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

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The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers ReviewEveryone, 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.The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers Overview

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