Category: Memory

The Zeigarnik effect is the psychological finding that people remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones.

The definition of the Zeigarnik effect is that people remember unfinished tasks or activities better than those that are finished.

When a task is finished or completed it tends to leave memory.

The Zeigarnik effect also provides a key to one of the simplest methods for beating procrastination.

The Zeigarnik effect was named after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna.

Example of the Zeigarnik effect

What she noticed was that the waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served.

When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.

Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on.

She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads (Zeigarnik, 1927).

Except some of the time they were interrupted half way through the task.

Afterwards she asked them which activities they remembered doing.

People were about twice as likely to remember the tasks during which they’d been interrupted than those they completed.

What does this have to do with procrastination? I’ll give you another clue…

Almost sixty years later Kenneth McGraw and colleagues carried out another test of the Zeigarnik effect (McGraw et al., 1982).

In it participants had to do a really tricky puzzle; except they were interrupted before any of them could solve it and told the study was over.

Despite this nearly 90 percent carried on working on the puzzle anyway.

Another Zeigarnik effect example

One of the oldest tricks in the TV business for keeping viewers tuned in to a serial week after week is the cliffhanger.

The hero seems to have fallen off a mountain but the shot cuts away before you can be sure.

And then those fateful words: “TO BE CONTINUED…”

Literally a cliffhanger.

You tune in next week for the resolution because the mystery is ticking away in the back of your mind.

The great English novelist Charles Dickens used exactly the same technique.

Many of his works, like Oliver Twist, although later published as complete novels, were originally serialised.

His cliff-hangers created such anticipation in people’s minds that his American readership would wait at New York docks for the latest instalment to arrive by ship from Britain.

They were that desperate to find out what happened next.

I’ve started so I’ll finish

What all these examples have in common is that when people manage to start something they’re more inclined to finish it.

Procrastination bites worst when we’re faced with a large task that we’re trying to avoid starting.

It might be because we don’t know how to start or even where to start.

What the Zeigarnik effect teaches is that one weapon for beating procrastination is starting somewhere…anywhere.

Don’t start with the hardest bit, try something easy first.

If you can just get under way with any part of a project, then the rest will tend to follow.

Once you’ve made a start, however trivial, there’s something drawing you on to the end.

It will niggle away in the back of your mind like a Lost cliff-hanger.

Although the technique is simple, we often forget it because we get so wrapped up in thinking about the most difficult parts of our projects.

The sense of foreboding can be a big contributor to procrastination.

When the Zeigarnik effect does not work

The Zeigarnik effect has an important exception.

It doesn’t work so well when we’re not particularly motivated to achieve our goal or don’t expect to do well.

This is true of goals in general: when they’re unattractive or impossible we don’t bother with them.

But if we value the goal and think it’s possible, just taking a first step could be the difference between failure and success.

Memory problems could be partly responsible for obesity among people consuming this diet.

A Western-style diet stops critical memory functions from working properly, a study finds.

People who habitually eat unhealthy foods showed slower learning and poorer memory.

A Western-style diet typically involves eating more red meats, junk foods and saturated fats and less fresh vegetables, grains and seafood.

The damage caused to memory may also be a cause of obesity.

For the study, people who typically ate a Western-style diet seemed not to ‘remember’ that they were full.

Even when they had just eaten, they were always ready to snack.

Dr Tuki Attuquayefio, the study’s first author, said:

“Even though they were full, they still wanted to eat the sweet and fatty junk food.

What was even more interesting was that this effect was strongly related to their performance on the learning and memory task, suggesting that there is a link between the two via the hippocampus.”

The hippocampus is an area of the brain critical to learning and memory.

Studies on animals have now shown that a high-fat and high-sugar diet causes problems with memory inhibition in the hippocampus.

Memory inhibition is our ability to block out memories that are no longer useful.

For example, when we are not hungry, it should be harder for us to think about food.

But, the Western-style diet causes problems with this.

So that even when people have just eaten, they are still attracted to tempting foods.

This creates a kind of vicious circle.

Unhealthy eating leads to poor memory, which also leads to more unhealthy eating.

Fortunately, animal studies also suggest that these memory and learning problems can be reversed relatively quickly.

The study was published in the journal Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition (Attuquayefio et al., 2016).

The common drink that may protect the brain against memory loss.

Drinking orange juice regularly is linked to a 47 percent lower risk of memory problems with age, research suggests.

Berry fruits, orange and red vegetables and leafy greens may also help protect against memory loss.

The results come from a study that followed 27,842 men for 20 years.

Every four years they were asked about the foods they ate and were given tests of their memory and thinking skills.

They were also asked questions including:

• “Do you have more trouble than usual remembering a short list of items, such as a shopping list?”
• “Do you have more trouble than usual following a group conversation or a plot in a TV program due to your memory?”

Those that had six servings of fruit and vegetables a day were 34% less likely to experience poor thinking skills later on.

Eating more fruit and vegetables in midlife was linked to better cognitive health later on — even if the men stopped eating fruit and vegetables.

Dr Changzheng Yuan, study co-author, said:

“One of the most important factors in this study is that we were able to research and track such a large group of men over a 20-year period of time, allowing for very telling results.

Our studies provide further evidence dietary choices can be important to maintain your brain health.”

The study only showed an association, it does not prove causation.

The study was published in the journal Neurology (Yuan et al., 2018).

Memory is dynamic, but it needs this clue as to what it should store away so you remember more.

Telling someone else a piece of information helps lodges it into your own memory more securely, psychological research finds.

People in the study who immediately told others a piece of information could remember more later and they remembered it for longer.

Dr Melanie Sekeres, the study’s lead author, explained:

“This has to be actively replaying or re-generating the information — for example, by telling someone the particulars, as opposed to just simply re-reading the textbook or class notes and studying it again later.

A week later, the memory was just as good.

Telling someone else about what you’ve learned is a really effective way for students to study instead of just re-reading the textbook or class notes.”

For the study students were trying to remember the general plots of films and certain details in the films.

Small cues — like the title of the film — were also enough to help students recall the film’s details.

Dr Sekeres said:

“With a cue, suddenly, a lot of those details will come back.

We don’t permanently forget them, which would indicate lack of storage — we just can’t immediately access them.

And that’s good.

That means our memories aren’t as bad as we think.”

Dr Sekeres explained the nature of the films used in the study:

“We chose mostly foreign films and somewhat obscure clips that we thought most undergraduates would not have seen.

The clips all contained brief scenes of normal, everyday events that mimicked the kind of events you might experience in a day, such as a family having dinner or kids playing at a park.”

How to remember more

Trying to explain the information to someone else can be tiring, but the effort is worth it:

“We tell students to test yourself, force yourself to tell someone about the lecture.

Even by writing out some questions for yourself about the information, then later answering them yourself, you are more likely to remember the information.

Unfortunately, simply re-reading or passively listening to a recording of your lecture in the hopes of remembering the information isn’t a great study strategy by comparison.”

The reason testing and re-testing works is because the brain is adaptive:

“We remember the important things, for the most part, and we forget the unimportant details.

You don’t want your brain to search through tons of useless information.”

The study was published in the journal Learning & Memory (Sekeres et al., 2016).