The Woman Who Can't Forget by Jill Price Read Free Book Online Page B

from various sources.” Over time, this is one type of bias that I hope we can make serious headway in correcting.
    The most personally damaging memory mechanism, in which people’s memories turn against them, is known as persistence: people cannot forget disappointments or moments of shame in life, like failing a major test in school, or getting fired from a job, or being rejected by a lover. The rehearsal of these memories can cause great emotional harm, as when terrible memories like rape or abuse haunt people all their lives. The excessive replaying can even cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Schacter refers to one case of persistence that led to shocking consequences—that of baseball player Donnie Moore, who was a relief pitcher for the California Angels. He was, as Schacter writes, “literally haunted to death by the persisting memory of a single disastrous pitch.” Moore was brought in to finish off a game against the Boston Red Sox but ended up throwing a pitch that was hit out of the park for a game-winning home run. He ruminated about that pitch so persistently that he was driven into a terrible depression and ended up shooting his wife and then committing suicide by turning the gun on himself.
    Research in the field of positive psychology, often called the science of happiness, has also produced powerful results about the negative psychological effects of ruminating, particularly in the onset of depression. Those who are depressive are more likely to ruminate, and those who ruminate are often dragged into depression. A horrible irony about this finding is that ruminators often think that their intense attention to whatever bad experience they’re dwelling on will help them gain some valuable insights, when in fact, rumination tends to undermine critical thinking of that sort.
    Although persistence would seem to be similar to my own memory, I don’t think it is really the same as the kind of replaying that my mind does. My memory is not selective in that way, fixated on any particular event. For me, the least consequential moments persist alongside the most traumatic and influential. That’s not to say, though, that my most upsetting memories haven’t weighed especially heavily on me; they have, and they’ve thrown me into bouts of depression. It’s just that the mechanism seems quite different to me, as I also have all kinds of inconsequential memories popping into my head in the same way all the time.
    The ever-present nature of my memories about the slings and arrows of life makes me envy the way in which the last of the biases, which is called egocentric bias, distorts most people’s memories in ways that are self-flattering. People tend to credit themselves more for successes than for failures, for example, and to privilege their successes in their memories of their lives. Psychologist Shelley Taylor, who has done important work on this subject, refers to this as creative self-deception. At the heart of egocentric bias is the tendency to put oneself at the center of the action in life, thinking that so many things have to do with us when they may not really be about us much at all. For example, we tend to interpret people’s moods as having to do with our influence on them, when they may really be feeling that way because of something else entirely; or we tend to privilege our role in some joint task over the contribution of others. What is especially fascinating to me about the way that egocentric bias tends to distort our memories is that for most people, it ends up distorting things in their favor, so that they tend to “remember past experiences in a self-enhancing light,” as Schacter writes.
    Schacter argues that the “seven sins” have evolved over time because they are advantageous in many ways, or are the by-products of memory functions that have served us well. Through the long sweep of human history, they have