QnAs with Daniel Schacter

Abstract

Since time immemorial, the fallibility of human memory has fascinated intellectuals in many fields of human endeavor. In his book The Seven Sins of Human Memory , a popular tome of scholarly work aimed at a general audience, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Schacter, a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, described the vagaries of memory, including, by turns, its pixie-dust evanescence and surprising persistence. Over the years, Schacter has explored memory’s inherent pitfalls, such as its proneness to bias and misattribution, and enriched our understanding of its links to imagination, learning, and aging. He spoke to PNAS about his most recent work on the neural mechanisms behind the formation of true and false memories. Daniel Schacter. Image by Rose Lincoln. > PNAS:You have long studied the neural mechanisms underlying memory reactivation. What is memory reactivation? > Schacter:Memories of past experiences can become reactivated in response to various environmental cues while we are awake or asleep. We know from previous studies that reactivating memories can strengthen them, make them more accessible, and modify them with new information. Such modification …