Discussing the article, "The Seven Sins of Memory," by Daniel L. Schacter

Our memory is a very important aspect of our lives that controls everything we do. Unfortunately, our memory isn’t like a tape recorder that picks up every detail. Our certainty of what we remember isn’t as reliable as we wish it was due to many factors. These factors are known as “The Seven Sins of Memory” which involve forgetting, distortions, and intrusive recollections. The three that involve forgetting are known as transience, absent-mindedness, and blocking; the three that involve distortions of memories are misattribution, suggestibility, and bias; lastly, the one sin that involves intrusive recollections and the one I will be discussing in more depth is persistence.
Persistence is having a memory that keeps reappearing that you’d rather forget. Persistence can either be small and insignificant or it can have a lasting and potentially harmful effect on someone. Has anyone had a song stuck in their head that started off as a catchy, but now it’s irritating and you can’t stop hearing it play on repeat in your mind? That would be a less harmful example of persistence. Persistence in a more mild way would be having PTSD which has a lasting effect on an individual.
Image result for ptsdPost Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, is a disorder that occurs because an individual experiences a rather traumatic event that causes stress on them due to the constant remembrance of that specific memory. These constant remembrances can cause phobias and even an anxiety disorder. These intrusive memories and being unable to forget is said by researchers to be “more disabling than forgetting” due to the mental effects. There are ways to try to suppress memories; however, they do not work like we’d wish them to. In a research to try to suppress memories, researchers worked with women with PTSD resulting from sexual abuse and women without PTSD but still had been sexually abused. They gave them a list of words to remember that weren’t related to trauma and then a list of trauma related words to forget. The women with PTSD remembered more of the trauma related words (the words that the researchers told them to forget) than the women without PTSD showing that these intrusive memories can also affect an individual’s control on encoding and retrieval of memories.
I have had experiences with persistence when it comes to insignificant memories that are only intrusive for a short period of time. However, the article didn’t give the example of guilt. Whenever I do something that wasn’t right or when there is a secret I am keeping that makes me feel guilty, that memory/secret keeps coming back to “haunt” me. Even though I don’t want to tell my secret, the guilt/memory gets the best of me by being intrusive and I end up spilling the beans. Everyone talks about how our memory is so bad and unreliable and causes so many problems when we get older, but this sin is the exact opposite and can cause more problems to our mental health than we ever realized.

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