Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I’m someone who fears cognitive changes, limitations, and, to a certain extent, the “normal” aging process.
I have a degenerative disease that can, directly or indirectly, lead to memory impairment that’s slightly more pronounced than in the general population of my age group.
This topic captures my attention, and I end up devoting some energy and focus to it, especially when I notice that I am no longer able to recall certain things. Sometimes it’s an article I’ve read related to my professional field, or a report I’ve written previously in which I described a similar change or for which I gathered specific information.
But what exactly is learning? What is this process through which we try to memorize concepts, facts, or elements that help us make connections with others later on?
Our minds were not “designed” to remember absolutely everything throughout our lives. If that were the case, we would be doomed to accumulate a vast amount of concepts, data, and useless information that would only make the system much less efficient, since memorizing all that data would require an enormous amount of energy just to run that “program.”
Learning isn’t just reading about a new fact or merely being exposed to something new.
Learning is a constant, never-ending battle against forgetting. It’s not a process that ends the first time we encounter something.
Of course, there are lessons that stay with us for the rest of our lives. We all surely remember our senior prom. Not because we have to think hard about that event, but because it left such a deep mark on our youth and gave us the tools to interact with people in a way that some of us had never seen or even considered before.
The mind constantly needs to eliminate and erase things from our memory in order to free up space that’s important for other, more fundamental things. If this weren’t the case, by the time we reached a certain age, our “internal hard drive” would be full, and we wouldn’t be able to take in anything new. Can you imagine what a disaster that would be? To be able to remember absolutely everything—every meal, every day, every game, and every subject taught throughout our entire academic life—including those we wouldn’t need for our profession or daily life.
We often hear the term “learning curve.” But is it really that simple? Does it depend solely on a single action—an effort to “imprint” something external onto our minds? Something we are reading, hearing, feeling, or smelling?
In the 19th century, Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, described the forgetting curve and the receding effect.
In this study, the psychologist demonstrated that most of the forgetting process occurs within the first 20 minutes after exposure to the material or fact being learned. In the first and second hours, this curve decreases by half, and after one to two days, it eventually reaches its maximum plateau—obviously depending on other factors intrinsic to the individual, such as stress, rest, and other determining factors.
Repetition and review are ultimately the tools we have to best prevent memory loss.
The second is the mind. The mind doesn’t forget something just because it’s masochistic, or because it “doesn’t want to learn.” It’s not a sign of weakness; it’s simply an observation. It ultimately comes down to letting go of what is no longer useful—or what might even be useful but hasn’t been consulted in a long time...
In other words, what we end up remembering, at the end of the day, is a reflection of our personality and our own lifestyle.
That’s why a good learner asks himself the following question: “What might I forget from what I’ve just read or learned, and what should I remember?”
Forgetting ultimately becomes an intentional act, rather than a consequence or an inevitability.
I’ve lived for almost 50 years. I’m still a little way off, to be sure, but there are only a few more years until I reach half a century of existence, and that milestone worries me. But as I said at the beginning, I can’t get stuck on that concept alone. I can’t let forgetfulness cloud my personality, and that’s why there are things I’ll never forget, like my father’s strong embrace or my mother’s kiss. There are things for which there is no greater value than the value of memory itself… And on which I depend to consider myself “human.”
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
Original text written by 
Source for this post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus