This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde wrote those lines in his play, the importance of being earnest.
There's something deeply comforting about this idea that memory is like a diary we can open and review.
But is this really how our minds work?
More than a century ago, a young german philosopher named Hermann Ebbinghaus wanted to figure out how we retain information.
He really wanted to understand memory at its most basic core.
How quickly can we learn new information that we've never been exposed to?
And how quickly does that information degrade psychologist Ayanna Thomas?
She says Herman Ebbinghaus decided to run an experiment on himself.
First, he needed something to memorize.
He came up with the idea of nonsense syllables, three random letters strung together.
He put them on some cards, so.
More than 2000 of these.
Then he shuffled the cards, divided them into groups, and set about learning them in a variety of controlled conditions.
Sometimes he read the cards aloud.
Leg.
Move, walk.
Dull.