Daniel Schacter's 7 Sins Summary

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The basis of this article is that though our memory is extraordinarily powerful, there are also “sins” that make it fallible. The author of the article, Daniel L. Schacter, outlines seven of these “sins.” Along with a description of each sin, he also summarizes evidence and research on each of the sins. The first three of Schacter’s sins can be categorized under the broad label of forgetting. They are, transience, absent-mindedness, and blocking. Transience deals with the fact that our memories become less accessible over time, even when those memories were originally well-encoded. On the other hand, absent-mindedness occurs because sufficient attention was not given to information and so it was not completely processed. Blocking is when information that was encoded sufficiently is inaccessible for a time. Unlike the …show more content…

In the lectures for this course as well as in the textbook we learned that long-term memory has an infinite capacity and duration. Though information may become inaccessible (as seen in the sins of transience and blocking), once we properly learn information, it is in our long-term memory. While this can become a problem when we want to forget something and cannot, when we imagine what life would be like without this capability, it is evident that this capability is advantageous. We learned in the course that short-term memory has a limited capacity and duration. If long-term memories had these same limitations, we would constantly have to relearn information. Thus, while persistence may be irritating at times, like Schacter suggests, it is not a flaw in our system. I agree with Schacter’s assertion that this is true for the other sins of memory as

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