Customer Reviews

The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Everyone, even young people, has suffered the frustration of an imperfect memory. What does not get acknowledged is that those frustrations, as common as they are, are only frustrating because they are so uncommon. Most of the time our memories function incredibly well. But as in most of neuroscience, when the brain doesn't function well, that's when we get a picture of what it is doing. A fascinating book, _The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers_ (Houghton Mifflin) by Daniel L. Schacter, details just how memory goes wrong, and gives some answers about why. Most important, it tells how at least some of memory's mistakes are directly related to it's remarkable, almost error-free, functioning. Schacter is a neuropsychologist who has written about memory in both academic and popular publications, but his descriptions of the seven ways memory fails are novel, and everyone will recognize at least some of the failures, since they are universal.

Schacter devotes a chapter to each of the sins, like transience, absentmindedness, and so on. There is a chapter on the sin of blocking. We have a phrase for it: "It's on the tip of my tongue." This one is so universal that of fifty-one languages surveyed, forty-five have a similar phrase (the Cheyenne translates to "I have lost it on my tongue."). It is far more likely to happen when you are trying to remember someone's name; remembering Mr. Baker is much harder to remember than the word "baker" because Mr. Baker designates one individual, whereas "baker" designates a well known range of activities and products. One of the traps people fall into is while trying to retrieve a tip-of-the-tongue word, they find a sound-alike word and keep hitting on that, which delays finding the target word.

There is lots that can go wrong with memory, and Schacter presents amazing clinical cases, like the man who had no capacity to remember anyone's name while he could remember other things without difficulty, to show specific and extreme problems. But in the final chapter of the book Schacter reports that these sins are not design flaws, not products of a basically defective system. He uses (but does not over-use) evolutionary biology to show that brains have made trade-offs to produce a useful working system that will quite naturally fail in some instances. It might be handy to remember absolutely everything, but then our minds would be too crowded to do other things efficiently; there have been cases of people who formed memories of virtually everything that happened to them, and were so inundated with details they could not function in the real world. The brain is made to forget things it does not use regularly. You can read this book and become more forgiving about your own forgetfulness and others; Schacter's readable, fascinating account will make you admire just how well your faulty memory works.

Even if this hadn't been quite such a good book as it is, I would have given it five stars for being neither about analogy nor pathology. I am tired of both, because as much as it is handy to refer to computer data storage as "memory," it really is nothing like human memory, and as much as my mother sees ghouls of Alzheimer's over every lost pen, the truth is that her memory isn't as good as, well, as she remembers it being.

Without being about pathology, this book is about the fallibility of memory; or rather I should say, the failure of memory to live up to the expectations that we have for it. Actually, this book has made me think about the purpose and function of memory, and I've concluded that it actually works rather well; if we had little videocameras in our frontal lobes, they wouldn't serve us as well as the memory functions we actually have, and in fact, this is the subject of the final chapter.

The seven "sins" of memory are transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence.

Transience is the deterioration of memory over time, other than traumatic memory-- Persistence is the stubbornness of traumatic memory to fade. Absent-mindedness is failure to pay attention to something unusual that happens while performing a task by rote. Misattribution is attributing one feature of a memory to another-- remembering a childhood friend by his dog's name, for example. Blocking is the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Bias is coloring old memories with present knowledge.

There is no branch of study, from cranial anatomy, to neurochemistry, to performance psychology, to forensics, that he does not probe for usefulness. I applaud him for undertaking this project. In general, his writing is clear and concise. If occasionally he seems to belabor a point, this is something his editors should have corrected, and I don't take him to task for it. Skim through and go on.

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.

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 mug us. This researcher-cum-author posits otherwise. You will learn about the biology of memory, the difference between brain & mind, forgetfulness & remembering &, which is perhaps the most novel aspect of this book: discover another way of perceiving "sin".

There are The Three Sins of Omission: 1) transcience - here today/gone tomorrow. 2) absent-mindedness - if my head wasn't attached to my neck I'd lose it. 3) blocking - ah, this one is hellatious, especially for a writer!

Then there are the Four Sins of Commission: 4) misattribution - you never really said that! 5) suggestibility - like the 'flu, these can be pernicious & withering. 6) bias - how our current knowledge & beliefs color how we remember. 7) persistence - recalling disturbing events or information we wish we wouldn't.

Oh, before I forget, this author game me a fascinating & humorous eInterview. What a mind-boggling read! Delightful? Yes, indeed. Well written? Certainly! Interesting? Definitely! Understandable? Readable? Memorable? Eminently so!

I feel a little guilty that I couldn't praise this book as much as others have, but I'll explain why. But first I'll give credit where it is due. One of the main benefits of the book is the author's ability to isolate, identify and characterize the 7 sins of memory. Each of us instantly recognizes each of them when their symptoms are described, because who among us has not been guilty of all of them at one time or another? It takes someone who thinks about, analyzes and writes about memory for a living to be able to be able to distinguish between and describe the 3 sins of omission and 4 sins of misattribution. When I have a memory lapse in the future, I may stop to consider which of the author's 7 categories was involved. So that much of he book is clearly enlightening. I also enjoyed the anecdotes and the discussions of the various experiments by fellow researchers to prove some of the points being made--the guy in the gorilla suit being a good example.

The problem I had however, is that the book really could have been magazine-article length instead of book-length. The 7 sins are set out right in the Introduction and it took about 1 page to do it. Obviously each of the chapters goes into greater detail as to each of the sins, but most of that detail was of a fairly scientific bent or, sad to say, just not that interesting. This is particularly true with respect to the author's very frequent discussions of the brain and how its function (or malfunction) affects memory.

The following sentences are just a few examples of what I am talking about, which appear over and over again in the book, almost as if he is writing to medical doctors:

"Shallice's experiment suggests that dividing attention prevents the lower left frontal lobe from playing its normal role in elaborative encoding."

"In a more recent fMRI study conducted by Anthony Wagner in my laboratory, we saw further evidence of how automatic behavior, reflected by reduced activity in the left inferior prefrontal cortex, works against forming vivid recollections."

"Could this interplay between the precuneus and the frontal system represent the neural signature of a type of blocking that resembles Freud's dynamically inspired concept of repression?"

"Buried in the inner regions of the temporal lobe, the amygdala abuts the nearby hippocampus, but performs quite different functions than does its neighbor."

Sentences like these go on and on, but you get the idea. It's almost as if the author periodically forgot his intended (lay) audience and instead was writing for the benefit of his fellow professionals. A month (or even a week) after reading this book, how much of any of this type of information about the inner-workings of the brain will anyone remember? We will remember the 7 sins themselves however and for this alone, this is a valuable contribution. I just didn't need a whole book to tell me about the 7 sins.

As a graduate student who studies human memory (and its errors), I picked up this book as a "fun read" to suppliment my academic curiosity. While I am familar with much of the research Dr. Schacter summerizes in this book, I never found the text "too dumbed down" for my taste. In fact, I found it to be a very enjoyable read and discovered many new studies I was previously not familar with. At the same time, I do not think this book is too technical for the average educated reader that may not be familar with memory or even psychological research. Dr. Schacter's book provides an interesting framework for considering many of the everyday (and not so everyday) problems with memory. By combining research from psychology and neuroscience, with anecdotes from popular culture and history "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" gives a complete overview that is both stimulating and entertaining.

Schacter's book certainly intrigued me. 'Groundbreaking work'... 'first framework'... Unfortunately the reality of the book is far from the snippets on the back cover.

First the good. Essentially Schacter illustrates his 7 sins in a one-sin per chapter style. He describes the sin, illustrates it, often discusses ways to avoid it when necessary, etc. I found he resorted to a few too many anecdotes instead of actual research. Then his last chapter puts forward a 'not-so-groundbreaking' idea that these supposed sins may be either needed or useful from an evolutionary standpoint. The 'sins' he chooses to acknowledge are transience (the fact that we forget over time), absent-mindedness (forgetting due to a failure of attention [often attributed to WM overload, the absent-minded professor], blocking(forgetting of the 'just out of reach type' *G*, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence (that damn tune!).

Unfortunately, Schacter can't seem to decide on the raison d'etre for this book. Is it a self-help guide, a review of recent literature, a medium for advancing a theory? This indecision results in a book that does none of these particularly well. All of the pleasant writing you can fit in 206pgs doesn't leave you feeling like you have a much better understanding of the field.

What annoyed me was the subtitle. With a subtitle like 'How the mind forgets and remembers', I'm afraid I have to conclude that this book does an injustice to the vast field of memory research.

Final word? What does Schacter accomplish?
He points out a few well-known memory problems that everyone can relate to and talks loosely about what researchers think about them. Keep that in mind, and it's worth a looksy at the paperback.

We're all concerned with memory, right? Schachter knows that, and he has written a lively book of great interest to everyone, professionals and laypersons alike. In a folksy, fun style, he starts out by reviewing the most interesting and pertinent research on the vagaries of memory, including forgetfulness, suggestibility, blocking, persistence, etc. You can liven up a party or even your family meal by telling friends and family about some of the amazing research that he reports in this concise little volume. But he saves the best for last. In the final chapter (I hate to give it away - you can stop reading if you don't want to know the ending), he argues that the foibles of memory that we incessantly complain about are actually virtues, enabling us to function more effectively in the environment. If this is true, we can stop worrying and go with it. I really enjoyed this well-written and educational book, and I've been recommending it to everyone.

Note to all, this is not a self-help book. People ask me that when they spot me reading it on the bus. It's a layman's (sensa spoonfeeding) explanation of how the mind stores memories, and more importantly, how it fails to. I'm just fascinated by the book. It touches on the everyday frustration of lost keys, the way memories pale over time, tip-of-the-tongue blocking, how we manufacture memories that couldn't possibly be true, and more. Lucidly written, Daniel Schacter's book reawakens in me a sense of awe for the power and delicacy of the workings of the human mind. A good read for anyone with an interest in psychology without the desire to get terribly clinical.

I just had a few miscellaneous comments to make.

This is the best book I've seen for the non-specialist on the subject of memory by a notable scholar and scientist in the area. Schacter boils it all down to "seven sins," which he shows are not truly defects in our memory system and cognitive processes so much as unfortunate side-effects of memory capabilities we'd be poorer without. Shachter explains it all in a well-written, informative, and even engaging manner, and despite the book's popular slant, it contains a great wealth of detail and technical information on this important field of psychology. Altogether an outstanding contribution to science-writing that will probably become a classic in its own right.

Daniel L. Schacter, Chairman of Harvard's Department of Psychology, explores the process of memory from a scientific and humanitarian viewpoint. He explores the Seven Sins of Memory through two classifications, The Three Sins of Omission - transcience, absent-mindedness and blocking, and The Four Sins of Commission - misattributation, suggestibility, bias and persistence. Identifying both the good and bad in each sin, Schacter connects the possibility of origin for each of these "sins" to evolution. The author is, without question, one of the most highly recognized experts in his field. Readers will find the book both insightful and thought-provoking as they take an incredible journey through the human mind.