Memory In General - The Seven Sins of Memory (Part II)

The Seven Sins of Memory 

I cannot fully recommend the book to the regular reader.  I learned a good deal from Schacter's book - some of that is in the paragraphs above and previous posts - but it is something more like a textbook than a summary of ideas for the general intelligent reader. It's not like it will be above their heads, but that it gets tedious. An example:

The book opens with a poignant story by Yasunari Kawabata, "Yumiura,"about an author who meets with a woman from years ago. She remembers much about their meeting when he visited her part of Japan, how they fell in love and he proposed marriage. He remembers none of this and is rather frantic listening to this calm woman pleasantly tell the story in some detail.  He is deeply troubled as he leaves and when he gets home looks over his notes, diaries, and correspondence from the time to try and find some clue that will unlock the memory for him. He discovers that there are none.  He has never been to this part of Japan (as he originally thought) and can see documentation that he was in other cities at the times in question. She has imagined the entire set of incidents.

I was intrigued because I had had several patients, all female with what we called erotomania, the belief that one is married or engaged to a famous (even if only locally) person.  I imagine they have changed the name at this point, as it sounds a bit insulting and is not fully accurate. The male equivalent presents differently, for the record. I pushed forward, looking for what research had been done, both before the original publication twenty years ago and since then, up until the updated edition last year. Nothing. Just the charming story. Checking back, I noticed what I had missed the first time, that it was fiction.

So what good is it, then? It is a poignant introduction to the topic that has no scientific value. What the chapter did contain was brief descriptions of the unbearably tedious and incremental types of research they do on memory.  They gave lists of ten words to college students, or seniors, or people who had had strokes. They asked them to memorise them, but sometimes they interfered with them and sometimes they didn't. They in four minutes, or four days, to list them.  Or they showed them fifteen words that included some previously listed and some new and asked which ones had been on the list. The designed the lists to be associated words or unrelated. A score of variations on "we gave them a list of words and then did this or that." There are other standard memory test designs, equally mind-numbing to follow.

I completely get it that these are the building blocks for memory research. One immerses oneself in such patterns and studies take on richer meaning and give ideas for further studies. Now we can do fMRIs while they are visualising or memorising or recovering from strokes. I don't fault in the least that this is the way a lot of the work simply has to be done, ins small increments.

I just have no interest in fighting through this stuff myself. My interest does not lie in understanding what is lacking in those who have damaged amygdalas. Give me the big picture about the varieties of people withing normal limits here. People who have experienced trauma and their memory oddities, sure.  Tell me what's happening there. I see those people, I know some. There are lots of those, and there are levels of trauma. But hippocampus damage? Please no.

Sometimes he does. But here I get even more nervous. Sometimes he hits on topics I already know something about, and while I never found him to be wrong, precisely, I did sometimes think "Not so fast. That's not the whole story about recovered memory, or implicit bias, or the various head-injured/stroke/dementia categories. Even here there is a fair bit of good information, it's just that...things are missing. Uncovering such things when an author hits something that I know makes be retroactively suspicious of the other things he has been telling me, about subjects I knew far less about. His last chapter may be a matter of taste. He speculates on larger issues of memory on the basis or recent research.  If you like your science very hard, you will find this frustrating, as a lot of this isn't nailed down. If you like exploring possibilities you may like it better.