Ebbinghaus

And Ebbinghaus was deliberately trying to remember those nonsense syllables.

In 1885, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus sketched the spacing effect’s first outlines through a self-experiment that involved memorizing and forgetting mind-numbingly long lists of nonsensical syllables.

It originates from the 19th-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who learned that humans forget 50% of new information within an hour of learning it.

For example, in the Ebbinghaus illusion, a circle surrounded by much bigger circles would look smaller to you than a circle of the same size surrounded by much smaller circles.

Many were placed in tombs, which may explain why they endured, Ebbinghaus said.