Daniel L. Schacter's 'The Seven Sins Of Memory'

Memories are something we all own and is essential for living. Without memory we won’t be able to learn, remember the past, or even think about the future. However, even if one possesses memories, it is possible that they may not be entirely reliable. Some of the reasons for this doubt is: forgetting and disruptive memories. Some of these alterations are caused by numerous variables that will be explained in this paper. This paper will focus on those variables and how they play a role in shaping and affecting our memories.

Daniel L. Schacter introduced the flaws of memory in his book “The Seven Sins of Memory” that was published in 1999. He classified these seven flaws as: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. All seven sins are a form of forgetting: the

A widely known cause of forgetting is insufficient attention, or as Schacter would call it: absent-mindedness. It occurs when one fails to pay proper attention to something and therefore, resulting in not being able to encode the information properly. Another familiar type of forgetting is blocking. This occurs with a person when he or she is most of the time aware of the fact that, the information which he or she is trying to retrieve, is being blocked. Blocking occurs when we are desperately trying to retrieve information but fail to do so, even when knowing that one has been exposed to the answer before. For example, when one recognizes a person but does not remember their name. A way of retrieving this blocked memory is by being exposed to a retrieval cue that could trigger the recall. Some might be able to retrieve it after one single cue, but for others, it might take more than that. That particular state is called the