By Agbai Sharonjoyce
Have you ever imagined how a song stays in your head for hours? Or a project you have not completed keeps popping up in your mind while trying to do something else.
The brain has a curious habit of holding onto things that are not done yet, this is not a random mistake by your mind it is actually an in-built feature of how you think.
This is called the Zeigarnik Effect. Decades ago a scientist named Bluma Zeigarnik observed waiters in a café and noticed something unusual.
They could remember every detail of a complex order as long as the bill remained unpaid, but as soon as the bill was settled the waiter forgot the details. She realized that the human brain treats unfinished tasks differently than finished ones.
Generally, at the outset of a task, the mind creates an internal pressure, which researchers hae dubbed task-specific tension.
Trhis pressure keeps the information fresh and easy to find in the memory. Once the job is completed the pressure is released and the brain automatically closes the file so that the details are soon forgotten.
There is also the Ovsiankina Effect. This describes the human inner urge to finish what it started. It creates a quasi-need (a desire that is situational and temporary) that makes us think about the task over and over until we go back to complete it.
Unfinished tasks really do stick in our memory. In a study by Dr. Priyanka Ranjan, participants were assigned 20 small tasks. While some were allowed to finish them immediately, others were interrupted halfway through.
The results revealed that people remembered the unfinished tasks frequently. Participants recalled about 80% of the interrupted tasks compared with 40% of the finished ones. This suggests that the brain keeps open loops active, helping us hold on to goals we have not completed.
An increasing number of big companies and digital creators employ this brain trick to entrance audiences. TV shows, for instance, use cliffhangers at the end of an episode to keep viewers in suspense, ensuring that they stay attached to the movie.
Apps and websites use progress bars that show you the percentage of your progress level, seeing that unfinished loop makes you want to keep clicking until it gets to 100%.
The harden rule is basketball was created because of fans’ frustration by constant game stoppages that left their flow feeling tense.
You can practice this by starting something and not finishing immediately. To start with, you can pick up a book to read and ensure to take series of break in between. Your brain and keep the information while you rest.
However having too many unfinished projects can make you feel stressed or distracted, when you have a lot of open files the brain cannot focus on new things. It can even stop you from sleeping properly.
To resolve this, researchers found a simple solution whereby you do not need to finish the task immediately to make your brain relax.
You just need to set a plan, when you write down how and when you will finish the job, your brain eases the tension and moves it from active to scheduled which clears your mind.
The bottomline
The brain’s love for unfinished tasks is not a flaw—it is a survival tool. By keeping incomplete tasks active in our mind the brain helps us stay focused, motivated and aware of what we still have to do.
A few open loops can help us stay productive while too many can leave us overwhelmed.
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