From NPR.
This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Almost a century and a half ago, a young german philosopher named Herman Ebbinghaus picked up a curious book at a used bookstore.
It was called elements of psychophysics and it described how to gather data on invisible mental processes.
The book gave Ebbinghaus an idea and.
He thinks about, okay, well, we all have this experience of learning information and forgetting information.
How can I study that?
Psychologist Ayanna Thomas.
She says Ebbinghaus wanted to answer a big question.
How does memory work?
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?
This was the late 18 hundreds.
There was no protocol on how to run a psychology experiment.
Most insights about memory came from philosophers and theologians.
So Ebbinghaus came up with a plan.
He would run an experiment on himself.
First, he needed something to memorize.