What does your audience remember after you present?

: Published: 15 October 2026

By Claire Doole, www.doolecommunications.com

The short answer is not much. In most cases, it goes in one ear and out the other!

Studies show that people forget half of what you say almost immediately; by the next day, it drops to a quarter and a week later, just a tenth.

That is pretty dispiriting given how long people spend preparing presentations.

However, help is at hand from the research of the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who at the beginning of the last century pioneered “The Forgetting Curve”.

Ebbinghaus not only showed that the human brain is extremely poor at retaining the spoken word, but he also gave us clear instructions on how to overcome this memory challenge.

In my workshops and coaching sessions, I play a memory game based on Ebbinghaus’s research. Wherever people are from, however educated or linguistically skilled they are, they all tend to remember and forget the same things. Remarkably, we all have the same brain, and it works in the same way, whoever we are!