THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY
How the Mind Forgets and Remembers

Daniel L. Schacter

Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Drawing on the latest neuroimaging research showing the brain as it learns and remembers, Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter classifies seven pitfalls which can make human memory inaccurate and unreliable: transience, the weakening of memory over time; blocking, the inability to recall a familiar name or fact; misattribution, assigning a memory to the wrong source; suggestibility, the implanting of memories through leading questions; bias, the unconscious reshaping of a memory under the influence of later events or opinions; and persistence, the repeated recall of disturbing information or events that one would prefer to forget. He says these often enraging and sometimes damaging 'sins' of memory are adaptive aspects of our mental system which also benefit us by protecting against overload, helping the memory 'to retain information that is most likely to be needed in the environment in which it operates.'