Ebbinghaus identified a distinct pattern of memory and forgetting from his experiments. He found that people can recall items that they encounter early on, but forget them if they aren’t re-encountered. The same effect occurs with lists; people tend to remember the ends of a list better than the beginnings because we’re used to encountering an item before another one.
The Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik later uncovered another characteristic property of memory, when observing waiters in her local cafe. She noticed that if she asked them about a customer’s order, they would often remember the order before the payment was made, but found it difficult to recall once the payment was settled. A similar effect can also be observed when we talk about our own unfinished tasks. When we complete a task, it’s easier to remember how we did it, but soon afterward, we find ourselves forgetting what we were doing. We may find that we cannot remember what we were doing just after we’ve finished it. However, we do remember things when they’re not finished. We can remember things we’ve started, but not done. We remember things we’ve not yet begun, but not things we’ve already finished.
