The problem of forgetting

Have you noticed that soon after learning a new study material you remember very little of it? The
less you have a chance to rehearse what you have learned, the greater the speed at which the
newly acquired knowledge evaporates from your memory. It has long been known that repetitio est
mater studiorum (Latin: repetition is the mother of learning). In other words, the best way to
remember is to make repetitions of the learned material. However, you might find it quite frustrating
when you have to repeat old subjects while your teachers or supervisors still want you to know more
and more new material. When are you supposed to find time for both? Usually, you find a solution in-
between. You spend most of your time learning new things, forgetting what you have learned earlier,
and rehearsing only material that is needed for current exams or other emergencies. The net result
is disastrous! Most of your time goes to waste as you forget most of the learned knowledge.
Naturally, you gain general understanding of the studied material, but understanding is also based
on memory traces and is equally volatile. It is only a question of time when you irreversibly lose most
of your investment in learning. Is the above presented scenario inevitable? The pressures of the day
do not really let you rehearse what you have learned earlier. The educational systems throughout
the world penalize those who do not master the new material. You are pushed into a nonsensical
situation. You are truly forced to waste your time and waste your life. Spaced repetition dramatically
reduces the time necessary for review. This should solve quite a portion of your learning problems.
If you are under no pressure to learn new things, so much the better. Spaced repetition will help you
organize your memory. Even if you decide to spend only 3 minutes per day on learning! You will see
how it triggers a positive feedback loop of efficient learning, growth of knowledge and the joy of
further learning.
Try experimenting with "the three most important things I learned today"! If you add just three
nuggets of knowledge daily, it will cost you just a few minutes of thinking, and it will transform your
life over decades!

Spaced repetition solves the problem of forgetting

Once you learn a fact, you need to refresh your memory shortly before forgetting takes place.
However, it may be very difficult to predict the moment of forgetting. Some facts are forgotten faster,
other can stay in your memory for years. Luckily, there are some regularities in the process of
forgetting that can help you optimize the timing of repetitions. Once you learn a collection of new
pieces of knowledge, let us call these pieces items, you can observe a slow but regular decline in
the proportion of items you remember. If you employ the computer to plot the forgetting curve, you
can easily predict when a given proportion of items will be forgotten. If you decide to constantly
remember at least 90% of the material, you might try to schedule your repetitions at the point when
you still remember 90% of what you have learned. It is known that you will still remember most of the
material after a much longer period of time. However, there is no better way! The process of
forgetting is random in nature, and you cannot easily say which item will last longer and which will be
forgotten sooner. The picture becomes more complicated if you realize that different items have
different difficulty, and require different inter-repetition intervals. Moreover, items that have already
been repeated once or twice, need much less refreshing than those that have just been learned.
Are you getting lost? Do not despair. There has been a lot of effort put into finding out the
regularities in the process of learning. As a result, effective algorithms have been developed that are
able to quickly determine the best possible interval for an item independent of its difficulty, and the
number of earlier repetitions. Those algorithms have been implemented as a computer program
known as SuperMemo (available for Windows, Android, iPhone, and on-line). SuperMemo can
supervise your repetitions without much involvement on your part. SuperMemo is not painless,
because it does not allow you to learn with no effort at all. However, it can be shown in strictly
scientific terms that SuperMemo helps you increase the speed of learning many times over. Indeed,
it makes it possible to closely approach the maximum natural capacity of the human brain to store
and retain information. In theory, over a period of an average lifetime, SuperMemo makes it possible
to learn many times faster than conventional methods, and makes it possible to reach
knowledge retention of 95% or more! SuperMemo minimizes the effects of forgetting and the overall
time needed for learning. This is done by scheduling repetitions in carefully determined intervals of
time called optimum intervals. These optimum intervals are calculated on the basis of two
contradictory criteria:

 Intervals should be as long as possible to obtain the minimum frequency of repetitions, and to
make the best use of the so-called spacing effect, which says that longer inter-repetition
intervals, up to a certain limit, produce stronger memories
 Intervals should be short enough to ensure that knowledge is still remembered
In practice, these two criteria translate into the following one:
In learning, intervals should be as long as it is necessary for a selected small proportion of
knowledge to be forgotten. This proportion, called the forgetting index, can vary from 3% (for slower
and meticulous learning) to 20% (for faster learning characterized by lower retention of knowledge)
If the forgetting index drops below 3%, the knowledge acquisition rate becomes unacceptably low.
On the other hand, the acquisition rate peaks at the forgetting index of about 20%. Above that value,
both the retention and acquisition rate decrease. Note, that one can compare traditional learning, in
which repetitions are arbitrarily set in time, to optimized learning with the forgetting index well above
50%. Such learning is not only slow, but above all, the retention of knowledge may be unacceptably
low. As a consequence, instead of remembering things which are important, you only remember
things which are easy to remember or those that receive occasional repetition while reviewing other
parts of the material. As optimum intervals differ for different pieces of
knowledge, SuperMemo requires that the learned material be split into smallest possible pieces
called items. If items were to be repeated collectively, e.g., as chapters of a textbook in traditional
learning, the overall optimal intervals would have to be as short as the optimal intervals for the most
difficult subitem in the set. This would make learning even less effective than learning by means of
traditional methods! Splitting knowledge into small pieces makes it possible for SuperMemo to
determine optimum intervals for each item independently. Simplicity of items is perhaps even more
important for neural reasons (see: Complexity of memory). Simple items make it possible for the
right synapses to be fully activated at the right time. Complex items result in trains of disparate
neural signals that result in unpredictably intricate activations of neurons. This makes optimization of
learning difficult or not possible at all. Using optimum intervals and the simplicity of items are a
formula for high speed and high retention in learning. However, the speed of learning is not the most
important factor in education. It is the quality of knowledge that counts most. SuperMemo makes it
possible to learn very fast, but it is still your responsibility to properly choose and formulate your
learning material.

Illustration
The following picture taken from SuperMemo illustrates how spaced repetition works:
Figure: Changes in memory status over time for an exemplary piece of knowledge. The horizontal
axis represents time spanning the entire repetition history. The top panel shows retrievability (tenth
power, R10, for easier analysis). Retrievability grid in gray is labelled by R=99%, R=98%, etc. The
middle panel displays optimum intervals in navy. Repetition dates are marked by blue vertical
lines and labelled in aqua. The end of the optimum interval where R crosses 90% line is marked
by red vertical lines (only if intervals are longer than optimum intervals). The bottom panel
visualizes stability (presented as ln(S)/ln(days) for easier analysis). The graph shows
that retrievability drops fast (exponentially) after early repetitions when stability is low, however, it
only drops from 100% to 94% in long 10 years after the 7th review. All values are derived from an
actual repetition history and the three component model of memory.

Summary
1. The key to effective learning is the minimization of the number of repetitions necessary to
retain knowledge in memory
2. SuperMemo minimizes the learning time by the approximation of optimum intervals (i.e.
intervals that should separate individual repetitions)
3. Knowledge memorized with SuperMemo must be split into smallest possible pieces
called items
4. When using SuperMemo, you must not forget that the quality of learning will depend on the
selection of the material, the way it is split into individual items, and the way the items are
formulated
Spaced repetition
Spaced repetition is a learning method based on computing optimum intervals that should
separate review of individual pieces of knowledge to ensure high retention. SuperMemo pioneered
the use of optimization methods in spaced repetition. The most advanced version of spaced
repetition has grown to become incremental reading.
SuperMemo 17 for Windows uses forgetting curves and the two component model of memory to
make best optimum interval predictions.
SuperMemo 1.0 for DOS was the first implementation of spaced
repetition (1987). SuperMemo celebrated its 30th birthday on Dec 13, 2017.
The method was first described in Piotr Wozniak's Master's Thesis: Optimization of learning in 1990,
and in a peer review journal in 1994.
Alternative terms used to refer to spaced repetition with approximate period of use in reference
to SuperMemo: SuperMemo method (1989-1995), optimum intervalization (1990-1992), scheduling
repetitions (1992-1995), repetition spacing or spacing of repetitions (1992-1999,
literature), graduated intervals (Pimsleur), spaced rehearsal or expanding rehearsal (literature, e.g.
Landauer & Bjork), spaced, expanded, or expanding retrieval (literature), spaced practice, expanded
practice or distributed practice (literature, e.g. Baddley), optimum schedule (literature, e.g.
Pavlik), spaced learning or spaced education, and more. The term spaced repetition was adopted by
SuperMemo in 1999. For more see: Alternative terms for spaced repetition
As the term spaced repetition was loosely used before the birth of SuperMemo, and adopted in the
present meaning only in 1999, we may occasionally use the term computational spaced
repetition to differentiate the SuperMemo method from a review schedule in which intervals
increase but are not explicitly computed or optimized.
See also:

 What is spaced repetition? (1990)

 History of spaced repetition (2018)
 Research background (1995)
This glossary entry is used to explain "History of spaced repetition" by Piotr Wozniak (June 2018)

Figure: A typical snapshot from an incremental reading process in SuperMemo. While learning
about leptin, the student extracts important portions of the text (in blue), and marks keywords that
will be used to form questions that will enhance memory in the long term (in dark orange). The
questions are reviewed along a spaced repetition schedule. See this video example for an
explanation. The brain picture was taken from here

Figure: The first forgetting curve for newly learned knowledge collected with SuperMemo. Power
approximation is used in this case due to the heterogeneity of the learning material freshly
introduced in the learning process. Lack of separation by memory complexity results in superposition
of exponential forgetting with different decay constants. On a semi-log graph, the power regression
curve is logarithmic (in yellow), and appearing almost straight. The curve shows that in the
presented case recall drops merely to 58% in four years, which can be explained by a high reuse of
memorized knowledge in real life. The first optimum interval for review at retrievability of 90% is 3.96
days. The forgetting curve can be described with the formula R=0.9906*power(interval,-0.07), where
0.9906 is the recall after one day, while -0.07 is the decay constant. In this is case, the formula
yields 90% recall after 4 days. 80,399 repetition cases were used to plot the presented graph.
Steeper drop in recall will occur if the material contains a higher proportion of difficult knowledge
(esp. poorly formulated knowledge), or in new students with lesser mnemonic skills. Curve
irregularity at intervals 15-20 comes from a smaller sample of repetitions (later interval categories on
a log scale encompass a wider range of intervals)
Figure: Changes in memory status over time for an exemplary piece of knowledge. The horizontal
axis represents time spanning the entire repetition history. The top panel shows retrievability (tenth
power, R10, for easier analysis). Retrievability grid in gray is labelled by R=99%, R=98%, etc. The
middle panel displays optimum intervals in navy. Repetition dates are marked by blue vertical
lines and labelled in aqua. The end of the optimum interval where R crosses 90% line is marked
by red vertical lines (only if intervals are longer than optimum intervals). The bottom panel
visualizes stability (presented as ln(S)/ln(days) for easier analysis). The graph shows
that retrievability drops fast (exponentially) after early repetitions when stability is low, however, it
only drops from 100% to 94% in long 10 years after the 7th review. All values are derived from an
actual repetition history and the three component model of memory.