Seven Sins of Memory

I'm trying to read Daniel L. Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets & Remembers which has sat on my shelf for a year now. I've long been interested in the process of memory, purchasing memory aid books when I was a teenager and fascinated by how memory can be improved with practice. 


Working in a bank in the early seventies certainly aided my computational skills as I found I was eventually able to add 4 and 5 digit numbers mentally beating people working out calculations on adding machines ( but don't ask me to do it now). My fascination may also be partly due to my fading memory and having watched both my grandfather fall victim to Alzeiheimer's Disease in the 80s (an incredibly funny, warm man with a gift for story-telling reduced to being unable to put more than three words together to form a sentence) and now my mother's memory deterioration - hence one of my greatest personal fears.


Daniel Schacter is a former Harvard professor and one of the leading researchers into memory. Shacter states that the problems with memory can be divided up into a group similar to the Seven Deadly Sins. These "sins" are transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. The first three are described as sins of omission, since the result is a failure to recall an idea, fact, or event. The other four sins (misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence) are sins of commission, meaning that there is a form of memory present but does not produce the desired result.


Transience refers to the general deterioration of a specific memory over time. 


Absent-mindedness involves problems at the point where attention and memory interface. Common errors of this type include misplacing keys, eyeglasses, or forgetting appointments - probably my biggest "Sin". 


Blocking is when the brain tries to retrieve or encode information, but another memory interferes with it.... on "the tip of my tongue". 


Misattribution involves correct recollection of information with incorrect recollection of the source of that information. 


Suggestibility is similar to misattribution. Memories are often influenced by the manner in which they are recalled, and aspects which seem likely or similar are incorporated into recollection, whether or not they actually occurred.


 Bias is similar to suggestibility in that current feelings and worldview distort memory of past events. This occurs partly because memories encoded while a person was feeling a certain level of arousal and a certain type of emotion come to mind more quickly when a person is in a similar mood. 

Persistence involves the unwanted recall of information that is disturbing and ranges from mistakes on the job to  traumatic experience. Persistent recall can lead to phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, and in extreme cases even to suicide.


I had started reading Joshua Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein on Memory Championships (see previous post) but switched back to Schacter because it seemed a little more relevant and scientific in approach (and I'm becoming disenchanted with Journalists and Writers who become instant authorities on specialised fields, - eg Bill Bryson on science, then Shakespeare). Seven Sins was one of the NY Time Notable Books of the Year and I'll write more about as I progress my way through it (if I can remember where I put it down)


Burn brightly, Pete.