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How Memory Works: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
How Memories Form
Memories form in stages: we take information in, store it, and later retrieve it. The hippocampus, deep in the brain, helps turn experiences into lasting memories.
Key fact
Sleep helps lock in what you learned during the day.
Working Memory
Working memory is your mental scratchpad: it holds a few things while you use them, like a phone number you’re about to dial.
Key fact
Most people can juggle only about four chunks at once.
The Forgetting Curve
In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus found that we forget new information fast, much of it within a day, unless we review it.
Key fact
Reviewing at the right moments flattens the forgetting curve.
Spaced Practice
Spacing out your study beats cramming. Reviewing something after a day, then a few days, then a week helps it stick for the long run.
Key fact
KnowSoda spaces your reviews out for you.
Testing Yourself
Pulling information out of memory strengthens it. Quizzing yourself beats rereading, even when you get answers wrong.
Key fact
Every question in KnowSoda is retrieval practice.
False Memories
Memories can change each time we recall them. People can even remember events that never happened, especially when someone suggests them.
Key fact
Eyewitness memories can be surprisingly unreliable.
Memory Tricks
Mnemonics make things easier to recall. The memory palace places items along a familiar route in your mind; acronyms turn lists into words.
Key fact
The memory palace trick is over 2,000 years old.
Fun facts
Most adults remember almost nothing from before the age of three or four. It’s called childhood amnesia.
A famous 1956 paper put our limit at “seven, plus or minus two” items; later research brought it down to about four.
When researchers repeated Ebbinghaus’s 1880s experiment in 2015, their forgetting curve closely matched his.
Spacing works for animals too: even sea slugs and fruit flies learn better when training is spread out.
In a 2006 study, students who took practice tests remembered more a week later than those who studied the text again.
In a famous study, about a quarter of people came to “remember” getting lost in a shopping mall as a child, after it was suggested to them.
Memory champions can memorise the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under 15 seconds.
Story: The Poet Who Remembered the Seats
The Poet Who Remembered the Seats
Ancient Greece. The poet Simonides steps outside a banquet hall for a moment. Behind him, the roof collapses on every guest inside.
The bodies can’t be recognised. But Simonides remembers where each guest was sitting around the table, and names them all.
So the story goes, he realised that things placed in order in a space are easy to recall. The memory palace was born.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 10
Memories form in stages: taking in, storing and retrieving.
Show the answer
True. Encoding, storage and retrieval.
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Question 2 of 10
Working memory works like a mental scratchpad.
Show the answer
True. Holding things while you use them.
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Question 3 of 10
Without review, we forget much of what we learn within a day.
Show the answer
True. Forgetting is fastest right after learning.
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Question 4 of 10
Spreading study over time usually beats cramming.
Show the answer
True. For remembering things in the long run.
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Question 5 of 10
Testing yourself helps you remember better than rereading.
Show the answer
True. It’s called the testing effect.
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Question 6 of 10
People can remember events that never happened.
Show the answer
True. Suggestion can plant false memories.
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Question 7 of 10
The memory palace links items to places in your mind.
Show the answer
True. You “walk” the route to recall them.
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Question 8 of 10
Memories are stored like perfect video recordings.
Show the answer
False. They’re rebuilt each time we recall them.
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Question 9 of 10
Working memory keeps everything forever.
Show the answer
False. It holds things briefly, while you use them.
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Question 10 of 10
Forgetting happens at a slow, steady pace.
Show the answer
False. It’s steep at first, then levels off.
Keep going in the app
KnowSoda learns what you know and brings back what you’re about to forget. How Memory Works has 6 more ideas at the Advanced and Expert levels.
Sources
- Ebbinghaus (1885), Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
- Cowan (2001), “The magical number 4 in short-term memory”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Roediger & Karpicke (2006), test-enhanced learning, Psychological Science
- Loftus & Pickrell (1995), “The formation of false memories”, Psychiatric Annals
- Dunlosky et al. (2013), effective learning techniques
- Godden & Baddeley (1975), context-dependent memory, British Journal of Psychology 66
- Squire (2009), the legacy of patient H.M., Neuron 61
