Written: November 15, 2011
The “Seven Sins of Memory”
Our memories are great at storing information about meaning and events in our lives, but they also often fail to function properly. The vast majority of people suffer from some sort of forgetfulness or memory failure throughout their everyday lives. We forget simple things all the time, such as where we had parked our car, or the name of someone who we had just met. Even though these sort of memory failures are small in terms of severity, they can be annoying and often leave us wondering about the causes. However, just the mere yearning for better memory won't cause it to happen. In order to develop techniques that will result in better memory performance, it is crucial to first understand the causes of memory failures. Through scientific studies, psychologists have isolated and defined the “Seven Sins” in which our memory systems fail. These seven sins help us to better understand the ways in which our memory can trick us, as well as leading us to appreciate the positive effects in light of the negative ones.
The first sin of memory, transience, is the gradual degradation of memory due to the passage of time. Our stores of general knowledge and memories of past events become increasingly more difficult to accurately recollect the longer it has been since the memories were first originally formed. Through research studies and experiments, psychologists have noted that transience can occur in both our short and long term memories. Our short term memory, or STM, includes things that are going through our minds at this very moment. It can contain information that we have just read, thoughts that we have recently formed, and our experiences of events that are currently happening. Short term memory can be very useful in storing ready to use information for quick access, but it does have a high turn-over rate. Our STM has a limited amount of storage capacity, and thus information quickly leaks out as new information is brought in. Transience experienced in short term memory is one explanation as to why we sometimes have trouble remembering a passage that we had just recently finished reading. Essentially, the information went into one ear and out the other, stopping only for a brief presence within our short term memory (PSYBlog 2008).
While our STM is limited in space, our long term memory, or LTM, essentially has no restrictions on capacity. Transience affects our LTM in a different way than our STM. Many psychologists believe that in our long term memory, the degradation of event memories is most severe shortly after the memories are formed. As time passes on, our memory loss for specific events slows down, and possibly leading to complete forgetting. The notion of transience, in both STM and LTM, is important in helping to understand the nature of why we are often forgetful of significant details from past events (PSYBlog 2008).
The second sin of memory, absent-mindedness, is the result of general lapses of attention and it is the reason why we often forget where we have placed things. Psychologists believe that memory failure due to absent-mindedness most often occurs when we aren't paying attention to the current situation. If our attention is directed elsewhere at the time of encoding, there's a good chance that specific details for that event will be misrepresented. A great example of this type of memory failure is the frantic search for an open space within a crowded parking lot. If our minds are focused on other things and our attention is diverted, we may often find it difficult to remember where we had parked upon returning to the lot. However, absent-mindedness can also be a blessing, since lacking this can result in cognitive overload. Take for example, the case study of Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevskii, who had the amazing propensity to remember anything that ever happened to him. He reported being tortured by simple everyday events, as his mind was constantly bombarded with relevant but mundane memories. So perhaps the next time when we forget where we have placed our keys, we should be thankful that absent-mindedness sets us free from remembering life's extremely dull moments (PSYBlog 2008).
Blocking is the third sin of memory, and it refers to the temporary inaccessibility of stored information within our memory. This memory failure is most often referred to as the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon, because even though we may have a strong feeling of what we want to say, we fail to produce the exact recollection. We might substitute a similar word or phrase in place of what we truly intend (Murray 2003). Surely, we all have experienced this effect in some way or another, possibly when trying to remember the name of a particular track on a music album, or when attempting to describe the sensations of a certain food. Even though we are certain of what we want to say, our memory fails by blocking the correct word or phrase that we wish to express.
The fourth sin of memory, misattribution, is the correct recollection of the meaning of a memory, but attributed to an incorrect source. According to Daniel Schacter, it “occurs when we remember that something happened to us but attribute the memory to an incorrect source” (Schacter 228). We may remember hearing a specific joke from a friend, when in reality we actually read it in a magazine. We might also mistake a dream that we had for being a memory of a real life event. Misattribution is unique in the way that the meaning of the memory is usually fully recollected, but we have trouble correctly identifying when or where it came from. It might lead us to incorrectly remembering that we had seen or heard something that we truly hadn't. This results from the merger of several eventful memories into one. Understanding misattribution is important in recognizing the problems that may occur when we incorrectly identify the source of our memories.
Suggestibility is the fifth sin of memory and is very closely connected to misattribution because it deals with false memories. It refers to the formation of memories that are generated by suggestions and questions that lead us to believing things that never actually occurred. A great example of this effect is when police investigators use leading questions when interviewing witnesses. This type of memory implantation leads to false recollections of events, and it can help explain the formation of false eye-witness testimony (Schacter 2003).
Persistence, the sixth sin of memory, refers to when recollections of information and events constantly remain within our memory. Persistence can be both a blessing and a curse. It is very useful for remembering important information such as dates of birth and identification numbers, but the persistence of negative memories can cause lifelong emotional distress. “For those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, images and recollections of a traumatic event become an intrusive and sometimes unbearable part of everyday experience” (PSYBlog). Memory problems don't always consist of loss, because sometimes having too much memory is worse than none at all.
The seventh and final sin of memory is bias, and it is when our current beliefs and understandings alter our recollections of past events. According to Schacter, egocentric bias is one of the most common forms of memory bias. In egocentric bias, past memories are distorted and changed to more closely resemble current attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs. “Egocentric bias reflects, in part, the strong role played by the self in the encoding and retrieval of episodic memories” (Schacter 233). Whether it's consciously or unconsciously, we often reform past memories in order to make them consistent with our current views and to portray ourselves in a more positive note (Schacter 2003). It is possible that we all have unknowingly done this in our lifetimes. For example, we may try to explain current political beliefs based on beliefs we think we held as teenagers or young adults.
In summary, our memories are extremely adept at storing large amounts of information for long periods of time. However, despite the powerful capacity of our memory systems, they sometimes fail to correctly recollect. We may experience simple forgetfulness, like portions of a grocery list or maybe the specific time a meeting is planned. Even though these sort of memory failures are small in terms of severity, they can significantly impact our lives and leave us wondering why it happened. Despite the benefits that our memory supplies us, what causes it to fail seemingly indiscriminately may supply us the most anguish. It is important to understand the causes of memory failure in order to not only accept the negative consequences, but to become appreciative of the positive effects as well.
Resources
Schacter, Daniel, Joan Chiao, and Jason Mitchell. "The Seven Sins of Memory." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1001.1 (2003): 226-239. Web. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~scanlab/papers/2003_Schacter_SevenSinsSelf.pdf>.
Murray, Bridget. "The Seven Sins of Memory." American Psychological Association: The Monitor. 34.9 (2003): 28. Web. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/sins.aspx>.
"7 Sins of memory: Complete Guide." PSYBlog. N.p., 25 Feb 2008. Web. 7 Nov 2011. <http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/02/7-sins-of-memory-complete-guide.php>.
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