The Seven Sins of Memory
   Daniel L. Schacter
  2001 Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston
    ISBN: 0618219196


Just like the seven deadly sins, the seven memory sins appear routinely in everyday life. How does transcience reflect a weakening of memory over time, how does absent-mindedness occur when failure of attention sabotages memory & how blocking happens when we can't retrieve a name we know well.

Memory is such a strange thing; I listen to my childrens' memories of our early family life & am often perplexed at how they remember certain adventures or misadventures we survived. Then again, when I remember my own childhood, I can no longer separate what I actually experienced versus what I encountered a few years later. Do I really remember the bombs dropping on our little patch of England? Do I really remember the air raid sirens? Or have my memories of movies & radio programs transformed into “real” memories?

So I was eager to set upon Daniel L. Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Minds Forgets and Remembers, because learning something about how the mind remembers is an interesting & curious lesson. Forgetting things has become a pretty daily event -- I have lists up the yin/yang dotted about my home. My beloved & I frequently finish each other's sentences & while conversing, one of us will inevitably stand there with mouth agape, while the mind scurries through its memory banks, searching.

What startled me about Daniel L. Schacter's point of view is his re-casting of the mold of sin. We all have it that sins are dreadful things that lurk around every corner just waiting to catch us unawares. This researcher-cum-author posits otherwise.

From the Introduction: A Blessing Bestowed by the Gods: “Memory plays such a pervasive role in our daily lives that we often take it for granted until an incident of forgetting or distortion demands our attention... Memory's errors are as fascinating as they are important... why do we sometimes fail to recall the names of people whose faces are perfectly familiar to us? What accounts for episodes of misplaced keys, wallets...? Why do some experiences seem to disappear from our minds without a trace? ... what can we do to avoid, prevent, or minimize these troublesome features of our memory systems?”

Daniel L. Schacter sets out to find some answers. As you can see from his opus listed below he has devoted his life to exploring how our brains & minds remember & forget. In The Seven Sins of Memory you will learn the difference between brain & mind, forgetfulness & remembering &, which is perhaps the most novel aspect of author Schacter's book: discover for yourself another way of perceiving “sin”.

The Seven Sins of Memory are:
The Three Sins of Omission:
1) transcience -- there was a game we played at parties at which I was pretty good - all about remembering stuff for a few minutes. Half an hour later I couldn't recall a thing!
2) absent-mindedness -- how many times have I driven off with my coffee cup perched on the roof of my car?
3) blocking -- ah, this one is hellatious, especially for a writer who loves her language. It's not so much names I lose as words!

The Four Sins of Commission:
4) misattribution -- assigning a memory to the wrong source -- you never said that?
5) suggestibility -- like the 'flu, these can be pernicious & withering within the legal system.
6) bias -- how our current knowledge & beliefs color how we remember our pasts -- just ask any first time mother what the birth of her child was like a year later!
7) persistence -- entails recalling disturbing events or information we wish we wouldn't. Memories of my knee & ankle injuries flood through me at unexpected moments; a paralyzing instance whirls me back to that sudden, inexplicable attack on a diving board & my subsequent tumble 30 meters to the swimming pool.

We tend to think of memories as snapshots from family albums that, if stored properly, could be retrieved in precisely the same condition in which they were put away. Not so! We code them, extracting key elements to store & recreate or reconstruct at a later date.

The Seven Sins of Memory is mind-boggling! What a read! Delightful? Yes, indeed. Well written? Certainly! Interesting? Definitely! Understandable? Readable? Memorable? Eminently so!

More from Daniel L. Schacter:
Stranger Behind the Engram: Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science
Sleep and Cognition edited with Richard R. Bootzin & John F. Kihlstrom
Awareness of Deficit after Brain Injury: Theoretical and Clinical Aspects edited with G. P. Prigatano
Memory Systems 1994 edited with Endel Tulving
Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past
Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past
The Cognitive Neuropsychology of False Memories
Memory, Brain, and Belief edited with Elaine Scarry.

Before you forget, do catch my memorable Interview with this author!
(07/15/01)

Rebecca