THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY

INTRODUCTION:
A Blessing Bestowed
by the Gods

IN unsettling short story "Yumiura," a novelist receives an unexpected visit from a woman who says she knew him thirty years earlier. They met when he visited the town ofYumiura during a harbor festival, the woman explains. But the novelist cannot remember her.

Plagued recently by other troublesome memory lapses, he sees this latest incident as a further sign of mental decline. His discomfort turns to alarm
when the woman offers more revelations about what happened one day when he visited her room. "You asked me to marry you;' she recalls wistfully. The novelist reels while contemplating the magnitude of what he has forgotten. The woman explains that she has never forgotten their time together and feels continually burdened by her memories of him.

After she leaves, the shaken novelist searches maps for the town of
Yumiura with the hope of triggering recall of the place and the reasons why
he had gone there. But no maps or books list such a town. The novelist then
realizes that he could not have been in the part of the country the woman
described at the time she remembered. Though the woman believed that her detailed and heartfelt memories were accurate, they were entirely false.

Kawabata's story dramatically illustrates different ways in which
memory can get us into trouble. Sometimes we forget the past and at other
times we distort it; some disturbing memories haunt us for years. Yet we
also rely on memory to perform an astonishing variety of tasks in our
everyday lives. Recalling conversations with friends or recollecting family
vacations, remembering appointments and errands we need to run, calling
up words that allow us to speak and understand others, remembering
foods we like and dislike, acquiring the knowledge needed for a new job -
all depend, in one way or another, on memory. Memory plays such a perva-
sive role in our daily lives that we often take it for granted until an incident of forgetting or distortion demands our attention.

In this book I explore the nature of memory's imperfections, present a
new way to think about them, and consider how we can reduce or avoid
their harmful effects. Memory's errors have long fascinated scientists, and
during the past decade they have come to occupy a prominent place in our
society. With the aging of the baby boom generation, memory problems
are increasingly common among this large sector of the population. A 1998
cover story in Newsweek proclaimed that memory has become the princi-
pal health concern of busy, stressed-out, and forgetful baby boomers-
and many others. Forgotten encounters, misplaced eyeglasses, and failures
to recall the names of familiar faces are becoming regular occurrences for
many adults who are busily trying to juggle the demands of work and fam-
ily, and cope with the bewildering array of new communications technolo-
gies. How many passwords and PIN s do you have to remember just to
manage your affairs on the Internet, not to mention your voice mail at the
office or your cell phone? Have you ever had to apply for a temporary PIN
at a website because you've forgotten your permanent number? I certainly
have.

In addition to dealing with the frustrations of memory failures in
daily life, the awful specter of Alzheimer's disease looms large. As the gen-
eral public becomes ever more aware of its horrors through such high
profile cases as Ronald Reagan's battle with the disorder, the prospects of a
life dominated by catastrophic forgetting further increase our preoccupa-
tions with memory.

Although the magnitude of the woman's memory distortion in "Yu-
miura" seems to stretch the bounds of credulity, it has been equaled and
even exceeded in everyday life. Consider the story of Binjimin Wilkomirski,
whose 1996 Holocaust memoir, Fragments, won worldwide acclaim for
portraying life in a concentration camp from the perspective of a child.
Wilkomirski presented readers with raw, vivid recollections of the un-
speakable terrors he witnessed as a young boy. His prose achieved such
power and eloquence that one reviewer proclaimed that Fragments is "so
morally important and so free from literary artifice of any kind at all that
I wonder if I even have the right to try to offer praise." Even more remark-
able, Wilkomirski had spent much of his adult life unaware of these trau-
matic childhood memories, coming to terms with them only in therapy.
Because his story and memories inspired countless others, Wilkomirksi
became a sought-after international figure and a hero to Holocaust sur-
vivors.

The story began to unravel, however, in late August 1998, when Daniel
Ganzfried, a Swiss journalist and himself the son of a Holocaust survivor,
published a stunning article in a Zurich newspaper. Ganzfried revealed that
Wilkomirski is actually Bruno Dossekker, born in 1941 to a young woman
named Yvone Berthe Grosjean, who later gave him up for adoption to an
orphanage. Young Bruno spent all of the war years with his foster parents,
the Dossekkers, in the safe confines of his native Switzerland. Whatever the
basis for his traumatic "memories" of Nazi horrors, they did not come
from childhood experiences in a concentration camp. Is Dossekkerl
Wilkomirksi simply a liar? Probably not: he still strongly believes that his
recollections are real.

We're all capable of distorting our pasts. Think back to your first year in high school and try to answer the following questions: Did your parents encourage you to be active in sports? Was religion helpful to you? Did you
receive physical punishment as discipline? The Northwestern University
psychiatrist Daniel Offer and his collaborators put these and related ques-
tions to sixty-seven men in their late forties. Their answers are especially
interesting because Offer had asked the same men the same questions dur-
ing freshman year in high school, thirty-four years earlier.

The men's memories of their adolescent lives bore little relationship to what they had reported as high school freshmen. Fewer than 40 percent of
the men recalled parental encouragement to be active in sports; some 60
percent had reported such encouragement as adolescents. Barely one-quar-
ter recalled that religion was helpful, but nearly 70 percent had said that
it was when they were adolescents. And though only one-third of the
adults recalled receiving physical punishment decades earlier, as adoles-
cents nearly 90 percent had answered the question affirmatively.

Memory's errors are as fascinating as they are important. What sort of
system permits the kinds of distortions described in Kawabata's fiction and
the Wilkomirski case, or the inaccuracies documented in Offer's study?
Why do we sometimes fail to recall the names of people whose faces are
perfectly familiar to us? What accounts for episodes of misplaced keys, wal-
lets, or similar lapses? Why do some experiences seem to disappear from
our minds without a trace? Why do we repeatedly remember painful expe-
riences we'd rather forget? And what can we do to avoid, prevent, or mini-
mize these troublesome features of our memory systems?

Psychologists and neuroscientists have written numerous articles on
specific aspects of forgetting or memory distortions, but no unified frame-
work has conceptualized the various ways in which memory sometimes
leads us astray. In this book, I provide such a framework. I try to develop a
fresh approach to understanding the causes and consequences of memory's
imperfections that, for the first time, suggests a way to think about the wide range of problems that memory can create.

As a memory researcher for more than twenty years, I've long been in-
trigued by memory failures. But it was not until a sunny morning in May
1998, in the midst of my daily walk, that I considered a simple question:
What are the different ways that memory can get us into trouble? I sud-
denly recognized that it is necessary to address that question in order to de
velop a broad understanding of memory errors. Yet I also realized that the
question had not yet been asked. For the next few months, I brought to-
gether everything I knew about memory's imperfections and attempted to
impose some order on a vast array of lapses, mistakes, and distortions. I
generated a variety of unsatisfactory schemes for conceptualizing these di-
verse observations, but eventually hit on a way of thinking that helped to
make everything fall into place.

I propose that memory's malfunctions can be divided into seven fun-
damental transgressions or "sins," which I call transience, absent-minded-
ness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Just like the ancient seven deadly sins, the memory sins occur frequently in every
day life and can have serious consequences for all of us.

Transience, absent-mindedness, and blocking are sins of omission: we
fail to bring to mind a desired fact, event, or idea. Transience refers to a
weakening or loss of memory over time. It's probably not difficult for you
to remember now what you have been doing for the past several hours. But
if I ask you about the same activities six weeks, six months, or six years
from now, chances are you'll remember less and less. Transience is a basic
feature of memory, and the culprit in many memory problems.

Absent-mindedness involves a breakdown at the interface between at-
tention and memory. Absent-minded memory errors - misplacing keys
or eyeglasses, or forgetting a lunch appointment - typically occur because
we are preoccupied with distracting issues or concerns, and don't focus at-
tention on what we need to remember. The desired information isn't lost
over time; it is either never registered in memory to begin with, or not
sought after at the moment it is needed, because attention is focused else-
where.

The third sin, blocking, entails a thwarted search for information that
we may be desperately trying to retrieve. We've all failed to produce a name
to accompany a familiar face. This frustrating experience happens even
though we are attending carefully to the task at hand, and even though the
desired name has not faded from our minds - as we become acutely aware
when we unexpectedly retrieve the blocked name hours or days later.

In contrast to these three sins of omission, the next four sins of
misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence are all sins of commis-
sion: some form of memory is present, but it is either incorrect or un-
wanted. The sin of misattribution involves assigning a memory to the
wrong source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering
that a friend told you a bit of trivia that you actually read about in a news
paper. Misattribution is far more common than most people realize, and
has potentially profound implications in legal settings. The related sin of
suggestibility refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading
questions, comments, or suggestions when a person is trying to call up a
past experience. Like misattribution, suggestibility is especially relevant to and sometimes can wreak havoc within - the legal system.

The sin of bias reflects the powerful influences of our current knowl-
edge and beliefs on how we remember our pasts. We often edit or entirely
rewrite our previous experiences - unknowingly and unconsciously - in
light of what we now know or believe. The result can be a skewed rendering
of a specific incident, or even of an extended period in our lives, which says more about how we feel nQwthan about what happened then.

The seventh sin - persistence - entails repeated recall of disturbing
information or events that we would prefer to banish from our minds alto-
gether: remembering what we cannot forget, even though we wish that we
could. Everyone is familiar with persistence to some degree: recall the last
time that you suddenly awoke at 3:00 A.M., unable to keep out of your
mind a painful blunder on the job or a disappointing result on an impor-
tant exam. In more extreme cases of serious depression or traumatic expe-
rience, persistence can be disabling and even life-threatening.

In this book I consider new discoveries, some based on recent break-
throughs in neuroscience which allow us to see the brain in action as it
learns and remembers and which are beginning to illuminate the basis of
the seven sins. These studies allow us to see in a new light what's going on
inside our heads during the frustrating incidents of memory failure or er-
ror which can have a significant impact on our everyday lives. I also discuss
how our emerging knowledge of the seven sins can help to counter them.
But to understand the seven sins more deeply, we also need to ask why
our memory systems have come to exhibit these bothersome and some-
times dangerous properties: Do the seven sins represent mistakes made by
Mother Nature during the course of evolution? Is memory flawed in a way
that has placed our species at unnecessary risk? I don't think so. To the con
trary, I contend that each of the seven sins is a by-product of otherwise de-
sirable and adaptive features of the human mind.

Consider by analogy the ancient seven deadly sins. Pride, anger, envy,
greed, gluttony, lust, and sloth have great potential to get us into trouble.
Yet each of the deadly sins can be seen as an exaggeration of traits that are
useful and sometimes necessary for survivaL Gluttony may make us sick,
but our health depends on consuming sufficient amounts of food. Lust can
cost a straying husband his wife's affections, but a sex drive is crucial for
perpetuating genes. Anger might result in dangerous elevations of blood
pressure, but also assures that we defend ourselves vigorously when threat-
ened. And so forth.

I argue for a similar approach to the memory sins. Rather than por-
traying them as inherent weaknesses or flaws in system design, I suggest
that they provide a window on the adaptive strengths of memory. The
seven sins allow us to appreciate why memory works as well as it does most
of the time, and why it evolved the design that it has. Though I focus on
problems that the seven sins cause in everyday life, my purpose is not to
ridicule or denigrate memory. Instead, I try to show why memory is a
mainly reliable guide to our pasts and futures, though it sometimes lets us
down in annoying but revealing ways.

I'll begin by exploring the nature and consequences of the sin of tran-
sience in Chapter 1. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, pioneering
psychologists first measured loss of retention over time and produced a fa-
mous curve of forgetting. Newer studies have taught us about what kinds
of information are more or less susceptible to forgetting over time. This
research has implications for such diverse topics as President 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. We'll also
consider exciting new advances from state-of-the-art neuroimaging tech-
nologies, which provide snapshots of the brain in action as it learns and remembers. My research group has used neuroimaging to seek the roots of
transience in brain activities that occur during the moments when a new
memory is born. Insights into the basis of transience also suggest new
methods to counter it. I'll consider a range of approaches to reducing tran-
sience, including psychological techniques that promote enhanced encod-
ing of new information, the effects of such popular products as Ginkgo
biloba, and recent advances in neurobiology which are illuminating the
genes that are responsible for remembering and forgetting.

Chapter 2 focuses on the most irritating of the seven sins: absent-
mindedness. We've all had more encounters with lost keys and forgotten
errands than we might care to remember. Absent-minded errors have the
potential to disrupt our lives significantly, as the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma
found out in October 1999 when he left his $2.5 million instrument in the
trunk of a taxi. Fortunately for Ma, police recovered the instrument right
away. I'll also consider a similar case with a bizarre outcome. To under-
stand why absent-minded errors occur, we need to probe the interface
between attention and memory, explore the role of cues and reminders
in helping us to carry out everyday tasks, and understand the impor-
tant role of automatic behavior in daily activities. We spend a great deal
of our lives on autopilot, which helps us to perform routine tasks ef-
ficiently, but also renders us vulnerable to absent-minded errors. A new
area of research on what psychologists call "prospective memory" is begin-
ning to unravel how and why different types of absent-minded forgetting
occur.

There are few more jarring experiences than knowing that you know
something cold the name of an acquaintance or the answer to a trivia
question - while failing to produce the information when you need it.
Chapter 3 explains why we are occasionally susceptible to such episodes of
blocking. Proper names of people and places are especially vulnerable to
blocking, and the reasons why this is so help to explain the basis of the sin
of blocking. In a fascinating neurological disorder that I'll consider, known
as "proper name anomia;' patients with damage to specific regions within
the brain's left hemisphere cannot retrieve proper names of people (and
sometimes places), even though they can easily summon up the names of
common objects. These patients often know a great deal about the people
or places whose names they block, such as a person's occupation or where a
city is located on a map. The plight of these patients resembles the familiar
tip-of-the-tongue state, where we can't 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. I'll compare alternative theories of the tip-of-the tongue state and suggest ways to counter this and related forms of blocking.

Blocking also occurs when people try to remember personal experi-
ences. I'll consider exotic cases in which 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. Laboratory studies of more mundane forms of blocking, in
which retrieving some words from a recently read list impairs access to oth-
ers, have intriguing implications for such real-world situations as inter-
viewing eyewitnesses to a crime.

Chapter 4 considers the first of the sins of commission: misattribu-
tion. Sometimes we remember doing things we only imagined, or recall
seeing someone at a particular time or place that differs from when or
where we actually encountered him: we recall aspects of the event correctly,
but misattribute them to the wrong source. I'll show how misattribution
errors figure prominently in such seemingly disparate phenomena as deja
Vll, unintentional plagiarism, and cases of mistaken eyewitness identifica-
tion. Remember the infamous John Doe 2 from the Oklahoma City bomb-
ing? I'll explain why he was almost surely the product of a classic misattri-
bution error.

Psychologists have devised clever methods for inducing powerful mis-
attribution errors in the laboratory. People incorrectly claim - often with
great confidence - having experienced events that have not happened. In
addition to explaining why such false memories occur, I will explore a
question with important practical and theoretical ramifications: is there
any way to tell the differences between true and false memories? Our re-
search team has used neuroimaging techniques to scan subjects while they
experience true and false memories, and the results provide some insights
into why false memories can be so subjectively compelling. We'll also en-
counter brain-damaged patients who are especially prone to misattribu-
tions and false memories. One patient believed that he was "seeing film
stars everywhere" - mistaking unfamiliar faces for familiar ones. Under-
standing what has gone wrong in such individuals can help to illuminate
the basis of misattributions in healthy people.


Chapter 5 examines what may well be the most dangerous of the seven
sins: suggestibility. Our memories are sometimes permeable to outside in-
fluences: leading questions or feedback from other people can result in sug-
gested false memories of events that never happened. Suggestibility is a
special concern in legal contexts. We'll examine cases where suggestive
questioning by law enforcement officials has led to serious errors in eye-
witness identification, and where suggestive procedures used by psycho-
therapists have elicited memories of traumatic events that never occurred.
Young children are especially vulnerable to the influences of suggestive
questioning, as illustrated in a tragic Massachusetts day care case in which
an entire family went to prison because of children's recollections that I be
lieve have been tainted by suggestive questions. Suggestibility can also lead
people to confess to crimes they did not commit. I'll discuss such cases, and
also consider recent experimental evidence showing that it is surprisingly
easy to elicit false confessions in noncriminal settings.

As I showed in my earlier book, Searching for Memory, 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. But we now know that we do not record our experiences the way a
camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key ele-
ments from our experiences and store them. We then recreate or recon-
struct 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. In other words, we bias our memories of
the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after
the event.

Chapter 6 explores several different types of biases that sometimes
skew our memories. For instance, "consistency biases" lead us to rewrite
our past feelings and beliefs so that they resemble what we feel and believe
now. We'll see how consistency biases shape memories in diverse situations,
ranging from how supporters of Ross Perot remembered feeling when he
quit the 1992 presidential race to how much married and dating couples re-
call liking or loving each other at different points in the past. "Egocentric
biases," in contrast, reveal that we often remember the past in a self-
enhancing manner. I will show that egocentric biases can influence recall in
diverse situations, ranging from how divorced couples recall their marital
breakups to students' recall of their anxiety levels prior to an exam. "Stereotypical biases" influence memories and perceptions in the social world.

Experience with different groups of people leads to the development of ste-
reotypes that capture their general properties, but can spawn inaccurate
and unwarranted judgments about individuals. I'll consider recent studies
that explore how stereotypical bias fuels racial prejudice, and can even lead
people to "remember" the names of nonexistent criminals. Although little
is known about the brain systems that give rise to bias, I will discuss some
intriguing clues from "split-brain" patients whose cerebral hemispheres
have been disconnected from one another.

Chapter 7 focuses on the most debilitating of the seven sins: persis-
tence. Try to think of the single biggest disappointment in your life - a
failure at work or school, or a romantic relationship gone sour. Chances are
that you recollected this experience repeatedly in the days and weeks after it
happened, even though you wished you could forget it. Persistence thrives
in an emotional climate of depression and rumination, and can have pro-
found consequences for psychological health, as we'll see in the case of a
baseball player who was literally haunted to death by the persisting mem-
ory of a single disastrous pitch. To understand the basis of persistence, I
will consider evidence that emotions are closely linked with perception and
registration of incoming information, which in turn influence the forma-
tion of new memories.

The force of persistence is greatest after traumatic experiences: wars,
natural disasters, serious accidents, childhood abuse. Nearly everyone per-
sistently remembers a traumatic event in its immediate aftermath, but only
some people become "stuck in the past" for years or decades; we'll explore
why this is so. Traumatic memories can be so overwhelming that it is only
natural to try to avoid reexperiencing them. Paradoxically, however, at-
tempting to avoid remembering a trauma may only increase the long-term
likelihood of persistently remembering it. Studies of brain structure and
physiology are providing important information about the neural under-
pinnings of traumatic persistence, and also suggest potentially novel meth-
ods for reducing persistence.

After reading the first seven chapters, you might easily conclude that
evolution burdened humankind with an extremely inefficient memory sys-
tem - so prone to error that it often jeopardizes our well-being. In Chap-
ter 8 I take issue with this conclusion, and argue instead that the seven sins
are by-products of otherwise adaptive properties of memory. For instance,
I'll show that transience makes memory adapt to important properties of
the environment in which the memory system operates. I will also consider
unusual cases of extraordinary recall which illustrate why some apparent
limitations of memory that produce absent-mindedness are in fact desir-
able system properties. I'll explain how misattribution arises because our
memory systems encode information selectively and efficiently, rather than
indiscriminately storing details, and examine how bias can facilitate psy-
chological well-being. I'll also argue that persistence is a price we pay for a
memory system that - much to our benefit - gives high priority to re-
membering events that could threaten our survival. I draw on recent devel-
opments in evolutionary biology and psychology to place these suggestions
in a broad conceptual context that allows us to appreciate better the possi-
ble origins of the seven sins.

In Kawabata's «Yumiura;' the woman who remembered a love affair
that apparently never happened reflected on the gift of memory. «Mem-
ories are something we should be grateful for, don't you think?" she asked
the bemused novelist. «No matter what circumstances people end up in,
they're still able to remember things from the past - I think it must be a
blessing bestowed on us by the gods." She offered this high praise even
though the memory system she celebrated led her unknowingly down a
path of delusion. The path through this book is in some ways analogous:
we will need to immerse ourselves in the dark sides of memory before we
can fully appreciate this «blessing bestowed by the gods."