Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve

     My favorite course in high school was AP Art History. To me, it was not always about the AP or about the tests, but it was about learning art for the sake of learning. From Renaissance wonders to intriguing modern art, the material in art history was always fun to learn. To this very day, I can still tell you about all of the works of art I have learned. Why? Because I have been to numerous museums, from the MOMA to the MET to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. In essence, I rehearsed what I learned by revisiting it and relearning the art when I went to museums. 

    What would happen had I not relearned all of the material and not visited those museums? Would I still remember all of that art? According to Hermann Ebbinghaus, after learning lists of nonsense syllables, he found that memory for novel information fades quickly, then levels out. Had I not rehearsed my art skills, I would lose most of knowledge of the art over the course of a few months/first year. However, after that year span, my knowledge of art would remain the same over the rest of my life. Without an ability to forget, we would be overwhelmed by out-of-date and irrelevant information. Our memory can fail us through forgetting (absent-mindedness, transience, and blocking), through distortion (misattribution, suggestibility, and bias), and through intrusion (persistence of unwanted memories). What we encode (whether automatically or through effortful processing) is only a very limited portion of the sensory stimuli around us. And as we age, our encoding grows slower and less efficient. Without encoding, information does not enter our long-term memory store and cannot be retrieved.

    Now here comes the real question. When I am done with this psych course, will there be instances, like in AP Art History, where I will revisit and relearn the ideas I learn in Psych class? The question remains a mystery.