You finish a fascinating podcast, read an insightful article, or attend a powerful training session. You’re intrigued and nod along in agreement. It clicks. You’re energized. You even think, “I’m going to remember this forever.”

And then, just a few days later, you can’t remember most of it.

This isn’t because you weren’t paying attention or deem yourself forgetful. It’s because your brain is doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Most of us are familiar with the learning curve—the rate at which we improve our skills or understanding over time. We expect learning to feel difficult at first and then gradually get easier with repetition and practice.

While the learning curve gets plenty of attention, far fewer people talk, or even know, about the forgetting curve, and it may be just as critical. First identified by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in a series of self-experiments conducted between 1880 and 1885, and replicated many times since, the forgetting curve illustrates how quickly we lose new information over time. His research showed that we forget about 50 percent of what we........

© Psychology Today