's predictive of how much new information we are likely to forget-and how fast.
Ebbinghaus believed that we retain less than half of all new information after an hour, and permanently store only about 15% of it. But for some ideas on how to improve our memory retention, here's Steve Joordens-a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough-from The Great Courses' production Memory and the Human Lifespan.