Japanese folding screen depicting a scene from the Tale of the Heike, seventeenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Burke Collection, gift of the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2015.
VIEW:
Miscellany
In 1927 Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik identified a phenomenon that came to be known as the Zeigarnik effect, which states that waiters are good at remembering particulars of a restaurant bill—until the bill is paid. “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones,” concluded Zeigarnik.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990
