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1-Page Summary of The Seven Sins of Memory
Overview
We’ve all been in a situation where we’re rushing to get somewhere when suddenly, you forget something from the day before. You try to remember what it was that you forgot and why it’s so important. It could be as small as your keys or maybe even something more significant like an appointment with someone important. This is because of how our brains are designed; they have flaws that make us forget things easily.
In this passage, you’ll learn about the seven weaknesses of human memory. These faults are what make us human, but we can overcome them by using certain techniques and hacks to remember things better.
Big Idea #1: All memories are liable to fade and weaken over time, but there are ways to keep the memories you want.
We’ve all had embarrassing moments when we meet someone and realize that they’re familiar, but it takes a while to figure out why. It’s because our memories are transient – many of them disappear over time without us realizing it. This is demonstrated by an experiment conducted in California after O. J.’s famous trial verdict came down.
Researchers asked a group of students to describe how they learned about the trial outcome. Fifteen months later, only half could recall what happened that day, and three years later, this dropped to 30 percent.
This isn’t surprising, and the fact that our memories fade over time is something we’ve known for a while. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus developed the forgetting curve to show how memories degrade over time.
In this passage, the author talks about a study that he did on himself. He memorized some nonsense words and tested his memory after nine hours. After one month, 75% of the words were erased from his mind.
The good news is that there are techniques to combat transient memory loss. Memory techniques have been around for a long time, and the ancient Greeks developed mnemonic devices. The basic idea of mnemonics is to associate new concepts with places or numbers that are already meaningful to you. So, for example, if you meet someone named Bruce who’s muscular, imagine how he’d bruise you in a fight and make it vivid enough so that next time you see him your mind won’t forget about Bruiser!
Big Idea #2: Sometimes we fail to remember something because the memory never registered properly in the first place.
You might think that a person who can recall thousands of random words would never forget to pick up the milk from the store. However, this is not actually true—the two types of memory failure are different.
When you’re not paying attention to something, it means that you didn’t fully process the information. It’s partly your fault and partly due to other factors like stress or anxiety. Therefore, situations where you forgot something important are often just a sign of everyday frustrations at home or work.
A psychology experiment by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons shows how people can be so focused on one thing that they don’t notice another. The psychologists had participants count the number of passes in a basketball video, and then asked them if anything unusual happened. Only half said yes, even though a man dressed as a gorilla ran onto the court!
There are times when we forget things that we haven’t forgotten. The reason is that we don’t set up reminders to remind us of those things. The key to remembering something is setting an appropriate reminder so you can be reminded and then do it.
For example, it won’t help to have a piece of string tied around your finger if you can’t remember what the string is there to remind you of. Likewise, writing a detailed reminder in a notebook is useless if it’s not there when you need it.
