1. Colette P. Mercado FS2 January 9, 2012
BEED/EEDO4A/2nd year
1. Biography and contributions of Hermann Ebbinghaus
The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) is best known for his innovative contribution to the study of
memory through nonsense syllables. Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on Jan. 24, 1850, near Bonn. In 1867 he went to the University of
Bonn and somewhat later attended the universities of Berlin and Halle. After the Franco-Prussian War he continued his philosophical
studies at Bonn, completing a dissertation on Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, and received his doctorate in
1873. Ebbinghaus's goal was to establish psychology on a quantitative and experimental basis. While professor at Berlin, he founded a
psychological laboratory, and in 1890 he founded the journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane. He
became full professor in Breslau in 1894, where he also founded a laboratory. In 1905 he moved to Halle, where he died on Feb. 26,
1909.
In psychology Ebbinghaus found his own way. None of his instructors determined in any marked way the direction of his thinking. A
major influence, however, was the combination of philosophical and scientific points of view he found in Gustav Theodor Fechner. He
acknowledged his debt in the systematic treatise Die Grundzüge der Psychologie, which he dedicated to Fechner.Ebbinghaus was an
unusually good lecturer. His buoyancy and humor, together with the unusual clarity and ease of his presentation, assured him of large
audiences. Another valuable trait was his Jamesian tolerance, which led him as editor to publish widely diverse opinions--a policy
vital to a young science.
Ebbinghaus himself published relatively little. No records exist of the work he did before he published Memory (1885). In the
introduction to this work, in the section on nonsense syllables, he says only, "I have hit upon the following method," and goes on to
discuss the nature and mechanics of nonsense syllables. Memory, a fundamental central function, was thereby subjected to
experimental investigation.
In 1894 William Dilthey claimed that the new psychology could never be more than descriptive and that attempts to make it
explanatory and constructive were wrong in principle, leading to nothing but confusion of opinion and fact. Since this amounted to an
attack on the very keystone of Ebbinghaus's faith, he undertook, despite his reluctance for controversy, to defend psychology as he
understood it. In an article in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie for 1896, he justified the use of hypothesis and causal explanation in
psychology.
When Ebbinghaus died, the Grundzüge that he had begun early in the 1890s was only a little more than half completed; a colleague,
Ernst Dürr, finished it. The major virtues of these volumes lie in their readableness and convenient format rather than in any radical
approach to psychology, but these qualities, together with their comprehensiveness and minor innovations, were sufficient to produce
an enthusiastic reception. Ebbinghaus's Abriss der Psychologie (1908), an elementary textbook of psychology, also achieved
considerable success.
Ebbinghaus's influence on psychology, great as it was, has been mostly indirect. Memory, undoubtedly his outstanding contribution,
was the starting point for practically all of the studies that have followed in this field.
2. Reasons for Forgetting
One Reason that we may forget is that we may not have paid attention to the material in the first place – a failure of encoding.
Consequentially, the reason for your memory is that you probably encoded the information into long term memory initially.
Obviously, if information was not placed in memory to start with, there is no way the information can be recalled. There are times that

2. Colette P. Mercado FS2 January 9, 2012
BEED/EEDO4A/2nd year
the material encoded into memory and that can’t later be remembered. Several processes account for memory failures, including
decay, interference and cue-dependent forgetting. Decay is the loss of information through nonuse. This explanation for forgetting
assumes memory traces, the physical changes that take place in the brain when new material is learned, simply fade away over time.
Although there is evidence that decay is evidence that decay occurs, this does not seem to be the complete explanation for forgetting.
Often there is no relationship between how long ago a person was exposed to information and how well information is recalled.
Because decay does not fully account for forgetting, memory specialists have proposed an additional mechanism: interference. In
interference, information in memory disrupts the recall of other information. Finally cue-dependent forgetting, forgetting occurs
when there insufficient retrieval cues to rekindle information that is in memory. Most researchers suggest that interference and cue-
dependent forgetting are key processes in forgetting. We forget things mainly because new memories interfere with the retrieval of
old ones or because appropriate retrieval cues are unavailable, not because the memory trace has decayed.
3. Strategies to improve memory
 The Keyword technique. If you are studying a foreign word with common English word with similar sound. This
English word is known as the keyword. For example, to learn the Spanish word for duck (pato, pronounced pot-o), you
might choose the keyword “pot”.
 Organization cues. To help recall material you read in textbooks, try organizing the material in memory the first time
you read it. Organize your reading on the basis of any advance information you have about the content and about its
arrangements. You will then be able to make connections and see the relationships among the various facts and process
the materials at a deeper level, which in turn will later aid recall.
 Take effective notes, “Less is more” is perhaps the best advice for taking lecture notes that facilitate recall. Rather than
trying to jot down every detail of a lecture, it’s better to listen and think about the material, and take down the main
points. In effective note taking, thinking about the material when you first here it is more important than writing it
down. This is one reason that borrowing someone else notes is a bad idea; you will have no framework in memory that
you can use to understand them.
 Practice and rehearse. Although practice does not necessarily make perfect, it helps. By studying and rehearsing
material past initial mastery – a process called overlearning – people are able to show better long-term recall than they
show if they stop practicing after their initial learning of the material.
 Don’t believe claims about drugs that improve memory. Advertisements for One-a-day vitamins with ginkgo biloba or
Quanterra Mental Sharpness product would have you believe that taking a drug can improve your memory. Not so,
according to the results of numerous studies. No research has shown that commercial memory enhancers are effective.