The Haphazard Construction Of The Human Mind
Author: Gary Marcus
ISBN: 9780618879649
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

Sample Chapter

Chapter 2

M E M O R Y

Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn't. It simply
files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from
you — and summons them to your recall with a will of its own.
You think you have a memory; but it has you! - John Irving

MEMORY IS, I B E L I E V E , the mother of all kluges, the single factor
most responsible for human cognitive idiosyncrasy.

Our memory is both spectacular and a constant source of disappointment: we can recognize photos from our high school yearbooks decades later - yet find it impossible to remember what we had for breakfast yesterday. Our memory is also prone to distortion, conflation, and simple failure. We can know a word but not be able to remember it when we need it (think of a word that starts with a, meaning "a counting machine with beads"),* or we can learn something valuable (say, how to remove tomato sauce stains) and promptly forget it. The average high school student spends four years memorizing dates, names, and places, drill after drill, and yet a significant number of teenagers can't even identify the century in which World War I took place.

I'm one to talk. In my life, I have lost my house keys, my glasses, my cell phone, and even a passport. I've forgotten where I parked, left the house without remembering my keys, and on a particularly sad day, left a leather jacket (containing a second cell phone) on a park bench. My mother once spent an hour looking for her car in the garage at an unfamiliar airport. A recent Newsweek article claims that people typically spend 55 minutes a day "looking for things they know they own but can't find."'

Memory can fail people even when their lives are at stake. Skydivers have been known to forget to pull the ripcord to open their parachute (accounting, by one estimate, for approximately 6 percent of skydiving deaths), scuba divers have forgotten to check their oxygen level, and more than a few parents have inadvertently left their babies in locked cars. Pilots have long known that there's only one way to fly: with a checklist, relying on a clipboard to do what human memory can't, which is to keep straight the things that we have do over and over again. (Are the flaps down? Did I check the fuel gauge? Or was that last time?) Without a checklist, it's easy to forget not just the answers but also the questions.

Why, if evolution is usually so good at making things work well, is our memory so hit-or-miss?

(Continues...)