Project Sherlock

Book

1885

Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Using himself as subject and nonsense syllables to strip out prior meaning, shows that forgetting follows a steep, regular curve rather than a haphazard one, and that relearning is faster than first learning.

Read it

Where it is now wrong

Every result here comes from one participant, Ebbinghaus himself, memorising nonsense syllables. The forgetting curve replicates well, but the deliberate stripping of meaning from the material is exactly what later work showed matters most to memory.

Before you start

FreeAdvancedlink checked 17 Sept 2026

Filed under Cognitive Psychology in Psychology.