Book Review
The Seven Sins of Memory
By DANIEL L. SCHACTER Reviewed by PEGGY BARNETT
Daniel L. Schacter is the chairman of the Psychology

Department of Harvard University and has published a number of articles and books about the brain and memory.

The label of "sins" of memory refers to the way memory can get us into trouble. These are not so much sins of memory as failure or distortions of memory.

He begins with the "sin of transience." Reviewing the history of the study of the brain, he explains how recent imaging techniques have enabled scientists to observe changes in the brain as subjects learn and attend. Working memory lets us hang on to an idea or fact long enough to encode it into long-term memory. What happens in the first few seconds of this process determines the strength of the memory.

The second sin is absentmindedness. Experimenters found that aging can produce a state that resembles a kind of chronic divided attention. Thinking about other things instead of attending to the current encounter lessens our ability to recall the details of the encounter. The kind of everyday memory failures that cause us to put post-it notes all over the house are not transience, but are usually caused by lapses of attention, "low levels of left prefrontal activity" or what most of us call absentmindedness.

The sin of blocking can occur in diverse situations. In a study, 10year-olds reported on occasions when retrieval blocks occurred.They most frequently involved loss of proper names, and more frequently in the 70-year-olds, though all reported problems. The condition even has a name in braindamaged patients - "proper name anomia."

The remaining sins include misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. The somewhat arbitrary division of memory problems into categories is interesting and clarifies discussion of them in most cases.

Because he is familiar with many psychology studies and brain research, Schacter takes the reader beyond what we might figure out using common sense. He does not, however, help us to improve our memories, only to understand them better and to be reassured that we are not alone.

This book is available in the Mary Willis Library.

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