The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers Paperback – May 7, 2002

This book is a 206-page plain language overview of the study of memory as of 2001, which some of us remember as the year of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Two things are immediately apparent. First, in the fifteen intervening years between the date of the book’s publication and the present time, there must have been significant advances in this field of study. Second, a subject of this complexity cannot possibly be covered in just 206 pages. The notes and bibliography take up another 49 single-spaced pages. This is memory-lite. But it provides an excellent overview of the work that is being done in attempts to understand the workings of the brain and its memory function.

The author is well-qualified. He is chair of Harvard University’s Department of Psychology. At the outset, he states that “the human brain is perhaps the most complex object in the entire universe, consisting of some one hundred billion nerve cells or neurons and an even larger number of connections or synapses between them.” One hundred billion anythings is difficult to imagine, much less understand.

Professor Schacter approaches his task like a teacher. He focuses on seven problems with memory that have undoubtedly been experienced by the average reader: Transience (fading with time) – Absent-mindedness – Blocking (it’s on the tip-of-my tongue) – Misattribution (where did I hear it?) – Suggestibility – Bias – Persistence. For each of these problems, he gives understandable examples. In the final chapter, the problems are discussed as a group, and the author states the opinion that these problems are a small price to pay for a memory capability that performs extraordinarily well.

In the early part of the book, there are references to specific functions of the various lobes of the brain and how those lobes may affect the processes of memory. As the discussion moves on to the rest of the “sins,” there are fewer references to objective scientific data, and more references to hypotheses and activity testing of various types. Professor Schacter does a thorough job of referencing the works of other psychologists, and summarizing their opinions.

It is an informative book, intended for non-technical people like me who want an overview of the field and a basic understanding of academic progress. It achieves its goal.

In Daniel Schacter's book, "The Seven Sins of Memory," he explores some of the most frustrating and ubiquitous faults and failings of our minds. There is nary a chapter that the reader does not see him or her self and the struggles of their own daily existence. As someone who has always struggled with my memory, I found myself both relieved and vexed at Schacter's assertions and examples about such memory sins as transience, bias, persistence and all the others.

However, Schacter's prose style leaves much to be desired. His writing comes across as dull and limp and often needlessly repetitive. His opening chapter, for instance, acts as a thesis for the entire book, but written in the style of a 9th grader's essay-"In this essay, I will be writing about..." Also, the science and studies he quotes throughout the book, though at times expansive, usually just work towards redundancy and over statement. I found myself skimming the bulk of most of his chapters.

Ultimately, a fascinating look at our minds, but I'm sure there's a writer who might explore the same subject in a more interesting and beautiful fashion.

The Seven Sins of Memory
(How the Mind Forgets and Remembers)
Daniel L. Schacter
Chair of Harvard University's Department of Psychology

Quotes from the book:
... memory's malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental transgressions or "sins," which I call transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Just like the ancient seven deadly sins, the memories sins occur frequently in everyday life and can have serious consequences for all of us.

Transients, absent mindedness, and blocking our sins of omission: we failed to bring to mind a desired fact event or idea. Transience refers to a weakening or loss of memory over time. Absent-mindedness involves a breakdown at the interface between attention and memory.... Blocking, entails a thwarted search for information that we may be desperately trying to retrieve.

The sin of misattribution involves assigning of memory to a wrong source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering that a friend told you a bit of trivia that you actually read about in a newspaper. Misattribution is far more common than most people realize, and has both potentially profound implications in legal settings. The related sin of suggestibility refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions, comments, or suggestions when a person is trying to recall up a past experience. Like misattribution, suggestibility is especially relevant to -- and sometimes can wreck havoc within -- the legal system.

The sin of bias reflects the powerful influences of our current knowledge and beliefs on how we remember our pasts. We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences -- unknowingly and unconsciously -- in light of what we now know or believe. The result can be a skewed rendering of a specific incident, or even expanded. In our lives, which says more about how we feel now than about how what happened then.

The seventh sin -- persistence -- entails repeated recall of disturbing information or events that we would prefer to banish from our minds altogether: remembering what we cannot forget, even though we wish that we could.

People incorrectly claim -- often with great confidence -- having experienced events that have not happened. ... is there a way to tell the difference between true and false memories?

... 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. But we now know that we do not record our experiences the way the camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then re-create or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.

... several different types of biases that sometimes skew our memories. For instance "consistency biases" lead us to rewrite our past feelings and beliefs so that they resemble what we feel and believe now. "Egocentric biases," in contrast, reveal that we often remember the past and self-enhancing manner.

... misattribution arises because our memory systems encode information selectively and efficiently, rather than indiscriminately storing details, ... bias can facilitate psychological well-being.

Five major types of biases illustrate the ways in which memory serves its masters.
Consistency and change biases show how our theories about ourselves can lead us to reconstruct the past as overly similar to, or different from, the present. Hindsight biases reveal that recollections of past events are filtered by current knowledge.
Egocentric biases illustrate the powerful role of the self in orchestrating perceptions and memories of reality.
And stereotypical biases demonstrate how generic memories shape interpretation of the world, even when we are unaware of their existence or influence.

This effects of consistency and change bias are perhaps nowhere more evident than in recollections of close personal relationships. Recall the 1970s Barbara Streisand tune "The Way We Were":
Memories
May be beautiful, and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget;
For it's the laughter
We will remember
Whenever we remember
The way we were.

Such biases can lead to a dangerous downward spiral. The worst your current view of your partner is, the worst your memories are, which only further confirms your negative attitudes.

Objectively, the couples did not love each other more today than yesterday. But through the subjective lenses of memory, they did.
When reflecting back on the first 10 years of their marriages, wives showed a change bias: they remembered their initial assessments as worse than they actually were. The bias made their present feelings seem an improvement by comparison, even though the wives actually felt more negatively 10 years into their marriage than they had at the beginning. When they had been married for 20 years and reflected back on their second 10 years of marriage, the women now showed a consistency bias: they mistakenly recalled that feelings from 10 years earlier were similar to their present ones. In reality, however, they felt more negatively after 20 years of marriage then after 10. Both types of bias helped women cope with their marriages. The more women's recollections were bias toward improvement at the 10 year mark, the happier they were with their marriages at the 20 year mark. By the 20 year mark wives who were most satisfied with their marriages showed the least memory bias, whereas those who were least satisfied showed the most biased -- perhaps reflecting ongoing attempts to cope with unhappy present by distorting the past. Memories of "the way we were" are not only influenced by, but also contribute to, "the way we are."

Judgments about sports events and O.J. Simpson trial illustrated a familiar occurrence in everyday life: once we learn the outcome of an event, we feel as though we always knew what would happen. Called hindsight bias by psychologists, this tendency to see an outcome as inevitable in retrospect is a close cousin of consistency bias: we reconstruct the past to make it consistent with what we know in the present.

Something similar occurs among courtroom jurors. Suppose that the prosecution introduces evidence from a seemingly incriminating telephone conversation, the defense objects to it, and the judge rules that the evidence is inadmissible. He then sternly instructs the jurors to disregard the evidence in their deliberations. Numerous studies have shown that mock jurors placed in such a situation cannot disregard inadmissible evidence, even in the face of explicit instructions to ignore it: they are more likely to convict then our jurors who never hear the inadmissible evidence. The same holds for incriminating pretrial publicity that jurors are instructed to ignore. Once the evidence enters the memories of jurors, they are biased to feel that they "knew all along" that the defendant was guilty.

Even though they often seem like our enemies, the seven sins are an integral part of the mind's heritage because they are so closely connected to features of memory which make it work well. The seemingly contradictory relationship between memory's sins and virtues captured the attention of Fanny Price, that heroine of Jane Austen's 19th-century novel Mansfield Park. Admiring a beautiful shrub -- lined walkway that had emerged from a formally rough patch of ground, she recalled what the walkway had looked like years earlier, and wondered whether she would lose this memory in the future. The moment inspired her to contemplate seemingly contradictory properties of memory.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, than in the qualities of memory, than any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannically, so beyond control! We are to be sure a miracle every way -- but our powers of recollecting and forgetting, do seem particularly past finding out.

The seven sins are not merely nuisances to minimize or avoid. They also illuminate how memory draws on the past to inform the present, preserve elements of present experience for future reference, and allows us to revisit the past at will. Memory's vices are also its virtues, elements of a bridge across time which allows us to link the mind with the world.