The Seven Sins of Memory:
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REVIEW BY H.V. CORDRY
On Oct. 4, 1992, shortly after taking off from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, an Israeli El Al 747 cargo plane lost power and crashed into an 11-story apartment building, killing 39 residents and all four persons aboard the plane. News of the tragedy flashed around the world, and in Holland it dominated newscasts for days. Ten months later, a group of Dutch psychologists questioned people about the incident, asking specifically whether they had seen a videotape showing the plane losing altitude after takeoff and hitting the apartment building. More than half (55 percent) responded that they had seen the tape, and most who said they remembered it were able to recall highly specific details about the crash. What made the accuracy of their memories most remarkable, however, was that there had been no videotape of the tragedy. Those who thought they had seen it were victims of suggestibility. In his fascinating book The Seven Sins of Memory, Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter ranks suggestibility as the sin with the greatest potential to wreak havoc. More than any other, it subverts justice by distorting memory and fostering false memories in the minds of witnesses, sometimes leading to wrongful convictions and even false confessions. Schacter focuses on the highly publicized daycare cases of the '80s and '90s -- McMartin, Little Rascals and Fells Acres -- explaining how the form of questioning by police, parents and social workers led very young children to recall sexual abuse and torture that physical evidence did not corroborate. Despite these fallibilities, Schacter argues that none of memory's sins is wholly sinful, that each sin may be viewed as a mere by-product of useful features of memory. Even absent-mindedness, though it evokes the chilling specter of Alzheimer's disease, ordinarily results from the kind of "divided attention" that pervades our daily lives and from processes that allow us to operate on automatic pilot, as Schacter puts it, thereby freeing brain space for more important matters. As one would expect from the author of Searching for Memory (1996), a New York Times Notable Book, Schacter's examination of memory's slips, lapses and outright betrayals is as interesting as it is informational, with case histories, clear and concise summaries of research and fascinating accounts of what neuro-imaging is revealing about how we remember and why we forget. H.V. Cordry is a former college professor, now writing from his home in Kansas.
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