Need a Memory Upgrade? How to Improve Your Memory, Part 8 of 11

by Teresa Bolen

The Zeigarnik Effect

You know how at the last episode of a popular TV series of a season, the show inevitably ends with a cliffhanger? Drives you crazy right? Why on earth do the writers and producers do that to us?

They do it because of something called the Zeigarnik Effect. In a nutshell, it creates a sense of incompleteness, and it turns out that we humans like completion. That little bit of a thing left incomplete nags away at us, which makes it easy to remember. Knowing about and intentionally using the Zeigarnik Effect is a great way to make greater use of and improve your memory.

It was named after the Soviet psychologist and psychiatrist who discovered it, Bluma Vulfovna Zeigarnik. She discovered the effect in the 1920’s while sipping coffee and noticing that the server had an amazing ability to remember the customer orders, until he had completed them. She published her findings in a paper in 1927.

So how can you use this information to help you improve your memory? Rotate activities and take strategic breaks. Take breaks in the middle of tasks rather than after finishing them.

For example, let’s say you wanted to learn the meanings of a list of words. Learn the first few, then either change study activities or take a break. Leaving the learning of the words incomplete will improve your memory of them. It will also give you a compelling urge to continue to learn them.

If taking breaks and changing activities in the middle of things seems disorganized and worries you, or you are concerned that you may not actually go back and finish your study tasks, take a few minutes to plan your study session before you start. This feeling is actually part of its power to help you improve your memory, but it is okay to organize it. Planning your study session is a good idea anyway, and you can use your plan as a safety net to make certain that you do the tasks you need to cover.

Here’s to your success!

Copyright © 2005-2006 by Teresa Bolen. All rights reserved.

References: Schiffman, Noah and Suzanne Greist-Bousquet. 1992. ‘The Effect of Task Interruption and Closure on Perceived Duration’ in Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1992, 30 (1), 9-11 accessed online.

Wikipedia, June 2006, ‘Bluma Zeigarnik’ accessed online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluma_Zeigarnik