The Forgetting Curve: What a 19th Century Psychologist Has to Say About Your Bad Meetings

Your brain is amazing.

It can let you walk, ride a bike, write poetry, learn long division, fall in love, and master Excel spreadsheets.

But if your brain is so amazing, you might wonder why you forget so much of the info you discuss in meetings.

It’s because just like you, your brain is trying to prioritize — it discards “unimportant” information to leave more room for the “important” stuff. That’s why you remember that fire burns, but you don’t remember what you ate for breakfast last Tuesday.

This worked perfectly when, as cavepeople, our biggest concern was not getting roasted in an accidental fire, but now it can be a problem. Your brain will take some things you learn in a meeting (or from school, or a book), mark them as “not necessary for survival and therefor unimportant” and clear them out.

In 1885, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first to discover how well our brains retained information. He found that our memory retention declines over time along an exponential curve known as the “forgetting curve” or the “Ebbinghaus effect” (because Ebbinghaus apparently wasn’t the humblest guy).

It’s no wonder we find it hard to remember everything shared in meetings. In fact, within 24 hours, people remember only approximately 30% of new information, and within a week they only recall about 10%.

There are a lot of factors that can affect our ability to remember, including the method by which we learned something, how actively and frequently we use it, and mnemonics or other memory techniques we use.

But the best way to improve memory, by far, is writing. The invention of writing was not only a huge change in our ability to communicate with one another, but also let us put control of our memory literally in our own hands. With writing, we can choose what information we have access to, even when it isn’t in our brains anymore.

So if you want to outsmart your caveman brain, outsmart Ebbinghaus, and remember everything of significance discussed during your meetings, all you have to do is take good, detailed notes.

However, when people take notes during a meeting, they aren’t actively participating, which reduces a meeting’s productivity. In fact, 60% of all meetings are considered a waste by their attendants because people couldn’t fully focus or participate. The best way to have full focus and still have great notes after a meeting is to use an intelligent assistant like izi. izi takes meeting notes, so you can have undivided attention during a meeting, and still have the entire conversation available to you afterwards.

izi listens to your meeting, takes and organizes notes, records key moments, and turns everything into a searchable, shareable resource. Ebbinghaus couldn’t have dreamed of a better way to bestow perfect memory on everyone; you won’t forget anything and all your notes are always in one place, organized and accessible, wherever, whenever.

Intrigued? Visit izi.ai and sign up for our beta, before your forget!

So, to recap: if you want to outsmart your inner caveman, prove a German psychologist wrong, and master meeting productivity… get izi today!