Are you stuck forgetting names, or test answers? The spacing effect could be your magic potion

Why do we get stuck? The eight causes of plateaus.

We all talk about timing as if it's the most powerful force on Earth. Bad Timing, for example. can ruin a good love affair, or a great product. Everyone knows this. Yet very few try to do anything about it. Humans are helpless, you might think, when confronted with the ways of Father Time. Well, not exactly. It doesn't have to be that way. Today, describing the Fourth cause of plateaus -- Timing -- I am going to explain one of the most powerful discoveries about human learning ever. It's so powerful, it's shocking that almost no one knows about, even though it's well over 100 years old. Give me 5 minutes today and you'll never learn (or forget) things the same way. Then, if you buy Getting Unstuck, you'll see how an entire subculture of people around the world are mastering time in ways that can improve every single aspect of your life.

Everyone forgets things at different paces, on difference schedules. Names of new acquaintances, multiplication tables, batting average statistics, the solutions to tricky GRE questions. Different kinds of facts follow different timing. But all forgetting occurs the same way, following the same pattern, along intervals that if plotted on a chart would look just like the back end of a bell curve – the familiar plateau curve I keep writing about. As an example, three days after a test, you might have a 50 percent chance of remembering something. After 7 days, a 20 percent chance. After two weeks, a 5 percent chance, and so on.

For centuries, the “fix” for this problem was simply more beatings – beatings on the knuckles, beatings on the brain. Try harder, the teacher would say. Use those flash cards over and over. And yet, no one reading this passage today will have trouble recalling the pain surrounding an attempt to memorize something as a student…while at the same time being unable to recall the very thing that was studied. In other words, the only fact that was beaten into your brain was the way the beatings felt. (Go ahead, try to recite that Shakespeare sonnet).

The solution isn’t repeating more often, according to research begun by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1800s and and furthered by Piotr Wozniak more recently. Successive repetitions quickly plateau, and quickly do no good at all. The trick is, ironically, repeating a lot less often. In fact, the magic formula lies in one simple but profound observation. You must repeat the fact you are trying to remember at that very moment when it is about to be forgotten, right as the librarian in your head is about to hop on the elevator to the basement of your brain and deposit the knowledge there. You stop her, tell her to bring the book back to the front desk, and your recall is preserved, this time for a bit longer. Then, right as your recall chances fall to 10 percent or so again, execute another reminder. Just as the fact is about to sink into the sea on your mind, nudge it up above the waterline, and it will float for a little bit longer. Do this enough times, and you will “never forget,” Wozniak claims. His research promises you can forget about forgetting. The fact will become forever buoyant for you.

Learn more about Bob’s new book, Getting Unstuck, and the companion online course.

This is great news for overwhelmed students of everything. It’s not the time you put into studying; it’s the timing.

A helpful reminder above a piano teacher’s classroom says, “Music is the silence between the notes.” Wozniak ’s insight might be phrased in this similar way, “Learning happens in between the times you are trying to learn.” There is incredible power in the in-between times.

Look at the chart below, which shows the progressive impacts on well-timed remembrances, and the normal forgetfulness response curve.

(Kim Carney)

Note the “forgetting curve,” and how it is climbing higher and higher toward the surface with each reminder.

The human brain is designed to limit the amount of information you can recall on short notice at any time. It’s a biological plateau. But the brain can be tricked, hacked, reprogrammed, to unlock an immense amount of learning potential. It’s all a matter of timing.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. Calculating and scheduling the correct timing for repetitions of thousands of vocabulary words and biology terms – imagine a world of 1 million flash cards popping up like so many random billboard in front of you -- would be beyond the capacity of even the smartest genius.

Computers, on the other hand, love that kind of work. Wozniak can easily do what Ebbinghaus could never dream of. To paraphrase Wired Magazine’s Gary Wolf, who has long chronicled Wozniak ’s adventures in timing, Wozniak has learned how to make a computer program him. He uses special software to time reminders of 100s of things he's trying to learn, everything from vocabulary words of new languages to complex engineering facts he's trying to keep in RAM.

But you don't need software to do this. And while precision is helpful, it's not essential to improve your learning. The next time you meet someone at a party and want to remember her name, make a point of saying it out loud to someone just a minute of so after you learn it. Then repeat the name again a few minutes later, even if it seems silly. Then do it 10 minutes later, then about 20 minutes later, then an hour later, then as you leave the party, then twice more before you go to sleep.

I'll bet by the time you wake up, you remember her. That's the power of the spacing effect.

No, you can't beat Father Time. But you can learn to dance to his rhythms. When you do, everything in life becomes easier.

Learn more about Bob’s new book, Getting Unstuck, and the companion online course.