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Brain Itch: Is This Household Item Causin | ||
Tags: Brain | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| LifeLongStudent Diglot Newbie United States focalfox.com/blog Joined 5127 days ago 13 posts - 17 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 1 of 3 15 November 2010 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Can anyone explain the "brain itch" effect of why leaving things unfinished really bothers you? Copywriters, Marketers, and News Networks use this intentionally to leave people hanging, but what is it about the unfinished task/story/etc. that causes the itchiness? Does anyone know of any way to utilize this kind of effect to cause better learning/ language acquisition (i.e. the desire to know the rest of the story causes better memory retention - or something like that)
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 3 15 November 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I believe it's all tied to the notion of "closure". Not in the soppy TV drama emotional sense, but in the cognitive sense. The brain likes to fill the gaps in any picture. Show someone a picture of a man standing behind a waist-high wall, and the brain automatically assumes that he's got legs, based on prior experience of human beings.
But if the brain doesn't have enough information, it keeps all the information to hand until it does. The itchiness may be because it's a lot of work for the brain to keep all this information to hand, even though the information was acquired effotlessly through familiar mediums (reading/listening to your native language, watching people doing things etc). If you're using an unfamiliar language, this may be too much work. The only situation where I can imagine it being useful is in teaching a very few key words, and it would take a lot of work to do it. Think about the effect an unknown name can have at the end of a chapter of a book. "Take them to Whannetharg, he'll know what to do!" You'll go away thinking "who's Whannetharg? and what will he do?" and that will keep the name Whannetharg bouncing around your head in between reading chapters. But this only matters because of everything that has happened up to this point. The reader has to be heavily invested in the story before this will grab his attention. You could do this with normal vocabulary words if you were writing a serial for learners, but if the cliffhanger relies on wondering what an ordinary word means (eg gun, ship, train) then the serial will be quite boring to people who know the word, and the effect is lost if the learner immediately looks up the word. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ManicGenius Senior Member United States Joined 5482 days ago 288 posts - 420 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, French, Japanese | Message 3 of 3 16 November 2010 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm more likely to think "What the hell kind of name is Whannetharg?". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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