The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
By Daniel L. Schacter
Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $24
He knows your name, and he’s coming across the room toward you with his hand extended, but you have no idea who this smiling man is. You can’t find the car keys, though they were in your hand two minutes ago. And what was the name of that guy you played ball with last month? It’s on the tip of your tongue. You remember sailing with your brother on Lake Michigan as children, though the event never occurred. Worst of all, you can’t forget the time a stranger leaped out of the bushes in Lincoln Park and threatened to slit your throat.
These are common “sins of memory,” basic and routine miscues, and they don’t mean you have early Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, they show the complex, varied system of human memory working as it’s supposed to work. A product of evolutionary design that we rely on to keep track of multiple levels of experience, memory is sometimes at its best when it fails as well as when it remembers.
In “The Seven Sins of Memory,” Daniel L. Schacter, chairman of Harvard University’s psychology department, proves himself our most commanding and accessible writer about this fascinating subject. His previous book, “Searching for Memory” (1996), was a dense but readable exploration of memory’s variety. Relying on neuroscience, cognitive science, clinical practice, literature and anecdotal evidence, Schacter demonstrated that the thing we think of as memory is actually a patchwork of overlapping systems–not one thing, but many things, with different kinds of memory serving different needs.
We have a memory for personal experience that makes use of different parts of the brain than memories for what we know of the world outside us. Traumatic memories are stored in a different place in our brains than memories of Thanksgiving dinner. Unless, of course, Thanksgiving dinner was particularly traumatic.
An elegant, readable, sympathetic study, “Searching for Memory” made the reader nod in recognition while seeing memory in a new way. It also induced empathy for the brain-damaged and anxiety over the inevitable failures that await us all, since Schacter demonstrated that most of what we know about memory is learned from those in whom it doesn’t work.
Where his earlier book was about how memory works, Schacter’s new one is about how it fails. It concerns “the nature of memory’s imperfections.”
There are, according to Schacter, seven categories of imperfection in our system of memory. The first he discusses is transience, which is the simple weakening of a memory over time, the way “the past inexorably recedes with the occurrence of new experiences.” We tend to remember best what is most intense or most necessary, events that matter most or that are surrounded with greatest urgency. Schacter calls transience “the boomers’ lament” because, as they age, Baby Boomers “are grumbling in record numbers about their increasing propensity for forgetting.”
Transience makes us forget who that smiling man with his hand extended might be, especially if we haven’t had to remember him for a while. Schacter says it also would account for President Bill Clinton’s failure to remember certain facts about his meetings with Monica Lewinski: “Whatever Clinton’s motivations when he testified, his self-professed confusion about the details of what happened is exactly the type of forgetting expected based on both naturalistic and laboratory studies.”
By the way, Schacter does not believe that taking ginkgo will stop the fading of certain memories. We would be better served by learning to enhance our memories through an elaborate system of encoding them at the time events occur. “The main stumbling block involves effective implementation of encoding techniques in everyday life,” he says.
A second type of forgetting is absent-mindedness. Our attention is elsewhere when we place those keys on the kitchen table, so we haven’t encoded their whereabouts and can’t find them two minutes later. When that happens, it might be some consolation to know that cellist Yo-Yo Ma once “left his $2.5 million instrument in the trunk of a taxi” as a result of absent-mindedness. You’ll have to remember to remember that, though.
Blocking is the third of Schacter’s “sins of omission,” where we “fail to bring to mind a desired fact, event, or idea.” Blocking refers to the familiar tip-of-the-tongue experience. Unlike transience, where the desired information is gone from our mind, or absent-mindedness, where it was never there at all, blocking gets in the way of retrieving something that is, in fact, available to us. We know who we played ball with last month, but can’t quite get his name. This is such a common experience that, when researchers surveyed speakers of 51 different languages, they found that 45 “contain expressions using Othe tongue’ to describe situations in which a blocked item feels as though it is on the verge of recovery.”
Schacter also identifies what he calls “sins of commission,” which involve memories that are present–but wrong. One sin of commission, misattribution, is the assigning of a memory to the wrong source. We remember events that didn’t occur, like that fantasy sailing trip with our brother. Or we are convinced that a second man was present at the scene of a robbery where only one was present; the second face, which we can describe in detail, was actually someone we saw at the post office the day before.
Suggestibility, a related failure of memory, occurs when leading questions or comments implant false memories, a familiar problem in the legal world.
Memories tainted by bias occur when we look back at events through the lens of our present attitudes. So when a divorced man evaluates his failed marriage, he may no longer remember the happy years, the sweetness, the shared growth. He remembers only the disappointment, and it colors everything.
The final category of memory failure is persistence. We cannot shake our most awful, vivid memories. When major league pitcher Donnie Moore gave up a home run that cost his team a chance to play in the World Series, he was so haunted by his failure that he eventually committed suicide. We all have our persistent memories, “those things that you wish you could forget.” As Schacter puts it, “the primary territory of persistence” is “disappointment, regret, failure, sadness, and trauma.” Persistent memories are seared into our brains and stored deep; they are “strongly linked with our emotional lives” and handled by our brains in ways that are different from our memories of less highly charged matters.
In a final chapter, Schacter addresses the question that his book inevitably raises: Are these seven sins “design flaws which expose memory as a fundamentally defective system”? He does not think so. Turning to evolutionary biology for a framework of understanding for this question, Schacter believes that “the seven sins are by-products of otherwise adaptive features of memory, a price we pay for processes and functions that serve us well in many respects.” If we remembered everything, our minds would be too crowded to be efficient. “[I]t is often useful and even necessary to dismiss information that is no longer current.” Conversely, if we forget traumatic events, we could be in danger, because “it is critically important that emotionally arousing experiences, which sometimes occur in response to life-threatening dangers, persist over time.”
Compelling in its science and its probing examination of everyday life, “The Seven Sins of Memory” is also a delightful book, lively and clear in its handling of hard facts. Some readers may object to Schacter’s overriding concept of memory’s seven failures as sins, since they really have nothing to do with transgressions of religious or moral law and they aren’t deliberate. Obviously linked with the familiar idea of seven deadly sins, the concept is being used primarily to be catchy–or perhaps as an aid to memory–but it’s inaccurate and off-putting. Other readers may grow weary of Schacter’s use of the question-and-answer technique for imparting information (“Why do we block on the names of people? To begin to answer this question . . .”). But these are quibbles; “The Seven Sins of Memory” is a superb example of contemporary science writing for a popular audience.
