Daniel L. Schacter, chairman of Harvard University’s Psychology Department and a leading expert on memory, has developed the Trst framework that describes the basic memory miscues we all encounter. Just like the seven deadly sins, the seven memory sins appear routinely in everyday life. Although we may hate these difTculties, as Schacter notes, they’re surprisingly vital to a keen mind.
Schacter, whose previous trade book, SEARCHING FOR MEMORY, was called “splendidly lucid” (The New Yorker), offers vivid examples of the memory sins — for example, the absent-mindedness that plagued both a national memory champion and a violinist who forgot that he had placed a priceless Stradivarius on top of his car before driving off. The author also delves into the recent research — such as imaging that shows memories being formed in the brain — that has led him to develop his framework. Together, the stories and the scientific findings examined in THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY provide a fascinating new look at our brains, and at what we more generally think of as our minds.
THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY is a groundbreaking work that will provide great reassurance to everyone, from twenty-somethings who find their lives are too busy, to baby boomers who mutter about “early Alzheimer’s,” to senior citizens who worry about how much (or how little) they can recall.

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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.

32 of 33 found the following review helpful:

Venial SinsDec 07, 2001
By Rivkah Maccaby "Rivkah Maccaby"
Even if this hadn't been quite such a good book as it is, I would have given it five stars for being neither about analogy nor pathology. I am tired of both, because as much as it is handy to refer to computer data storage as "memory," it really is nothing like human memory, and as much as my mother sees ghouls of Alzheimer's over every lost pen, the truth is that her memory isn't as good as, well, as she remembers it being.

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.

27 of 29 found the following review helpful:

Boggling stuff about how our minds remember & forget!Jul 11, 2001
By Rebecca Brown "rebeccasreads"
Just like the seven deadly sins, the seven memory sins appear routinely in everyday life. How does transcience reflect a weakening of memory over time, how does absent-mindedness occur when failure of attention sabotages memory & how blocking happens when we can't retrieve a name we know well.

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!

73 of 89 found the following review helpful:

1/3 interesting and informative; 2/3 soporificOct 17, 2001
By P. Meltzer
I feel a little guilty that I couldn't praise this book as much as others have, but I'll explain why. But first I'll give credit where it is due. One of the main benefits of the book is the author's ability to isolate, identify and characterize the 7 sins of memory. Each of us instantly recognizes each of them when their symptoms are described, because who among us has not been guilty of all of them at one time or another? It takes someone who thinks about, analyzes and writes about memory for a living to be able to be able to distinguish between and describe the 3 sins of omission and 4 sins of misattribution. When I have a memory lapse in the future, I may stop to consider which of the author's 7 categories was involved. So that much of he book is clearly enlightening. I also enjoyed the anecdotes and the discussions of the various experiments by fellow researchers to prove some of the points being made--the guy in the gorilla suit being a good example.

The problem I had however, is that the book really could have been magazine-article length instead of book-length. The 7 sins are set out right in the Introduction and it took about 1 page to do it. Obviously each of the chapters goes into greater detail as to each of the sins, but most of that detail was of a fairly scientific bent or, sad to say, just not that interesting. This is particularly true with respect to the author's very frequent discussions of the brain and how its function (or malfunction) affects memory.

The following sentences are just a few examples of what I am talking about, which appear over and over again in the book, almost as if he is writing to medical doctors:

"Shallice's experiment suggests that dividing attention prevents the lower left frontal lobe from playing its normal role in elaborative encoding."

"In a more recent fMRI study conducted by Anthony Wagner in my laboratory, we saw further evidence of how automatic behavior, reflected by reduced activity in the left inferior prefrontal cortex, works against forming vivid recollections."

"Could this interplay between the precuneus and the frontal system represent the neural signature of a type of blocking that resembles Freud's dynamically inspired concept of repression?"

"Buried in the inner regions of the temporal lobe, the amygdala abuts the nearby hippocampus, but performs quite different functions than does its neighbor."

Sentences like these go on and on, but you get the idea. It's almost as if the author periodically forgot his intended (lay) audience and instead was writing for the benefit of his fellow professionals. A month (or even a week) after reading this book, how much of any of this type of information about the inner-workings of the brain will anyone remember? We will remember the 7 sins themselves however and for this alone, this is a valuable contribution. I just didn't need a whole book to tell me about the 7 sins.

10 of 10 found the following review helpful:

Interesting for Scientific and Popular Readers AlikeSep 28, 2003
By Sair K
As a graduate student who studies human memory (and its errors), I picked up this book as a "fun read" to suppliment my academic curiosity. While I am familar with much of the research Dr. Schacter summerizes in this book, I never found the text "too dumbed down" for my taste. In fact, I found it to be a very enjoyable read and discovered many new studies I was previously not familar with. At the same time, I do not think this book is too technical for the average educated reader that may not be familar with memory or even psychological research. Dr. Schacter's book provides an interesting framework for considering many of the everyday (and not so everyday) problems with memory. By combining research from psychology and neuroscience, with anecdotes from popular culture and history "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" gives a complete overview that is both stimulating and entertaining.

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