Memory......

I thought the "The 7 Sins of Memory" was extremely interesting. I specifically liked the various research examples in the 7 different categories (such as switching people who were getting directions and seeing if the people giving the directions even noticed or the child who made up a detailed story of being lost in the mall after suggestion even though the event never happened - very intriguing). Sin # 2 - absent-mindedness, sounds like what happens when one doesn't reach "deep understanding" that we've been discussing in past classes. The misconceptions that we've also discussed when reading Bransford would fit into the bias "sin". I've, of coarse, already encountered misconceptions in past classes and will continue to encounter misconceptions in future classes. I wonder where dejavu would fit? Also, I've had times where I couldn't remember if something had really happened or if it had been a dream - I guess that would fit into misattribution? I'm not sure what I think about calling them "sins" especially since the author suggests not thinking of them as flaws. If you're going to refer to them as "sins" your going to think of them as flaws and in a negative manner. I'm also a little confused why the authors would use Clinton as an example - it seemed very unscientific and not backed by any research. Did he really have a superior memory? Did he later actually forget certain events or was it selective memory? I just thing that these last two points kind of take away from the paper.
I thought the overall concept behind "The Magical # 7" was interesting, too. There is a movie called "The Number 23" and the main character relates everything to the number 23 - his name, phone number, birthday, address, the color pink. It kind of reminded me of that. I always get skeptical with statistics. I've taken a few stat. classes and you can always manipulate the tests and numbers (not saying that all these researches did that, of coarse) but even scientific peer-reviewed papers can have incorrect stats. The research examples used to support the paper were confusing, I'd like to learn more about them to really understand where this "magical number seven" stems from.