The Seven Sins of Memory

Why do we often fail to recall the names of people whose faces are perfectly familiar to us? Why do some experiences seem to disappear from our minds without a trace? And what can we do to avoid, prevent or minimise these troublesome features of our memory systems?

These are just some questions Daniel L. Schacter, Chair of the Harvard University's Department of Psychology tries to answer in his book "The Seven Sins of Memory".

He proposes that memory's malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental transgressions or "sins":

1. Transience --- weakening or loss of memory over time. The culprit in many memory problems.
2. Absent-mindedness --- misplacing keys or forgetting an appointment typically occurs because we are preoccupied with distracting issues or concerns and we don't focus our attention on what we need to remember. We haven't forgotten it; it never registered in our memory in the first place!
3. Blocking --- the thwarted search for information that we may be desperately trying to retrieve. We've all failed to produce a name to accompany a face, only to have it pop up unexpectedly a few hours/days later.
4. Misattribution --- assigning a memory to the wrong source. It is far more common that most people realise and has potentially profound implications in legal settings.
5. Suggestibility --- memories can be implanted as a result of leading questions, comments or suggestions when a person is trying to call up a past experience.
6. Bias --- 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.
7. Persistence --- repeated recall of disturbing information or events that we would prefer to banish from our minds altogether; remembering what we cannot forget.