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Zusammenfassung von The Seven Sins of Memory

Name: The Seven Sins of Memory
Rating: 4.1 (107 reviews)
Author: Daniel L. Schacter

Daniel L. Schacter

How the Mind Forgets and Remembers

4.1 (107 Bewertungen)

20 Min.

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Neurowissenschaft Mentale Gesundheit

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The Seven Sins of Memory
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What’s in it for me? Learn about the frailty of human memory.

We’ve all been there: you’re in a rush to get to an important meeting, when suddenly you forget where you left your keys the night before. You wrack your brain trying to think of where they might be – you could swear you left them right on the kitchen table!

How could such a small, simple memory drift from your mind? Well, this kind of forgetfulness is simply a product of how our brains function. The human mind has evolved with this flaw – and it’s not the only flaw in our ability to remember.

These blinks highlight seven frailties of our memories. While these faults are a product of human evolution, we can still overcome them with the right techniques and hacks.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why you’re more likely to remember a baker’s occupation than his name;
why traditional police lineups can lead to miscarriages of justice; and
how false memories can lead innocent people to admit to murder.

All memories are liable to fade and weaken over time, but there are ways to keep the memories you want.

Have you ever rolled up to a party and been greeted by someone you didn’t recognize, only to find out that you’d met just a few months before? These kinds of embarrassing moments can happen to anyone and are caused by the first of the seven deadly sins of human memory: transience.

Memories are transient – many memories disappear over time without us realizing it.

A study conducted by a group of researchers in California demonstrated just how faulty our memories can be over time. The study was carried out after O. J. Simpson’s notorious acquittal in his famous 1995 murder trial.

Researchers asked a group of students to provide detailed descriptions of how they came to learn about the trial outcome. Fifteen months on, only 50 percent could give accurate accounts of where they were; three years on, this dropped to 30 percent.

This isn’t a surprising discovery, and the fact that our memories lose accuracy over time is something we’ve known for a while. In 1885, the German philosopher Hermann Ebbinghaus developed the forgetting curve to show how memories fade over time.

Ebbinghaus memorized a list of nonsense words and tested himself. After nine hours, he had forgotten 60 percent of them. By the end of the month, 75 percent were obliterated from his memory.

The good news is that there are techniques you can use to combat transient memory loss.

Memory techniques have been around for a long time. The ancient Greeks developed memory tricks called mnemonics, which work by linking new information to places or numbers, making the new concepts much easier to recall than decontextualized bits of info.

In everyday life, a simple way to harness the power of mnemonics is to associate new information to concepts and images that are already meaningful to you.

So, say you meet a well-built man named Bruce. Following in the Greek tradition, imagine how Bruce would “bruise” you in a scuffle. Make the image vivid enough, and next time you see him you’ll have no problem remembering Bruce the bruiser!

Sometimes we fail to remember something because the memory never registered properly in the first place.

You might think that a memory champion who can recall thousands of random words would never forget to pick up a carton of milk from the store. But that’s not actually the case – absent-mindedness is an entirely different kind of memory failure.

Absent-mindedness means you’re not paying enough attention to the task at hand, so incoming information is either partially encoded or not at all.

Even when we’ve definitely memorized a piece of information, a mental block can stop our recall.

We all know the feeling of not quite being able to remember someone’s name. You swear you know it, you’re positive you do, it’s right on the tip of your tongue but . . . !

And, in fact, you do know the answer – the only issue is that it’s being blocked.

We mix up memories of people, places and things more often than we think.

If you’ve ever confused the name of your doctor with that of your dentist, you already know about the next sin: misattribution.

We often misattribute things we’ve seen in different situations.

Suggestions from other people can drastically change our memories.

What is your earliest childhood memory? How much detail do you have of it and how much has it been influenced by what others have told you? It turns out we are highly suggestible when it comes to remembering past events.

Being asked leading questions about past memories can actually change what we remember. This was made crystal clear when a group of Dutch psychologists interviewed their university colleagues ten months after a tragic plane crash in 1992. The crash killed 43 people when a cargo plane crashed into an apartment building in Amsterdam.

We unknowingly alter our memories to fit with our current world views.

Have you ever had to choose between two objects you liked equally? If someone asked you a day later which one you preferred, you’d probably say you much preferred the the object you chose, even though they were equal a day before. This is a classic illustration of consistency bias.

In other words, you’re likely to believe your views are the same now as they were in the past.

Highly emotional events are the ones we remember most.

In 1986, Donnie Moore, a pitcher for the California Angels, was one strike away from winning the American League Championship Series for his team. But instead of tasting victory, Moore threw a pitch that the Boston Red Sox’s Dave Henderson launched into the left field stands; the Red Sox would go on to win the series and reach the World Series. Just three years later, haunted by the memory, Moore shot his wife and killed himself. This is an extreme case of memory persistence.

Everybody has positive and negative memories that are persistent, but individual thinking styles affect their impact on each of us.

The negative aspects of our memory are really just side effects of highly successful mechanisms.

Think of a table, any table. You probably conjured up an image of one you use all the time, maybe even the one you’re sitting at now. But now imagine if this simple request had prompted you to remember every single table you’d ever seen. It would be pretty difficult to function, wouldn’t it?

This is just one example of the flip side of memory’s “sins.” What can seem like weaknesses in our memory are actually useful adaptations to our environment.

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Worum geht es in The Seven Sins of Memory?

The Seven Sins of Memory (2002) offers a close look at the seven ways our memory can let us down: from why we always lose our car keys to why some people are haunted by recurring negative thoughts. The book also discusses how to mitigate these shortcomings and why they’re actually trade-offs for massive memory benefits. By examining how our memory works and its faults, we see that these weaknesses are actually just side effects of a very clever system.

Bestes Zitat aus The Seven Sins of Memory

Thinking and talking about past experiences is the best way to remember them.

—Daniel L. Schacter

Wer The Seven Sins of Memory lesen sollte

Anyone interested in how memory works and how to make it more reliable
People hoping to curb recurring negative thoughts
Anyone wondering why trying not to think of a white bear just won’t work

Über den Autor

Daniel Schacter is the head of the department of psychology at Harvard University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has won numerous awards for his research and writing on memory and neuropsychology.

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