Daniel L. Scharter, Ph.D. Psychology Today June 2001
In this article it talks about the many forms of memory loss. The author divides it into seven fundamental transgressions or “sins”. He also talks of some of the extremes of memory loss of a normal person. Such as the story of Binjimin Wilkomirski, which tells about his childhood in a concentration camp from the point of view of a small child. More amazingly is that he was unaware of his traumatic childhood until it became aware to him in therapy. His vivid memories of the horrible terrors he faced as a child in concentration camps won him a place in the national spotlight. Only four years later Daniel Ganzfried, also a son of a Holocaust survivor, published a revealing article about the true Binjimin Wilkomirski who’s real name was Bruno Dossekker. He found out that Bruno was adopted and was living a safe life as a native of Switzerland during the Holocaust. We are now faced with the question of whether or no he is a liar. Scharter says probably not. He still strongly believes his recollections are real. This is just one very revealing example that our memory plays games with us of what is true and

Back to the seven sin. First Scharter talks about his first three sins; transience, absentmindedness, and blocking which are sins of omission. Omission is simply that we fail to bring to mind a desired fact. The first of these three sins are transience, which is the rapid delay of memory over time, which is guilty of most memory problems. This can also be illustrated by Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve. On to the second sin of memory loss which is absentmindedness. It is the interference between attention and memory were you become occupied because of distractions or worries your have. You just simply don’t realize what you are doing, so it is not stored in memory. Some very good example of this are putting your sunglasses on your head and then walking around looking for them or simply misplacing your keys. We have all experienced absentmindedness probably more that we care for or even more than we remember. The third sin is blocking. This is the forgetting of something that you know and is stored in your memory, that you should remember but you just can’t seem to put a grasp on it. You know that it is up there but you just can’t seem to retrieve it. For instance you are walking down the street and you recognize someone that you know, but you can’t seem to put a name to the face. Hours, days, or even weeks later out of no were you suddenly remember the name of that person you saw weeks earlier. It is extremely weird but it happens quite often to most of us.

In this article they go in depth on one of the most common sins, which is transience. They preformed an experiment to try to answer the following question. If I measure activity in a persons brain while they are learning a list of wo