Ever wondered why you can attend a very interesting and engaging workshop and 24 hours later forget almost everything you learnt? The answer is that your brain is simply doing what it was designed to do.

In the 1880s, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a series of experiments on his own memory and found that newly learned information begins to fade almost immediately. Within an hour, roughly half is gone. Within 24 hours, up to 70%. By the end of a week, only about a quarter remains. This pattern, known as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, has been confirmed by modern research with remarkably consistent results.

For anyone who designs learning, whether in corporate training, education, or professional development, this is a critical challenge. Completion rates and engagement scores tell us whether people showed up. They do not tell us whether people remember.

At Bon Education, this question led us on a research journey across neuroscience, education science, marketing, and entertainment. We wanted to understand not just why people forget, but what makes certain information stick. What we found were several behavioural mechanisms that can be built into the design of a learning program to work with the brain rather than against it. In this article we look at three mechanisms that neuroscience suggests are particularly powerful: identity, curiosity, and novelty

Identity: When learning feels personal, memory goes deeper

In 1977, psychologists at the University of Calgary ran a landmark study on something called the self-reference effect. They found that when people process information in relation to themselves, rather than just understanding it abstractly, they remember it significantly better.

The self acts as a kind of supercharged filing system. When new information connects to who you are (or who you are becoming), your brain encodes it more deeply and links it to a richer web of existing knowledge.

For learning program designers, this has a direct implication. When participants start to see a skill as part of their professional identity (“who I am” or “who I could be”), they naturally rehearse and apply it more often. That repeated use strengthens memory traces over time, which is exactly what long-term retention requires.

Curiosity: The brain's built-in memory amplifier

In 2014, neuroscientist Matthias Gruber and his team at UC Davis published a study that changed how many researchers think about motivation and memory. Using brain imaging, they found that when people are genuinely curious about something, activity increases in the hippocampus (a region critical for forming new memories) and in the brain's dopaminergic reward circuit.

Participants didn't just remember the answers to questions they were curious about, they also remembered completely unrelated information that appeared while they were in a curious state. Curiosity seemed to put the brain into enhanced-encoding mode, absorbing everything more effectively.

For program designers, it means the sequence of how you present information matters enormously. Leading with a compelling question, an unresolved problem, or a gap in knowledge isn't just a nice engagement trick. It physiologically primes the brain to remember whatever comes next.

Novelty: A little surprise goes a long way

Closely related to curiosity is the role of novelty. In 2013, neuroscientist Fabricio Ballarini and his team at the University of Buenos Aires conducted a series of experiments in elementary schools to test whether a novel experience could improve memory for unrelated classroom content. They found that when students attended an unfamiliar science or music lesson within about an hour of hearing a story read by their teacher, their long-term recall of that story improved significantly. Students who attended a familiar lesson showed no such benefit. The novelty, it seemed, had put the brain into a heightened encoding state that spilled over into whatever was being learned nearby.

In a follow-up study published in 2020, Ramirez Butavand and colleagues extended this research to high school students and found the same effect. Students who took part in a new or unusual class around the same time as a learning task remembered the material better. This improvement in memory was still noticeable 45 days later. The researchers linked these findings to the role of dopamine in memory consolidation, a mechanism consistent with earlier neuroscience showing that new or unexpected experiences activate the brain's reward circuitry and strengthen the formation of long-term memories.

Designing for retention: a practical checklist

Bringing these principles together, here is what program design based on behavioral science looks like in practice:

Design for identity

• Give learners opportunities to connect content to their own experience, goals, or sense of who they are becoming. The closer the material feels to "who I am," the deeper the encoding.

• Don't just re-present information. Ask learners to recall and apply it in contexts that feel relevant to their lives. Reflection prompts, scenario-based exercises, and low-stakes quizzes strengthen memory far more than passive re-reading.

Design for curiosity

• Open with an unresolved problem, a surprising fact, or a gap in knowledge before delivering the answer. A curious brain is a brain that's ready to encode.

• Anchor key messages in narratives that evoke emotion and connect to the learner's lived experience. Stories give the brain multiple pathways for encoding information. If you missed Bon Education’s article on storytelling called “Engaging Adult and Youth Learners: Why Stories Outperform Data Dumps,” read it here.

Design for novelty

• Vary locations, case studies, formats, and angles across sessions rather than repeating the same structure. Well-timed novelty activates the brain's reward circuitry and strengthens memory formation.

Other behavioral design principles

• Break content across multiple touchpoints over days or weeks rather than delivering everything at once. Schedule reinforcement activities at increasing intervals.

• Present information in manageable chunks. Strip away unnecessary complexity in materials and delivery. Connect new concepts to what learners already know.

• Make it as easy as possible for learners to access, revisit, and engage with material. Every unnecessary click or login is an invitation to disengage.

• Nudges and prompts that arrive at natural decision points help learners revisit key information before it fades. Use these reminders before a session, at the start of a week, or just as a relevant task is about to begin.

  
  

The forgetting curve is not a flaw – it is just how memory works. But once you know that, you can start designing for what actually sticks. That is where behavioural science earns its place as a practical lens for understanding why people remember some things and forget others. None of these principles require a bigger budget or a more sophisticated platform. They require a shift in attention: from delivery to retention, from content volume to cognitive impact. The research is there. The question is whether we're willing to let it change how we build.