The Seven Sins of MemoryDr. Daniel L. Schacter is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Chair of the psychology department. Dr. Schacter studies psychological and biological aspects of human memory and amnesia, using a combination of cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuro-imaging techniques.
Opening his lecture on memory errors, Dr. Schacter remarks that memory is "the foundation for so much of who we are, what we do... but, on the other hand, despite the importance of memory, it's also fragile. It's imperfect." Dr. Schacter distinguishes seven categories of memory failures and focuses on two of these at length during this lecture: transience (a "sin" of forgetting during which the rate of forgetting decreases in the hours and days following an experience) and misattribution (the presence of an inaccurate memory or the incorrect assignment of information to a particular circumstance).
Through the use of brain scanning techniques such as fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), Dr. Schacter notes that things that happen "in the few seconds when you encode a new experience... have very profound consequences for whether you're subsequently going to remember that information for a long period of time, or whether it's going to fade away and be subject to transience." It turns out that words are best remembered when encoded semantically (by emphasizing the meaning of the word), and that different regions of the brain become activated during different kinds of word encoding.
Dr. Schacter demonstrates the phenomenon of misattribution by reading a list of related words to the audience, followed by a recall and recognition test. When asked, approximately 80% of audience members confidently believed that a word thematically similar to those read aloud had actually been in the original list when, in fact, it had not. This form of error indicates that we retain the general sense of a list, but not necessarily the specific words. However, despite the fact that these errors are unsettling, Dr. Schacter informs us that in "the case of misattribution and several of the other memory sins, these vices of memories can also be virtues."
