Do you ever feel like you can’t remember anything; your homework, your lunch, your own phone number? This is actually more common than you think, and you probably aren’t losing your mind.
Daniel L. Schacter, a psychologist at Harvard University, wrote a paper based on his research on memory entitled, "The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience." This paper has been heavily cited in the field of memory and cognition and explains the faults of the human memory in simple terms.
Transience refers to when memory fades and retrieval gets harder. This can happen more rapidly than you might think (in a matter of seconds or minutes). This is why it’s so hard to remember the phone number or email address that someone just told you. Repeating the important information over and over in your head, or writing it down immediately after you hear it has proven helpful.
Absent-Mindedness happens when you aren’t paying adequate attention to the environment or other stimuli. The information is only shallowly encoded and doesn't maintain a good, solid grasp on your memory. This can happen when meeting someone new and trying to remember their name. Next time you meet someone, notice the color of their eyes and repeat “Hi, [insert name here]!” Adding these details will help to encode new information into your memory.
Blocking occurs when there are cues related to a sought after piece of information but you cannot retrieve it. This is also known as the Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon, when you are desperately trying to remember something, but can’t quite verbalize it. Studies have shown that priming and probing will inhibit what you are actually looking for. When this happens to you, the best thing you can do is to stop thinking about it. It’s more likely to come back to you when you're thinking about something else.
Misattribution is when information gets attributed to the wrong person, event, or source. This can include making someone else's ideas your own by mistake, or making certain details up all together. Perhaps, making lists about who did what when will help you to keep all the details straight.
Suggestibility is the tendency to incorporate information provided by others as implanted in your own memory. This is a common phenomenon that occurs in interrogation rooms and result in false confessions. So if you ever find yourself in an interrogation room, you better differentiate between what the police are telling you occurred and what you actually know to be true.
Bias memory errors occur when pre-existent beliefs distort memories. It’s easy for you to believe that you took a political stand or spoke your mind on a topic that you are passionate about. However, this passionate drive might lead you to believe that you argued your point better than you actually did. You can’t always be right or the winner of an argument. I guess the best advice would be to be realistic about how forceful your speech or actions really were in the moment.
Persistence refers to reoccurring memories of a thought or event that one would prefer to forget. This is the classic example of not being able to stop thinking about that stupid thing you did Friday night, or that test you failed. Try to distract yourself to get your mind off of it. From experience, I know this is easier said than done. Ugh.
