For a while now I’ve been telling my son stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round table at bedtime.
Not the ones from the books. I take the characters and build my own stories around them, a few threads running at once, coming together and splitting apart again.
So it’s one long story, in pieces.
The other night I got him here:
Everyone stopped. Merlin, Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain. All of them, right where they stood.
Frozen in time.
Except… the boy.
Then a loud sound came from the distance. TICK... TICK... TICK.
He turned toward it, and an old man came out of the woods. Long staff, long beard. Kind of like Merlin.
The man said one thing. “I’ve been waiting a very long time for you to arrive.”
And I said, “Alright bud, that’s it for tonight. Time to go to sleep.”
What’s Inside
THE INSIGHT: The famous science about unfinished business turned out to be wrong. What replaced it is more useful to you anyway.
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK: How to open a loop at any age, and why the wrong stopping point backfires.
PICKS: The book that invented the technique, what curiosity does to a kid’s brain, and a line from 1751.
CHALLENGE: Stop one thing early this week. Then say nothing.
THE INSIGHT
An open loop gets closed. The only question is who closes it.
Last week I wrote about the gap between the slip and the repair, and what a kid decides while they’re sitting in it.
That was one open loop.
This week I want to look at the mechanism itself, because it runs in both directions, and one of those directions is a gift.
First, let’s go back to one of the oldest stories built on an open loop.
In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade marries a king who has been executing a new wife every morning. On the first night she starts telling him a story, and when dawn comes she stops in the middle of it. He wants to know the ending. So he lets her live another day.
She does it again the next night. And the next. A thousand and one times.
That’s the whole plot. A woman keeps herself alive by not finishing a story.
For most of the last century the science behind that had a name. The Zeigarnik effect, from a 1927 study: you remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones.
It’s in a hundred marketing books.
It doesn’t hold up. A meta-analysis published last year pooled 38 papers on it and found the memory advantage is basically zero.
But the same analysis looked at a second finding from the same era, and that one held.
Maria Ovsiankina, working in the same Berlin lab, asked a different question. Not whether people remember an interrupted task. Whether they go back and finish it.
Across 21 studies, about 67 percent of the time, they do.
So the mechanism was never that an open loop is memorable.
It’s that an open loop gets closed.
Somebody closes it. Hold onto that, because it decides everything about how you use this.
When you open the loop on purpose, they come back to you for the ending.
That’s what the old man in the woods was for in the King Arthur story. My son didn’t hold onto that story because it was unfinished. He came looking for me because it was unfinished.
And the wanting does something on its own. Matthias Gruber and Charan Ranganath at UC Davis put people in a scanner while they waited to hear the answer to a question they were curious about. Curiosity ran on the same reward circuits as money and food, and pulled the memory system along with it.
The part I keep thinking about is what else happened in that state. They also remembered unrelated things better. Faces they weren’t even trying to learn.
Curiosity doesn’t only make them want the story. It opens them up to whatever is nearby.
And whatever is nearby is the character, and the choice that character is about to make.
Now the other direction.
You have an argument in the kitchen and it stops the second they walk in. You take a phone call and go quiet for the rest of dinner. Something is happening in the family and nobody has said it out loud yet.
That’s a loop, too. It gets closed the same way, on the same clock. They just do it without you.
I wrote about this when your kid gets the facts right and the ending wrong. They’re not making things up. They’re finishing what you started, with the only material they’ve got.
And a young kid’s material is mostly themselves. When a kid assigns meaning to something, the first place they look is inward. Not “Dad’s worried about work.” Something closer to “they’re mad at me.” One possible belief underneath it: when the room goes quiet, I’m the reason.
Same tool, two directions. Open one on purpose at bedtime and they come back for the ending. Leave one open by accident and they write it themselves.
Back to the story from the other night.
My son immediately said “Noooooooooooooo. I need to know who that man is. I need to know what happened.”
The next day he said, “Dad, remember when the old man came out of the woods? We’re going to finish that story, right?”
Of course, I told him.
And I smiled.
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK
Stop at the question, not at the danger.
This isn’t a bedtime thing. An open loop works anywhere you’re telling a story and you get to pick when to stop. The car. The dinner table. A walk. A text you don’t finish.
What changes with age is the material, not the method.
With little kids it’s a made-up story and characters they love. From about eight it lands better when it’s true, something that actually happened to you at their age. With teenagers, don’t perform it. Start something real, then let the conversation end on its own.
Whatever the material, four things.
Stop on a question, not on a threat. “A man came out of the woods and told him he’d been waiting a long time” is a question. “The wolf was right behind him and the door was locked” is a threat, and a young kid carries that one into the dark. Same with a true one. “There’s a reason your grandmother never went back to that town” is a question. Half of something frightening is just something frightening.
Then stop talking. This is the hard part. They will push. Mine did, loudly. Say goodnight, or get out of the car, anyway. The pull only works if you don’t relieve it.
Don’t bring it up first. Let them bring it. If you raise it you’ve closed the loop for them and you won’t know whether it was working. If they never mention it, your stopping point was too quiet. Sharpen the next one.
Pay it off. They came back for an ending. Give them one. Do this a few times without paying it off and the carrying stops, because they’ve learned your stories don’t finish. That’s what buys you the next one.
And the other direction, in one sentence. If something happened this week that they saw and nobody explained, close it before the weekend. “You heard Mom and me arguing on Tuesday. That was about money, it’s handled, and it had nothing to do with you.” Enough to stop the guessing. Not everything you know.
Pro tip: One place to not use this. If they asked you a straight question, answer it. Holding back something they actually asked for isn’t a cliffhanger, it’s a closed door, and they can tell the difference immediately. Open loops work on things they didn’t know to ask about yet.
PICKS
📚 Read: The Arabian Nights translated by Husain Haddawy - the source of the technique, and the cleanest telling I’ve found. Also a year’s worth of characters and plots you can take apart and rebuild.
📚 Read: How curiosity changes the brain to enhance learning - a short write-up of the Gruber and Ranganath study. Three minutes. The part about picking up unrelated information is near the bottom.
❤️ Quote: “Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.” - Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1751.
CHALLENGE
This week, stop one thing early.
A story, a memory, something true.
On a question, not on a threat.
Reply and tell me how long it took them to bring it up.
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