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"Despite memory's obvious benefits, it can also let us down, said Daniel Schacter, PhD, longtime memory researcher and chair of Harvard University's psychology department, at an APA 2003 Annual Convention session honoring the publication of his book, "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). "Memory, for all that it does for us every day...for all the feats that can sometimes amaze us, can also be a troublemaker," said Schacter of his book, which describes the seven major categories of memory foibles being investigated by psychologists. However, noted Schacter, the same brain mechanisms account for memory's sins as well as its strengths, so investigating its negatives exposes its positives. "We shouldn't think of these fundamentally as flaws in the architecture of memory," he explained, "but rather as costs we pay for benefits in memory that make it work as well as it does most of the time." At the session, during which Schacter received the APA Div. 1 (Society for General Psychology) William James Book Award, he defined his book's seven sins. The first three are "sins of omission" that involve forgetting, and the second four are "sins of commission" that involve distorted or unwanted recollections."