Just a little N-gram I did today just to see if Ebbinghaus is subject to his own phenomenon.

And so it is.

In the course of nearly 100 years since Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve, society has effectively followed that curve, or something like it, with regard to his name, although you’ll see at the bottom the n-gram for “forgetting curve” itself is on a gradual modest rise.

It seems to bottom out at around a third of the crest, though, which is also very interesting.

We might suggest from this that society also has a “forgetting curve” but in order to find a GLM style working tangent to the 14 days for society you might need to take a lifetime of 70 years.

If you were to be running a trust the objects of which were to make a certain concept known by a number of people for ever, it would make sense to run publicity drives on a generational basis, ie one every 28 years.

Comments? Thoughts?

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