Daniel L. Schacter - How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: the Seven Sins of Memory

I N YASUNARI KAWABATAS 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 of Yumiura 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.

Kawabatas 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 pervasive 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 memorys imperfections, present a new way to think about them, and consider how we can reduce or avoid their harmful effects. Memorys 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 principal 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 family, and cope with the bewildering array of new communications technologies. How many passwords and PINs 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 youve forgotten your permanent number? I certainly have.

In addition to dealing with the frustrations of memory failures in daily life, the awful specter of Alzheimers disease looms large. As the general public becomes ever more aware of its horrors through such high profile cases as Ronald Reagans battle with the disorder, the prospects of a life dominated by catastrophic forgetting further increase our preoccupations with memory.

Although the magnitude of the womans 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 unspeakable terrors he witnessed as a young boy. His prose achieved such power and eloquence that one reviewer proclaimed that