Simon ebbinghaus dissertation

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia and attended the University of Bonn where he intended to study history and philology. In 1870, his studies were interrupted when he served with the Prussian Army in the Franco-Prussian War.

Ebbinghaus’ famous work, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology was already published in 1885 and was so successful that he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin. Ebbinghaus and Arthur König founded the Psychological journal Zeitschrift für Physiologie und Psychologie der Sinnesorgane in 1890.

Still, Ebbinghaus managed to contribute significantly to the research on memory. His most famous finding is probably the forgetting curve, which describes the exponential loss of information that one has learned. His results roughly state that just 20 minutes after learning, we can only recall 60% of what we have learned.

This can be understood as a consonant-vowel-consonant combination, where the consonant does not repeat and the syllable does not have prior meaning, like DAX, BOK, and YAT. After creating the collection of syllables, Ebbinghaus pulled out a number of random syllables from a box and then write them down in a notebook.