Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), who originally trained in philosophy, suggested that: Mental states of every kind of sensations, feelings, ideas – which were at one time present in consciousness (but have now disappeared from it), have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.
In his book Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology (1885), he goes further: ....they continue to exist, stored up so to speak, in the memory.
So for Ebbinghaus , experiences never cease to exist, they just get ‘stored up’ in memory. He continues to explain in his book that there are three ways in which the memory store may be accessed.
First he describes voluntary access, in which we deliberately try to recollect images. Second, he outlines a recall that is ‘without any act of the will – images that are reproduced involuntary’. Third, he proposes that there is a type of recall that is obvious only because we are able to carry out some task or activity.
It is knowledge that is not conscious, yet produces effects that can be seen in everyday life.
One very important contribution that Ebbinghaus made to the development of memory research was the rigor in his methodology.
The experiments he conducted tested how humans learned to associate words together. He was more interested in the process of memory formation than the end result. For this reason he developed ‘nonsense syllables’, combinations of letter that had no existing associations.
His argument was that if he used words that already existed some of those worlds would be easier to recall than others because they would be well established in the memory storage.
For example, of a person was to see the word ‘cage’ and they owned a pet that was kept in a cage, they would be at a distinct advantage when it came to remembering this word. They could make a more meaningful association than someone who did not own such a pet.
This sounds like a very sensible approach to memory research - to use material that has no preconceived images attached to it.
Herman Ebbinghaus
