How to listen and stop forgetting

While the human brain can do wonderful things, it isn’t always the best tool for retaining information.

Don’t worry if this sounds familiar. Even bright, healthy adults are forgetful. We’re designed that way. And it’s a good thing.

Cognitive science professor Art Kohn says people are quick to forget. He talks about something he calls The Forgetting Curve. Kohn says one hour after learning new information the majority of people will have forgotten half of it.

A day later, the average person will be unable to recall 70 percent of the material. By the end of the week that figure will hit 90 percent. There will be people who do better and others who do worse. “In general the situation is appalling. Nearly everything you teach employees in company training sessions will be forgotten,” says Kohn.

This should not come as a surprise. A human brain is efficient precisely because it spends much of its time editing out unnecessary incoming information in order to focus. Along the way it will edit out important material along with the barrage of trivia coming our way every moment of the day.

Kohn talks specifically about corporate training. He worries that forward-looking businesses who spend vast sums preparing staff for new challenges may not get the value they hope for. The Forgetting Curve is a problem in other areas of business. People forget things all the time. They forget conversations, instructions, sales calls any one of dozens of interactions that take place during a working day.

With Dubber’s Unified Call Recording, there is no need to forget any interaction that takes place on a phone or video call. Unified Call Recording can capture every conversation and store it for later recall. The voice data is converted to text, date stamped and made searchable.

This means you can retrieve an accurate record of any conversation, presentation or training session. Even if our efficient, but flawed, human brain can do no better than recall it happened last Thursday morning or that it involved sending widgets to Brisbane.