A TECHNIQUE FOR INTROSPECTION

SELF KNOWLEDGE

A fundamental paradox of our minds is that they are filled with pieces of information which belong to us but are not known to us - pieces of data which may be utterly critical to our emotional flourishing and capacity for accurate decision-making but which elude our day to day to grasp.

It follows that an urgent task of psychology is to devise tools that, rather like the claw crackers and spatulas served up in lobster restaurants, will grant us better access to the fruitful and salient bits of our own thinking.

We should, in this regard, be especially grateful to a once world-famous, now largely forgotten nineteenth century German professor of psychology Hermann Ebbinghaus. Born into a wealthy merchant’s family in Barmen on the Rhine in 1850, Ebbinghaus was a brilliant student from a young age and by his early 20s, set out to explore through original research the paradoxes and secrets of mental functioning. He was especially interested in memory and in 1885 made his name with a book called Über das Gedächtnis ("On Memory"), in which he named and described what we still refer to today as both the Learning Curve and the Forgetting Curve; models of the way in which information is absorbed, held and dispensed of by the mind over time. The professor also discovered what is now known as the Ebbinghaus illusion; a way of demonstrating that we judge the significance of things not in the abstract but in relation to what is most immediately near to them, an idea with wide application in psychology, for example in the way we judge our status or the severity of a setback.

The Article is from the school of Life

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