Primacy-Recency Effect

Read a list of twenty words aloud and ask people to recall them: the first few and the last few survive; the middle dies. Memory favours the opening and the close, and this shapes far more than word games.

The mechanics: first items get rehearsal — the mind, fresh, repeats them into long storage. Last items are still warm in the short-term tray. The middle gets neither, and evaporates. First impressions and final scenes dominate; the middle of anything is a valley.

Now apply it to your life as an author of other people's memories. The meeting's opening minute and closing minute will be remembered; the middle will blur. The holiday's first day and last night. The interview's entrance and exit.

So spend your care asymmetrically: open strong, close stronger, and do not grieve the unglamorous middle — but place what matters most at the edges. And as a listener, beware: your memory of the year, the trip, the person, is built disproportionately from beginnings and endings. The valley had content too. It simply had no witness.