The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
288
The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
288eBookUpdated, 20th Anniversary (Updated, 20th Anniversary)
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Overview
In this intriguing study, Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter explores the memory miscues that occur in everyday life, placing them into seven categories: absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Illustrating these concepts with vivid examples—case studies, literary excerpts, experimental evidence, and accounts of highly visible news events such as the O. J. Simpson verdict, Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony, and the search for the Oklahoma City bomber—he also delves into striking new scientific research, giving us a glimpse of the fascinating neurology of memory and offering “insight into common malfunctions of the mind” (USA Today).
“Though memory failure can amount to little more than a mild annoyance, the consequences of misattribution in eyewitness testimony can be devastating, as can the consequences of suggestibility among pre-school children and among adults with ‘false memory syndrome’ . . . Drawing upon recent neuroimaging research that allows a glimpse of the brain as it learns and remembers, Schacter guides his readers on a fascinating journey of the human mind.” —Library Journal
“Clear, entertaining and provocative . . . Encourages a new appreciation of the complexity and fragility of memory.” —The Seattle Times
“Should be required reading for police, lawyers, psychologists, and anyone else who wants to understand how memory can go terribly wrong.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A fascinating journey through paths of memory, its open avenues and blind alleys . . . Lucid, engaging, and enjoyable.” —Jerome Groopman, MD
“Compelling in its science and its probing examination of everyday life, The Seven Sins of Memory is also a delightful book, lively and clear.” —Chicago Tribune
Winner of the William James Book Award
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547347455 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 87,921 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Sin of Transience
ON OCTOBER 3, 1995, the most sensational criminal trial of our time reached a stunning conclusion: a jury acquitted O. J. Simpson of murder. Word of the not-guilty verdict spread quickly, nearly everyone reacted with either outrage or jubilation, and many people could talk about little else for days and weeks afterward. The Simpson verdict seemed like just the sort of momentous event that most of us would always remember vividly: how we reacted to it, and where we were when we heard the news.
Can you recall how you found out that Simpson had been acquitted? Chances are that you don't remember, or that what you remember is wrong. Several days after the verdict, a group of California undergraduates provided researchers with detailed accounts of how they learned about the jury's decision. When the researchers probed students' memories again fifteen months later, only half recalled accurately how they found out about the decision. When asked again nearly three years after the verdict, less than 30 percent of students' recollections were accurate; nearly half were dotted with major errors.
The culprit in this incident is the sin of transience: forgetting that occurs with the passage of time. We are all familiar — sometimes painfully so — with the everyday consequences of transience. Imagine, for example, that you are attending an annual meeting of a professional or social group. A smiling face looms at the other end of the hallway, approaching with an extended hand, calling out your name, and saying how wonderful it is to see you again. You smile politely and try to buy some time, but inside you feel a mounting sense of panic: Who is this person? Why don't I remember having met him before? He senses your discomfort and reminds you of the pleasant cup of coffee you enjoyed together at the same meeting last year, where you discussed, among other things, mutual frustrations with the bad weather that disrupted your travel plans. If you had seen this person an hour or a day after you met, you surely would have recognized him. But a year later, you feel like the befuddled novelist in "Yumiura," who could not remember the woman who claimed he proposed marriage, as you struggle and still can't recall the incident. Muttering weakly something to the effect that "I sort of remember ...," you actually feel as though you are meeting this person for the first time.
Transience can sometimes leave us feeling rather embarrassed. A female acquaintance of mine attended the wedding of a friend, whose husband she had not met before. Several months later, at a fiftieth birthday party for her friend, she spotted an unfamiliar man in the corner. She discreetly asked her friend about the stranger — who was the woman's new husband. My acquaintance says she still cringes when thinking about that moment.
Perhaps the most pervasive of memory's sins, transience operates silently but continually: the past inexorably recedes with the occurrence of new experiences. Psychologists and neuroscientists have uncovered reasons for transience and are developing ways to counter it. The path to the modern era was set when a young German philosopher, traveling through Europe in the late 1870s, found inspiration that changed his future, and that of psychology, while browsing in a secondhand Parisian bookstore.
When Memory Fades
The philosopher's name was Hermann Ebbinghaus, and the book that he encountered, authored by the great German philosopher-scientist Gustav Fechner, contained experimental methods for studying sensory perception. When Ebbinghaus began his first academic post in Berlin in 1878, he pursued the flash of insight that had come to him in the Parisian bookstore: memory, like sensory perception, could be studied using the methods of science. It would take him seven years to publish his findings, but Ebbinghaus's 1885 monograph shaped the field for decades to come. Probing his own memory for thousands of meaningless letter strings (psychologists call them "nonsense syllables") that he had dutifully tried to learn and re-learn, Ebbinghaus produced the first experimental evidence of transience. He tested himself at six different times after studying a list of nonsense syllables, ranging from one hour to one month. Ebbinghaus noted a rapid drop-off in retention during the first few tests; nine hours after he studied a list of nonsense syllables, he had forgotten approximately 60 percent of the list. The rate of forgetting then slowed down considerably. After a month's delay, Ebbinghaus had forgotten just over 75 percent of what he had learned initially — not that much worse than the amount of forgetting at the nine-hour delay.
Ebbinghaus conducted his experiments in the sterile confines of the laboratory, far removed from the complexities of everyday life; he studied meaningless strings of letters, not rich and varied personal experiences, and tested only himself. Despite the evident limitations, these century-old findings concerning how one man learned and forgot nonsense syllables have something to say about whether we will recall last week's breakfast meeting six months from now or remember what we read in yesterday's newspaper for more than a few hours or days. His conclusion that most forgetting occurs during early delays, and then slows down at later ones, has been replicated in countless laboratory experiments. Modern memory researchers have also extended Ebbinghaus's curve of forgetting outside the confines of the laboratory, demonstrating that it defines a core feature of transience.
In the early 1990s, the psychologist Charles Thompson and his colleagues at Kansas State University probed the memories of college students who kept diaries over the course of a semester in which they recorded one unique event each day. Forgetting was not quite so rapid as in Ebbinghaus's study, but the shape of the forgetting curve for these everyday events was generally similar to what others had observed in the laboratory. Thompson's students recorded and tried to remember experiences that varied in significance. A minority were personally meaningful ("My boyfriend Jake and I broke up"), but most were rather humdrum ("Watched movies at Jim's house on the VCR from 8:00 P.M. to 3:45 A.M."; "Mark and I started to make caramel corn but we soon found out that we were out of baking soda"). Other evidence concerning an annual happening that most people value greatly — Thanksgiving dinner — shows clearly that even personally significant events are not immune from the kind of transience that characterizes the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
How well can you recollect the most recent Thanksgiving dinner that you attended? A study of more than 500 college students suggests that what you remember very much depends on exactly when you are reading these words. At regular intervals for six months after Thanksgiving, students were asked about the overall vividness of their memories of the dinner, and also about specific details. Vividness declined rapidly over the first three months, followed by a more gradual decline for the remaining three months. The basic form of the Ebbinghaus curve was again observed, but this time for an event of considerable personal significance.
The drop-off was not, however, quite so steep as in Thompson's diary studies. This difference may be because some aspects of our most recent Thanksgiving dinner can be "remembered" on the basis of general knowledge of previous ones. We know that we probably had turkey, even if we have forgotten the particulars of this year's bird; we also know that we probably gathered together with family. This type of general knowledge about what usually happens at Thanksgiving does not fade across just a few months. Consistent with this suggestion, students' memories for food and for who attended the dinner dropped off at a relatively slow rate. But memories of details that were specific to the most recent Thanksgiving — such as what clothes they and others wore, and the contents of conversations — were lost much more quickly.
Similar processes operate when people recall a day at work. Try to answer in detail the following three questions: What do you do during a typical day at work? What did you do yesterday? And what did you do on that day one week earlier? When twelve employees in the engineering division of a large office-product manufacturer answered these questions, there was a dramatic difference in what they recalled from yesterday and a week earlier. The employees recalled fewer activities from a week ago than yesterday, and the ones they did recall from a week earlier tended to be part of a "typical" day. Atypical activities — departures from the daily script — were remembered much more frequently after a day than after a week. Memory after a day was close to a verbatim record of specific events; memory after a week was closer to a generic description of what usually happens. Likewise, Thompson's diary studies showed that specific details, such as the location of an event, the people who were there, and the specific date, fade more rapidly than the general sense of what happened. These observations are backed up by other laboratory studies indicating that recollections of when and where an event occurred, or who said what, tend to be especially transient.
At relatively early time points on the forgetting curve — minutes, hours, and days, sometimes more — memory preserves a relatively detailed record, allowing us to reproduce the past with reasonable if not perfect accuracy. But with the passing of time, the particulars fade and opportunities multiply for interference — generated by later, similar experiences — to blur our recollections. We thus rely ever more on our memories for the gist of what happened, or what usually happens, and attempt to reconstruct the details by inference and even sheer guesswork. Transience involves a gradual switch from reproductive and specific recollections to reconstructive and more general descriptions.
When attempting to reconstruct past events based on general knowledge of what usually happens, we become especially vulnerable to the sin of bias: when present knowledge and beliefs seep into our memories of past events (see Chapter 6). The combination of transience and bias can get us into trouble. A management consultant told me about a meeting at which a partner in a large company made a presentation to an important client in the presence of his company's CEO and several overseas investors. The partner related a story relevant to the client's situation about how a particular fast food chain adopted a strategy of raising prices. The story was based on an incident the partner remembered from a year or two earlier. But rather than calling on a detailed reproductive memory, the partner had unknowingly reconstructed the specifics from his present knowledge — the chain had not actually raised prices. Worse yet, a manager who had previously worked at the fast food chain fidgeted uncomfortably. "She started making faces while he was speaking," recalls the consultant. "As the partner was finishing his story, the manager spoke to the associate next to her in what she thought was a whisper. In a voice that regrettably carried halfway across the room, she said, 'He doesn't know what he's talking about. They never raised prices.'" The embarrassed partner had lost specific memory but was unaware of it.
Transience played the role of troublemaker in another, rather more public incident, where questions concerning the nature of forgetting assumed national prominence: the 1998 grand jury investigation of William Jefferson Clinton.
Forgetting Monica
The afternoon of August 17, 1998, was a watershed in the investigation and eventual impeachment of President Clinton. Testifying before a grand jury convened by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Clinton answered questions concerning the details of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and about his related testimony in January 1998 in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Clinton's August 17 remarks will no doubt be remembered by many — and in the history books — for his verbal jousts with prosecutors regarding the exact definition of the term "sexual relations."
But from the perspective of a memory researcher, Clinton's terminological hairsplitting is not nearly so interesting as a second battle he fought that afternoon: a battle over the characteristics and limits of transience. Clinton's memory lapses in his grand jury testimony and earlier deposition in the Jones case were widely viewed as self-serving conveniences designed to avoid embarrassing admissions. Prosecutors' attempts to establish this point rested on their intuitions about what is — and is not — reasonable to forget about an experience at different times after it has occurred.
This debate over transience is vividly illustrated by an exchange between Clinton and the government counsel Sol Wisenberg concerning a meeting between the president and Vernon Jordan on the evening of December 19, 1997. Earlier that day, Jordan had met with an extremely upset Monica Lewinsky, who had just learned that she had been issued a subpoena by the independent counsel's office. Jordan had later told Clinton about this development. On August 17, nearly eight months later, Wisenberg focused on what Clinton had said back in January 1998 about this meeting with Jordan. When asked whether anybody other than his attorneys ever told him that Lewinsky had been served with a subpoena by the independent counsel's office, Clinton told the Jones attorneys, "I don't think so." But this claim seemed implausible to Wisenberg: "Mr. President, 3.5 weeks before, Mr. Jordan had made a special trip to the White House to tell you Ms. Lewinsky had been subpoenaed; she was distraught; she had a fixation over you. And you couldn't remember that 3.5 weeks later?"
Clinton says that his memory is not what it used to be, and offers up possible explanations of his recent forgetfulness:
... If I could say one thing about my memory — I have been blessed and advantaged in my life with a good memory. I have been shocked and so have members of my family and friends of mine at how many things I have forgotten in the last six years — I think because of the pressure and the pace and the volume of events in a president's life, compounded by the pressure of your four-year inquiry, and all the other things that have happened. I'm amazed — there are lots of times when I literally can't remember last week.
Wisenberg immediately picks up on Clinton's self-confessed memory problems. "Are you saying, sir," he queries, "that you forgot when you were asked this question that Vernon Jordan had come on December 19, just 3 weeks before, and said that he's met that day, the day that Monica got the subpoena?" While not explicitly agreeing, Clinton acknowledges that he might have forgotten certain aspects of Vernon Jordan's visit. "It's quite possible that I had gotten mixed up," he proffers. Clinton then asserts somewhat more emphatically, "All I can tell you is I didn't remember all the details of all this."
Given the obsessive pursuit of Clinton by the independent counsel's office, Wisenberg's questions might be viewed as indiscriminate badgering by an aggressive attorney. But other parts of the deposition indicate that Wisenberg did not cast doubt on Clinton's claims about forgetting when they seemed more plausible. Compare the contentious exchange about forgetting across a three-week interval with an incident that occurs later in the grand jury deposition. Clinton is asked about a meeting with his aide John Podesta which occurred seven months earlier. On January 23, two days after the Lewinsky affair became public, Clinton had allegedly told Podesta that he had not engaged in any type of sex whatsoever with Lewinsky. When asked about this exchange, Clinton acknowledges making careful denials to a variety of people who might have included Podesta, but again appeals to faulty memory for particulars:
CLINTON: I do not remember the specific meeting about which you asked or the specific comments to which you referred.
WISENBERG: You don't remember...
CLINTON: Seven months ago, I'd have no way to remember, no. In contrast to his pointed probing of Clinton's apparent forgetting of a three- week-old meeting, Wisenberg allows this assertion to pass unchallenged. He is willing to concede poor memory for a relatively routine exchange seven months earlier, but is dubious about any claims of forgetting across a mere three weeks. The crux of the problem goes all the way back to Ebbinghaus: How much forgetting is plausible at different times after an experience has occurred?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Seven Sins Of Memory"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Daniel L. Schacter.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Table of Contents,
...,
Copyright,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: A Blessing Bestowed by the Gods,
1. The Sin of Transience,
2. The Sin of Absent-mindedness,
3. The Sin of Blocking,
4. The Sin of Misattribution,
5. The Sin of Suggestibility,
6. The Sin of Bias,
7. The Sin of Persistence,
8. The Seven Sins: Vices or Virtues?,
End Matter,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Author,
Related Subjects
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