We are most aware of our memory when it betrays us, i.e., we fail remember information that we need at a particular moment. Many experiences that we want to remember are forgotten in course of time. Forgetting is inevitable process of life having both positive and negative values.

Generally psychologists use the term forgetting to refer to the apparent loss information already encoded and stored in memory. It is the opposite remembering and is inferred from our inability to remember something aft given point of time. Forgetting is the difference between what one has lea and what one has retained. To forget means not to be able to remember a material learned earlier.

According to Underwood (1968), “retention and forgetting are thus reciprocal terms for the quantitative aspect of memory, with retention indicating the amount remembered under specified conditions and forgetting the amount not remembered under same conditions.”

The first attempt to study forgetting was made by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus about a century ago. Using himself as his only subject, he memorized lists of three-letter nonsense syllables. A nonsense syllable is a meaningless set of three letters with two consonants and a vowel in between, such as XOQ, and YUC.

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A nonsense syllable can be pronounced in a single articulation, and has no associational value. Ebbinghaus’s experiments were designed to explore the rate of forgetting as a function of time. His curve of forgetting suggested that forgetting is rapid at first, but slows down with the passage of time. The most rapid forgetting occurs in the first nine hours, and particularly in the first hour. After nine hours, the rate of forgetting slows down, and declines little, even after the passage of many days. His study had profound influence on subsequent research on memory and forgetting.