Daniel Lawrence Schacter (born June 17, 1952) is an American psychologist. He is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research has focused on psychological and biological aspects of human memory and amnesia, with a particular emphasis on the distinction between conscious and nonconscious forms of memory and, more recently, on brain mechanisms of memory & brain distortion.

Professor Schacter’s research uses both cognitive testing and brain imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Schacter has written three books, edited seven volumes, and published over 200 scientific articles and chapters. His books include: Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (1996); Forgotten ideas, neglected pioneers: Richard Semon and the story of memory. (2001);^[1] The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (2001).

In The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, Schacter identifies seven ways (“sins”) that memory can fail us. The seven sins are: Transience, Absent-Mindedness, Blocking, Misattribution, Suggestibility, Persistence, and Bias.

In addition to his books, Schacter publishes regularly in scientific journals. Among the topics that Schacter has investigated are: Alzheimer’s Disease, the neuroscience of memory, age-related memory effects, and issues related to false memory. He is widely known for his integrative reviews, including his seminal review of implicit memory in 1987.

In 2012 he said in the interview to the American Psychologist journal that our brain is like time machine, or to be precise, it works as virtual reality simulator. He also said that our brain can imagine the future but it have difficulty in retracting the past.

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