What is the Zeigarnik Effect? The Zeigarnik Effect is the idea that our brains remember unfinished tasks more easily than finished ones. It often goes hand in hand with the Ovsiankina effect.
Have you ever noticed that you spend a lot of time thinking about things you have to do at work? Projects, upcoming tasks, and events? You probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about projects or tasks that have already finished, unless something went wrong with them. And if something went wrong, it has most likely created a new issue that you need to fix. This is the basic idea behind the Zeigarnik Effect. Our brains are better at keeping unfinished or interrupted tasks active in our minds than tasks that have been completed.
This effect was noticed by a Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist called Bluma Zeigarnik. The story goes that in the 1920s she was in a restaurant and she noticed how much information the waiters could keep in their heads. They had to keep order information available so they didn’t make mistakes. She started to think about this and wanted to test her theory. After the waiters had finished serving each table and the customers had paid, she asked them what they could remember about the order. Very few of the waiters could recall much. They had kept the information in their heads for as long as necessary and then dropped it.
This led to the theory that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. Other experiments have followed over the years, and some have supported the idea while others haven’t. It is still debated, and it may depend on the type of task and the situation.
The Zeigarnik Effect often goes together with the Ovsiankina Effect, which says that people have a strong desire to resume and complete tasks that are unfinished or interrupted. When we have a task that is not finished, it can linger in our short-term memory and keep getting refreshed. Short-term memory has limited capacity, so one way the brain deals with an unfinished task is by repeatedly bringing it back into consciousness. That is why unfinished tasks can pop into our heads at inconvenient times. It is as if the brain is trying to keep a mental “bookmark” active until it can finally close the loop.
This also connects to stress. When a task feels unfinished, it can create a low-level tension, because your brain is treating it as open business. That tension can push you toward the Ovsiankina Effect, where you want to finish the unfinished task simply to get relief from the mental itch. This is also why you can sometimes use these effects to overcome procrastination, or the fear of starting. If you take the first step on a task, it becomes “active” in your mind, and that can help pull you forward until you finish. On the other hand, if you start too many tasks and can’t finish them, you may just end up more stressed.
These effects are all around us and they get used in the media as well. A lot of soap operas and TV series use cliff-hangers because they know your brain won’t let the unfinished plot go. You think about it all week, and the desire for closure helps pull you back to the next episode. Conspiracy theories can play to the same tendency, because you never get a clean conclusion, so the “unfinished” feeling keeps returning to your mind.
Exams sit here as well. When you are cramming for exams, the information sits in your short-term memory and keeps coming back up to be checked. After the exam finishes, the information often drains away quickly. That is one reason many people feel exams don’t serve much purpose: they can encourage short-term memorisation rather than long-term learning.
SNS companies make use of these effects as well. Social media serves up an endless reel of pictures, articles, or videos, and there is no way to ever complete it. Your brain can always feel that you left the site “unfinished,” and the drive for closure pulls you back. They often have autoplay too, which gets you to watch a bit of the next video before you can stop. If you do stop, you may still feel the tug of the unfinished thread. Autoplay on a site like Netflix pushes you toward resolution by making it easy to watch just one more.
Then there are constant notifications and messages from friends and strangers. Every time your phone vibrates, these effects can kick in, pushing you to check what it was and reply straight away, just to remove the open loop from your mind. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://steemit.com/life/@akasaverba/ovsiankina-effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluma_Zeigarnik
https://www.verywellmind.com/zeigarnik-effect-memory-overview-4175150
https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/zeigarnik-effect-interruptions-memory
Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/mri-images-of-the-brain-5723883/