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Hermann Ebbinghaus Quotes
1850–1909 Germany
Hermann Ebbinghaus (January 24, 1850 — February 26, 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve.
Also known as: Herman Ebbinghaus
Random Hermann Ebbinghaus quote
14 quotes
Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.
Edwin Boring (1929)
The foreseeing of our attention is the will to give attention, is voluntary attention.
The constant flux and caprice of mental events do not admit of the establishment of stable experimental conditions.
Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.
The schoolboy doesn't force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that he must impress them again in the morning.
What is true is alas not new, the new not true.
Hermann Ebbinghaus cited in: Sills (1968)
Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time.
Natural science served as - if we overlook the hasty identification of mind and matter which had its origin in natural science - as a shining and fruitful example to psychology.
A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.
Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together.
Popular thought, supported by desires common to all human beings, readily accepts the view that mind is essentially different from matter, that its laws are in every respect different from the laws of material nature, and that the brain, being a part of the material nature, is simply the special tool used by the mind in its intercourse with nature.
The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series.
No matter how thoroughly a person may have learned the Greek alphabet, he will never be in a condition to repeat it backwards without further training. But if he chances to set out purposely to learn it backwards, he will probably accomplish this in noticeably shorter time than was the case in the previous learning in the customary order.
The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study' governs his combinations of them
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