In the April 3 issue of The New Republic, Jason Zengerle writes about Harvard psychology professor Daniel Schacter’s research into the fallibility of memory, summarized in his book, The Seven Sins of Memory. Professor Schacter is going to testify in Scooter Libby’s defense to explain how any misstatements Libby made to federal investigators could easily have been entirely legitimate memory lapses.
The TNR article specifically mentions “‘transience,’ the forgetting that occurs with the passage of time,” which can include actual distortion of what’s remembered.
This is relevant to this blog, as regular readers know, because I’m interested in how the vagaries of human memory might well have affected the stories recounted in the Bible.
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