🧠Ebbinghaus was his own only test subject

🏛️ Hermann Ebbinghaus ran the experiments behind the forgetting curve on one person: himself. For 🔬 Memory - A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885) he learned lists of nonsense syllables, each a consonant, a vowel and a consonant, and timed how much faster he could relearn them later.

A sample of one, with no control group. The curve has been reproduced since, which is why it is still taught.

Why I kept it: it makes me less shy about my own small experiments, and more careful about what I claim from them. Notes in 📖 Ebbinghaus on forgetting.