We may experience normal forgetfulness in our daily lives, but there is a certain level that can only be a sin of the memory. A situation where our memories put us into trouble. The memory plays an essential purpose in our lives, but we tend to assume its significance until we are in an incident of forgetting or distortion that demands our attention. These are situations where the memory betrays us, abandons us and puts us in trouble. In his work, “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers”, Daniel Schacter explores and breaks down seven ways in which the memory sins but goes on to insist that this is not a biological shortcoming but rather an indication of a properly functioning memory. Just like there are various forms of memory, there also exists different forms of forgetting. The seven sins identified by Schacter include absent-mindedness, prejudice, misattribution, suggestibility, obstructing, persistence and transience.
Transience refers to the tendency to gradually forget events or facts. This one sin of the memory can be associated with the inability to grasp new information. One cannot remember facts he has read, or once he reads
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I have experienced it through waking up in the middle of the night and reflecting on some painful experiences, blunders made over the week and some failures that could have been avoided. These memories always seem to resurface most of the times despite attempts to move on and forget them. Thus, I have been prone to persistence but I cannot dispute I am also vulnerable to other sins such as absent-mindedness. Finally, the memory is the most reliable guide to our past and future and hence we should take its inherent weakness and flaws as part of evolution it has undergone. Despite these, annoying failures and sins we should celebrate the strengths of our