Need to Know More About How We Remember – and Forget?

By Susan Miner, Education Director, Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum

As a museum educator I have often wished for a sure-fire way to stimulate visitors to absorb and retain what the museum works so hard to convey in our exhibits and programs.  As an aging learner myself, I wish for a reliable way to gain and retain the learning I need and want in my life.  If you share either or both of these motives, you may enjoy knowing about the work of Dr. Daniel L. Schacter, a noted research psychologist at Harvard University who will be a panelist at a session at the AAM annual meeting in Boston on April 28, 2006, and whose books provide a provocative look at how our brains function and malfunction in the memory department.

Dr. Schacter’s groundbreaking book, Searching For Memory:  The Brain, The Mind, and the Past, appeared in 1996, winning the New York Times Book Review  “Notable Book of the Year” award.  In this book, Dr. Schacter summarizes a century of memory research right up to recent neuro-imaging studies, illustrating each chapter with original art and everyday experience that exemplify both the power and the fragility of human memory.  What makes the book so valuable to me, as an educator, are not the anecdotal reviews of patients or artists whose experiences recount the brain’s memory foibles, fascinating as these are, but rather the conclusions that Dr. Schacter draws from them about the structure and function of the brain itself.  His encyclopedic review of both clinical and laboratory studies, including his own work with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans, sketches the brain landscape we all travel as memory guides and misguides us through life.

In 2001 Dr. Schacter published another New York Times Notable Book award-winning volume, The Seven Sins of Memory:  How the Mind Forgets and Remembers.  Praised by reviewers and scientists, including 2000 Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel, MD, the book explains modern science’s insights into the biological workings of both memory and forgetting.  Dr. Schacter describes how the seven memory “sins” of transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence occur as a result of their close connection to parallel “virtues” of memory.  Again he cites examples from literature, case studies, experiments, and recent news events that relate the scientific findings to common experience. This analysis of memory’s lapses serves both to remind us of the innate nature of memory loss and to help us understand and forgive our own “memory missteps.”

I invite those of you who will be attending the next AAM annual meeting to hear and discuss Dr. Schacter’s presentation at the session titled Mind, Memory, and Museum Experience:  Today’s Brain Research and Tomorrow’s Museum on Friday, April 28, 2006, at 9:00 am.  The panelists hope that it will be part of an ongoing dialogue about creating and understanding lasting memories of museum learning experiences.