Hermann Ebbinghaus

1850-1909 · German · Experimental Psychology of Memory

Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short.

Hermann Ebbinghaus was the German psychologist who first brought exact experimental measurement to memory — and, in doing so, proved that the higher mental processes, which the founders of the new psychology had thought beyond the reach of experiment, could be studied with the rigor of a natural science. Working alone, on himself, with monkish patience, he invented a method and a material to make memory measurable: the *nonsense syllable*, a meaningless consonant-vowel-consonant unit stripped of association, and the *savings method*, which measured retention by the time saved in relearning a…

Topics Hermann Ebbinghaus addresses

• the nonsense syllable
• the savings method
• the forgetting curve
• over-learning
• the spacing effect
• distribution of practice
• the serial-position effect
• the learning curve
• the experimental study of memory
• the measurement of memory
• self-experimentation
• retention below recall
• the completion test
• psychology's long past and short history
• quantitative psychology
• the experimental study of the higher processes
• memory as lawful
• the frictionless-plane method
• relearning
• meaningful versus meaningless memory

Questions to put to Hermann Ebbinghaus

The Experimental Study of Memory

• What made you think memory could be studied by exact experiment?
• How does the savings method let you measure memories you can't consciously recall?
• Why did you use yourself as the only subject in your experiments?
• What does the forgetting curve show about how we lose what we've learned?
• How did you keep your experiments controlled and standardized over thousands of trials?

Nonsense Syllables and the Frictionless-Plane Method

• What is a nonsense syllable and why did you invent it?
• How does using meaningless material let you isolate the pure process of memory?
• Doesn't stripping away meaning give you an artificial memory that misses what remembering really is?
• What's the difference between studying memory with nonsense syllables versus meaningful material like poetry?
• How do you respond to the criticism that your method left out everyday, meaningful remembering?

The Quantitative Laws of Learning and Retention

• What is over-learning and why does it help retention?
• Why does spacing out your practice work better than cramming it all at once?
• How does the length of a list affect how hard it is to learn?
• What is the serial-position effect?
• What does the learning curve tell us about how we acquire new material?

Psychology as a Measuring Science

• What do you mean when you say psychology has a long past but only a short history?
• How did you prove Wundt wrong about the higher mental processes being unmeasurable?
• What makes measurement the proper method for a science of mind?
• How does your completion test measure mental ability in children?
• Can everything important about the mind be captured by numbers and laws?

Converse with Hermann Ebbinghaus on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Hermann Ebbinghaus's own writing, cited to the page.