In
this well-written book, Daniel Schacter, chairman of Harvard’s Psychology
Department, provides the non-specialist reader with a guided tour of the latest
research on memory. He offers a
fascinating glimpse into how human memory works and how it sometimes fails
us.

The Seven Sins of Memory is popular science writing at its
best. It is deeply interesting and
entertaining without sacrificing substance.
And it delivers a wealth of information without demanding too much of
its readers.

As
the title suggests, the book is organized into seven parts—each dealing with a
specific memory problem. The seven sins
are transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility,
bias, and persistence. The first three
are sins of omission: a desired
memory is not accessible. The last four
are sins of commission: a memory is
present but it is either incorrect or unwanted. Transience refers to
the weakening or loss of memory over time.
Absent-mindedness occurs when
some desired information does not get registered in memory because our
attention is focused on something else besides what we need to remember. Our minds commit the third sin of memory, blocking, when our attempts to retrieve
stored information are thwarted in some way.
I’m sure we are all familiar with the embarrassing and frustrating
experience of blocking on an acquaintance’s name at a party. Misattribution
occurs when we assign a memory to the wrong source or unconsciously blend two
or more partial memories into one. The
most disturbing sin is suggestibility,
which refers to having memories implanted in us because of leading questions or
suggestions offered when we are trying to recall a past experience. Bias
reflects the mind’s tendency to edit our previous experiences in light of our
current beliefs and values. Persistence is the repeated recall of
unpleasant or traumatic information or events that we wish we could forget.

Schacter
combines reports of recent breakthroughs in neuroscience with humorous and
thought-provoking anecdotes of famous celebrities and political figures
struggling with the seven sins of memory.
For example, he discusses Bill Clinton’s apparent inability to remember
important details of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and the inaccuracy
of people’s memories regarding where they were and how they felt when they
first learned about the O. J. Simpson verdict.
Schacter does more than use these stories as entertaining filler or as
illustrations of obvious points about absent-mindedness or memory loss. He uses them as case studies to illustrate
important kinds of explanations of human memory. The only things more interesting than the stories themselves are
Schacter’s analyses of them.

Schacter
is more than a good storyteller—and he definitely is that. Schacter provides the interested layperson
or scholar outside of this field with an informative overview of the science of
human memory. For those interested in
digging deeper into the issues raised in The
Seven Sins of Memory, Schacter also gives a wealth of references, including
a hefty 28-page bibliography.

Readers
of this book will find themselves comforted at times and disturbed at others. Seeing just how prone all people are to the
seven sins of memory can make you feel better about all those times you’ve
misplaced your keys or forgotten a coworker’s name. One of the themes of Schacter’s book could be summed up as “Do
you forget or misremember things?
Welcome to the human race.”
However, there is also a dark side to the errors of human
memory—particularly with the sins of misattribution and suggestibility. Schacter raises serious doubts about certain
therapeutic techniques that supposedly help adults to “remember” past incidents
of sexual abuse and trauma that may have never happened. The mind’s susceptibility to the power of
suggestion has potentially devastating consequences for our society. I was glad to see evidence that Schacter and
other memory researchers realize the important social and political
ramifications of their research and have become active in campaigning for
improved witness interrogation techniques that significantly reduce the effects
of suggestibility.

My
only criticism of the book concerns the way the book is presented on the book
jacket and in the introduction. The
dust jacket calls The Seven Sins of
Memory a “seminal book” and “a groundbreaking work.” But works of popular science are by definition not seminal, and they are
not groundbreaking. They cover ground
that has already been broken and ploughed in other important scholarly
publications. Even Schacter falls prey
to the temptations of salesmanship in the introduction when he overplays the
importance of organizing his book into “seven sins.” He claims that the theme of “seven sins” provides a “fresh
approach to understanding the causes and consequences of memory’s
imperfections” and a “unified framework” that “concepualize[s] the various ways
in which memory sometimes leads us astray.”
The “seven sins” motif is nothing more than a nice way to organize an
interesting book of popular science.
There is really no need to overplay its significance. The quality of this book should speak for
itself.

Those
interested in learning more about recent research on memory should consult Memory, Brain
and Belief (Harvard University Press, 2000), edited by Daniel L.
Schacter and Elaine Scarry. This
interdisciplinary anthology bring together contributions from neuroscience,
cognitive psychology, literature and medicine in an interesting survey of the
cutting edge of memory research.

© 2002 James Beebe