The Seven Sins Of Memory Research

While the human brain allows humans to sustain life and perform many complex tasks, like anything it has its flaws. One function of the brain that repeatedly fails us is memory. Before attempting to understand the flaws located throughout the memory process, the basic types and systems of memory need to be understood. The two basic types of memory are short and long term. The first type of memory, short term, requires conscious thought to acquire and can only hold a limited amount of information that can only be kept for a duration of less than a minute (Smith, 2016). On the other hand, long term memory does not require conscious thought to acquire and can hold large amounts of information for extended periods of time (Smith, 2016). These types

Following encoding is the second memory system, storage, which is the action of maintaining memories in your brain (Gilbert, et al., 2015). The final memory system is retrieval, which is the action of bringing memories into the present (Smith, 2016). With a basic understanding of the different types of memory and how they are stored, we can now explore some ways these systems fail us, which are commonly known as the “Seven Sins of Memory.” The first sin of memory that Daniel Schacter discusses is transience. Transience happens to everybody and is the process of forgetting things as time passes (Gilbert, et al., 2015). For example, throughout tests conducted on native English speaking participants that had taken Spanish courses in school, many of the participants began to forget the content they had learned very rapidly over the first three years following the course and then continued to forget the content at a slower rate in the time following (Gilbert, et al., 2015). While the retrieval

A great example of this is bias, which is the process of past experiences, knowledge, or emotion influencing the way you remember something (Schacter 1999). The cause of bias could be considered short term memory, because current emotions could influence your memory, or long term memory because ultimately the memory altered has been held onto for an extended period of time. An example of bias could be somebody currently in a healthy relationship remembering a previous relationship as a bad experience because of their current feelings in their new relationship (Murray, 2003). While bias consists of changing your memories due to emotion, persistence is quite the contrary. Persistence is repeatedly remembering events that we wish we could forget (Smith, 2016). Since persistence involves recalling memories to current times, it is a part of long term memory and retrieval. An example of retrieval would be an athlete not being able to forget letting his team down in a very important competition (Murray,