The Seven Sins of Memory The Seven Sins of Memory The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers is a book () by Daniel Schacter, former chair of Harvard University's Psychology Department and a leading memory researcher. The book revolves around the theory that "the seven sins of memory" are similar to the Seven deadly sins, and that if one tries to avoid committing these sins, it will help to improve one's ability to remember. Schacter argues that these features of human memory are not necessarily bad, and that they serve a useful purpose in memory. For instance, persistence is one of
Seven deadly sins sins such as restlessness and instability. Dante refined this definition further, describing acedia as the "failure to love God with all one's heart, all one's mind and all one's soul"; to him it was the "middle sin", the only one characterised by an absence or insufficiency of love. Some scholars have said that the ultimate form of acedia was despair which leads to suicide. Acedia is currently defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as spiritual sloth, which would be believing spiritual tasks to be too difficult. In the fourth century, Christian monks believed acedia was not primarily caused