7 sins of memory summary

7 sins of memory summary

Schacter’s book summarizes the seven ways in which human memory can fail, and despite the problems these problems can cause us, they are side-effects of positive features of memory;  if we could get rid of these forgetting and biasing processes, we would actually be as our minds were flooded with irrelevant and confusing information.

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Chapter 1: The sin of transience.

Gradual loss of memory. Memory is lost/diminishes over time. Both in STM and LTM.

• “Straightforward forgetting: the decay of recalled information over time. The brain has multiple memory systems with different forgetting characteristics”.
• In the 19^th century it was the time when psychologists first measured loss of retention over time and produced a famous curve of forgetting.
• Transcience undermines memory’s role in connecting us to past thoughts and deeds that define who we are
• Newer studies — what kinds of information are more or less susceptible to forgetting over time.
  • Implications: resident Clinton’s grand jury testimony about what he recalled from meetings with Monica Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan, what you are likely to remember from a day at the office, and how forgetting changes with increasing age.
  • New advances from state-of-the-art neuroimaging technologies, which provide snapshots of the brain in action as it learns and remembers
  • Neuroimaging to seek the roots of transience in brain activities that occur during the moments when a new memory is born.
    • Insights into transience
    • Approaches to reducing transienceà psychological techniques that promote enhanced encoding of new information, recent advances in neurobiology which are illuminating the genes that are responsible for remembering and forgetting…

Chapter 2: Absent-mindedness

Failure of attention, either at the encoding stage or at the retrieval stage.

• “Forgetting associated with lapses of attention during encoding or during attempted retrieval can be described as errors of absent-mindedness”
• Absent-minded errors have the potential to disrupt our lives significantly

• E.g. lost keys, forgetting where we put something (Yo-Yo Ma forgetting his cello in a taxi)…
• To understand why these errors occur it is necessary to test what is the relation between attention and memory.
  • Cues, reminders, automatic behavior in daily activities…
  • Autopilot- perform tasks efficiently, but also makes us vulnerable to be absent-minded.
  • Prospective theory- how and why different types of absent-minded forgetting occur.

Chapter 3: Blocking.

Failure to retrieve or access deeply encoded information – a temporal (as opposed to permanent in transience) inability to remember.

• “When people are provided with cues that are related to a sought-after item, but are nonetheless unable to elicit it, a retrieval block has occurred“, e.g. tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
• Why are we sometimes susceptible to episodes of blocking?
  • Names of people, specific places…?
  • Neurological disorder- Damage in the brain’s left hemisphere (not able to retrieve some names, even the person is able to retrieve names of objects)
  • Tip-of-the-tongue state — we cannot come up with a proper name or a common name, yet often can provide a great deal of information about it, including the initial letter and number of syllables.
  • Blocking also when remembering personal experiences (patients temporarily lose access to large sectors of their personal pasts, and new neuroimaging studies that are providing initial glimpses into what goes on in the brain during this sort of blocking).

Chapter 4- Misattribution

Failure of source-memory: Being able to remember the content but forgetting the actual source of the information and attributing it to some other source. This can take various forms, even to the point where one thinks that real events were only imagined or things that were only imagined are thought to have happened.

• Three kinds of misattribution:

1. Source confusion: “remember correctly an item or fact from a past experience but misattribute the fact to an incorrect source” e.g. eyewitnesses confusing where or when they saw a particular person; subjects confusing whether they saw something in real life or on television; confusions between imagination and memory
2. Cryptomnesia: “an absence of any subjective experience of remembering. People sometimes misattribute a spontaneous thought or idea to their own imagination, when in fact they are retrieving it—without awareness of doing so—from a specific prior experience” e.g. unconscious plagiarism
3. False recall and false recognition: when individuals falsely recall or recognize items or events that never happened. In some experiments, subjects show just as much confidence in their false recall as in their correctly recalled items.

• Sometimes we remember things that we’ve only imagined or recall seeing someone at a place that differs from the reality- we recall aspects of the event correctly, but misattribute them to the wrong source.
• False memories- Is there any way to tell the differences between true and false memories?
  • Scan subjects while they experience true and false memories, and the results provide some insights into why false memories can be so subjectively compelling.
  • Brain-damaged patients who are especially prone to misattributions and false memories.

Chapter 5- Suggestibility

Possibility to “remember” something while the only basis for this memory is that it was suggested to us by someone else (without a real basis).

• “Suggestibility in memory refers to the tendency to incorporate information provided by others, such as misleading questions, into one’s own recollections”.
• Our memories are sometimes permeable to outside influences: leading questions or feedback from other people can result in suggested false memories of events that never happened.
• Kind of misattribution.
• Schacter uses “suggestibility” for misattribution where the misattributed information is suggested by another person. (e.g. Loftus “lost in the mall” study. Repeated and/or specific questions can cause the subject to vividly imagine an event, and then they can misattribute this vivid mental image as a memory).
• Suggestibility can also lead people to confess to crimes they did not commit- easy to elicit false confessions in noncriminal settings.
• We tend to think of memories as snapshots from family albums that, if stored properly, could be retrieved in precisely the same condition in which they were put away. (Searching for memory)
• We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then recreate or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience — We bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.

Chapter 6- Bias

Misremembering due to the influence of current knowledge, emotions, beliefs, etc. Usually selective or distorted recall, in accordance with our beliefs.

• “Bias refers to the distorting influences of present knowledge, beliefs, and feelings on recollection of previous experiences”. Types of biases:

1. Consistency bias: lead us to rewrite our past feelings and beliefs so that they resemble what we feel and believe now
2. Change bias: people who have worked hard to improve their study skills distort their memory of how good they were before the course downwards (justification-of-effort bias?)
3. Stereotypical bias: influence memories and perceptions in the social world. e.g. made-up “black” names are more frequently falsely remembered as names of criminals than “white” names
4. Hindsight bias: recollections of past events are filtered by current knowledge;
5. Egocentric bias: reveal that we often remember the past in a self-enhancing manner.

• Clues from “split-brain” patients whose cerebral hemispheres have been disconnected from one another.

Chapter 7- Persistence

Occurs when memories that should be forgotten cannot be forgotten. Usually, they are linked to strong emotional experiences.

• “Persistence involves remembering a fact or event that one would prefer to forget. Persistence is revealed by intrusive recollections of traumatic events, rumination over negative symptoms and events, and even by chronic fears and phobias.” It can have dangerous consequences for psychological health.
  • Depressed subjects show greater memory for negative events and stimuli (persistence bias?)
  • Basis of persistence- evidence that emotions are linked with perception and registration of incoming new information — FORMATION OF NEW MEMORIES
  • Persistence is greater after traumatic experiences (wars, natural disasters, accidents, abuse…)
  • Some people become “stuck in the past”, in those traumatic events.
  • Those memories can be so overwhelming that it is only natural to try to avoid reexperiencing them.
  • Attempting to avoid remembering a trauma may only increase the long-term likelihood of persistently remembering it.
    • Studies of brain structure and physiology- neural foundations of traumatic experiences.

Chapter 8- Vices or virtues?

• The seven sins are by-products of otherwise adaptive properties of memory.
• Transience makes memory adapt to important properties of the environment in which the memory system operates. (Chapter 1)
• Unusual cases of extraordinary recall illustrate why some apparent limitations of memory  produce absent-mindedness are in fact desirable system properties (Chapter 2)
• Misattribution arises because our memory systems encode information selectively and efficiently, rather than indiscriminately storing details, and examine how bias can facilitate psychological well-being. (Chapter 4)
• Persistence is a price we pay for a memory system that — much to our benefit — gives high priority to remembering events that could threaten our survival. (Chapter 7)

Recent developments in evolutionary biology and psychology to place these suggestions in a broad conceptual context that allows us to appreciate better the possible origins of the seven sins.

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