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.

Memory

Volume XIII, Number 1 | winter 2020

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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.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness.

—Dante Alighieri, c. 1321
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