ABSTRACT

Memory failures are common in everyday life. In ancient Egypt, Greece, India, and the Roman Empire, memory problems were regarded as so annoying that people prayed to the gods for help people with these problems. Not long after the founding of scientific psychology, Colgrove (1899) wrote an article in the American Psychologist about a variety of memory failures that people had reported to him. He noted that “a young lady went to telegraph for an umbrella left on a car; she had been holding it over her head for 30 minutes. A lady walked into a parlor with a $10 bill in one hand, a match in the other. She put the bill in the stove and saved the match. A man picked up a pebble and put it in his pocket; took out his watch and threw it into the ocean. A boy returned from the store three times to find out what his mother wanted. A minister became absorbed in a book and forgot that it was Sunday. A man walked home and left his horse in the village all night. The same man went home from church and left his wife.”