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

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.

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.

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!