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Fun fact: Suppressed/hidden/lost memories due to trauma that appear to re-surface through therapy are not a real thing, as previously thought (and still by some

• slater 11mo ago
  Gonna need some citations on that “fun fact”
  • blauditore 11mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy (especially the research section)
    • shadyKeystrokes 11mo ago
      [dead]
    • svnt 11mo ago
      That is extremely weak to nonexistent counter-evidence that seems to focus on supporting Loftus, who has put a lot of effort into the defense of her public persona. I don’t disagree that it is possible to manufacture memories but the evidence isn’t there to support your conclusion or the converse.
      • Aurornis 11mo ago
        Recovered-memory therapy (the topic of the Wikipedia article) is very clearly quack science and has been discredited. Some of the techniques used in the therapy include giving patients sedative-hypnotic drugs to put the patient in a waking dream-like state while the therapist asks leading questions to get them to "remember" an event. The same drugs they used are known to be associated with false memories, like when someone falsely recalls something from a vivid dream as having actually happened.
        • svnt 11mo ago
          It has fallen out of favor based on a lack of evidential support, for sure. It has not really been dismantled publicly scientifically, but mostly quietly, perhaps in order to protect its practitioners, perhaps because the research cannot currently be ethically conducted. I am not advocating for it, just stating the near total lack of substantive scientific evidence presented either in support or opposed.
    • ghurtado 11mo ago
      Claim: "modern cancer research is a scam" Proof: "colloidal silver has been used to attempt to cure cancer". Solid logic.
  • ghurtado 11mo ago
    People downvoting a request for supporting evidence is peak Hacker News.
    • fsckboy 11mo ago
      people demanding supporting evidence without expending any effort themselves is peak internet.
      • jjk166 11mo ago
        The onus of proof lies on those making a claim. If you're unwilling to back up what you say, don't say it.
        • nwienert 11mo ago
          In science. On a casual forum you have no obligation and I’d rather someone leave a short comment so I at least know, if I’m interested I’ll go look and verify myself.
        • fsckboy 11mo ago
          on a discussion board? no, there is no onus of proof, because nothing is riding on it, just as you don't need proof to reject the ideas. demanding citations is the favorite trick of people who want to waste your time precisely because they disagree with you and no matter what you come up with, they'll never give in. therefore, one should never give in to it. rather, doing your own research and contributing it to the discussion is the lifeblood of online communities.
          • jjk166 11mo ago
            > demanding citations is the favorite trick of people who want to waste your time precisely because they disagree with you and no matter what you come up with, they'll never give in. therefore, one should never give in to it. That's incredibly dumb. First, unless you are making a baseless claim, you have supposedly already done the research, so presenting evidence of your claim ought to not be any more of a burden on your time than making the claim was. Second, you don't need the other party to accept the evidence you present, particularly if they are disagreeing in bad faith. No one can use the "asking for evidence" trick if you have presented the evidence. Third, which is more efficient: having one person who made the claim present the evidence to back it up, or to make every single person who comes across the claim look up the evidence independently? Making baseless claims wastes everyone's time (and coincidentally is the actual favorite trick of those who want to waste your time because they disagree with you). Fourth, if you give up on doing things you ought to because you're worried there will continue to be assholes on the internet afterwards, you'll never do much of anything at all. Fifth, which type of comment do you prefer to read: the one that makes a claim without evidence which maybe you'll double check at some point if you have time, or the one that quickly gives you the evidence right there? Write the type of comments you like to read.
• layer8 11mo ago
  People can remember things that hadn’t re-entered their mind for decades. It certainly happened to me a number of times (completely trauma-unrelated and not actively elicited).
  • worldsayshi 11mo ago
    My guess is that long term memory recovery is inherently a reconstruction from the pieces that you have retained. So it is not unlikely to include dreamed up parts.
    • layer8 11mo ago
      The accuracy of recollection can certainly vary, but the point is that some information is retained long-term even when it isn’t made use of in the meantime. Of course one could argue that actually it is being made use of unconsciously, but I’m skeptical of that, given the relative irrelevance of the details that can be recollected. It’s also not that difficult to imagine that some memory-representing micro-structures in the brain just happen to be stable over decades even when they remain untapped.
    • Aurornis 11mo ago
      The debunked recovered memory therapy was something different: They would use different techniques and leading questions to try to get a patient to think they remembered something that may not have happened at all. Some of the techniques included hypnosis or even giving the patients (including children) sedative-hypnotic drugs before pressuring them with the leading questions. If they could eventually get the person or child to claim to have some memory of the event (after asking a lot of leading questions and maybe even drugging them) they considered it to be a recovery of the memory.
    • bpj 11mo ago
      This has been my experience as someone who has experienced childhood trauma, and what I've inferred from my therapist. He taught me that the memories I have are typically exaggerations of what happened and it's hard to pin down what truly happened. The only evidence I have that has any merit is my siblings can corroborate with similar experiences since it happened to all of us, and I'm sensitive to things related to these traumas. Almost every day I can feel the things that happened, and on my worst days these areas are much more sensitive. On top of that, I have legitimate memories that were not traumatic, but still related to the same traumas because said person attempted to encourage these activities throughout my young life on rare occasions. I didn't remember what happened as a kid, but I knew something wasn't right and I wasn't comfortable. It wasn't until I was almost 30 that I had my first "flashback" which was a fractured memory, I still remember it looked like a faded photograph in my mind, and it was accompanied by an extremely uncomfortable feeling. The re-surfacing memories aren't real in a sense, but in my case they aren't entirely fake either. I wonder if it's possible that things can be completely imagined with absolutely no basis what-so-ever in certain circumstances, and I also wonder how difficult it is to discern that. It seems to be a difficult concept to manage.
• anal_reactor 11mo ago
  Most people think that when their memory fails it's just the act of not remembering something, but misremembering something happens equally often, and completely making up shit also does happen. It's just like LLM hallucinations.
• bollocks9 11mo ago
  What about Dr. Jim Tucker’s two child psych cases, James Leininger and Ryan Hammons? One remembered memories of a WWII pilot named James Huston Jr. and the other a deceased Hollywood agent named Marty Martyn. Putting aside the reincarnation hypothesis for the moment, do you think the kids invented the details and coincidentally happened to match to a real person or were they fully coached? Maybe they didn’t get enough sleep or got too much sleep?
• elmomle 11mo ago
  The statement "there is evidence of black swans" does not justify the conclusion "every swan is black".
  • fsckboy 11mo ago
    if you specialize in looking for black swans, and you've looked for more black swans than anybody ever, and all the black swans you thought you'd found have turned out to be sooty white swans, people might be interested in reading about your experience and have their faith shaken that black swans actually exist. I'm reminded of the story of dragon sightings in Great Britain: after the printing press and newspapers and newspaper reporters chasing stories emerged, as news distribution out from city centers into rural areas increased, it seems dragons picked up and moved farther away, only being spotted in the hinterlands without news. You apparently would keep your mind open to the idea that dragons don't like the smell of newsprint as no other conclusion could be more plausible sheerly on the basis of logic?
    • musicale 11mo ago
      Dragons are smart, and wary of human civilization. They still remember St. George and his ilk.
• ghurtado 11mo ago
  > any memories "re-surfacing" in therapy are in fact newly created, You're saying that those memories are exactly the same as all the other memories. Every time you "recall" something, you are not pulling up some file that is always the same. You are actively recreating the memory. There's nothing "fun" or insightful about this, this mechanism has been known for a long time. Obviously it's not unique to psychotherapy. > may have been created Most things that "may" have happened do not warrant absolute statements such as "that's not a thing" (which, incidentally, is a particularly empty statement in any context, since every thing is a thing)
• DiscourseFan 11mo ago
  There are two types of repression, however. The notion that primarily repressed memories--say, those of being breastfed, of being potty trained--could ever resurface is bogus of course. But it is that original violence, first of being cared for, and then having that care taken away and even, in many cases, transforming into authoritarian violence in order to be socialized properly, that precipitates all other "secondary" repressions like Freudian slips, even screen memories or rationalizations. No, most people traumatized past the age of say, 5, won't readily forget it. But perhaps they will have a way of reconciling with that trauma in an unhealthy or not fully conscious manner (consider self-harming, or drug abuse, making up a narrative in order to stay with a partner who violently abuses them). And they will not readily connect their traumatic experiences with their unhealthy coping mechanisms. And we could say that the connection between unconscious behaviors and trauma, when revealed, could be considered a "re-surfacing." Even if I can't remember being breastfed, I know that I find the warm embrace of another's arm's comforting and soothing, and this perhaps relates to my original state of relaxation as a child in my mother's arms, for instance.
  • drdeca 11mo ago
    Why would it relate to your past experience of being held in your mothers arms, rather than to whatever inbuilt tendencies that lead one to respond well to being held in one’s mother’s arms while a baby? Like, if kissing is derived from impulses relating to breastfeeding (which is a hypothesis that, AIUI, is in good standing, though not the only one in good standing nor necessarily more favored than a couple others), I wouldn’t think that therefore someone who was only ever bottle-fed as a baby would therefore not get anything out of kissing. The appeal of “my lips on another person” should be there regardless, just as it was for the first time a baby is breastfed (though, of course, it is also a cultural thing: not all cultures have had kissing as a standardized way of expressing affection, so whether one grows up in a context where kissing plays a role, that probably also plays a part in whether one finds it appealing to have one’s lips on another person).
• dbspin 11mo ago
  The problem is not that memories can't be repressed. There's plenty of research demonstrating repression does exist as a defence mechanism. The problem is that even highly evocative memories can also relatively easily be falsified, or modified through elicitation and reframing. Since there's no neurological stenographer, there is no mechanism even in principle to identify the difference between the two. With potential consequences like the satanic panic of recovered and elicited memories of sexual abuse. That's what Elizabeth Loftus and others have shown, and shown so thoroughly that eye witness testimony should never be trusted.
  • saltcured 11mo ago
    As a counterpoint to this, I am replying here because I can't make myself write a polite response to the GPP. Yes, witness testimony is always potentially flawed. But knowing "some repressed memory recovery is false" does not justify saying that repressed memories are not a real thing. Repressed memories do happen. They do come back sometimes. When they do, they are just as valid as any normal memory that a person thinks they always had. I know because I had them myself. Mine were of trauma in the age range from 5-9. I had a high "ACE score" when I eventually looked into this. I did not have any therapy session prompting the recall, I just remembered them spontaneously around age 15 when I was empathizing with a schoolmate who told me about domestic violence. It was a sickening feeling to have this whole phase of my past come unlocked. Amazingly, it submerged into repression again. I next remembered it at about age 20. In between, I had years of basically not remembering/knowing that I had any of this trauma or that I had experience the earlier recall. They all came back together, again triggered by an empathetic moment in college. Again it was disorienting to have this whole aspect of my past reopen. At that later point, I confronted people who were around my childhood and got enough of a painful discussion, confession, and apology to know that these memories were not invented. I had other forms of childhood trauma that never submerged. I don't know why this one section did. I find it very offensive for someone to make broad statements that these phenomena do not exist.
    • eiginn 11mo ago
      This mirrors my experience as well of multiple instances over my life of repressing childhood trauma and some event or conversation suddenly bringing it back to the surface.
• pcthrowaway 11mo ago
  Sure it's a real thing for memories to surface that were previously buried. It's happened to me. If it happens in therapy, that doesn't mean the memories are "implanted". And not all memories lack the ability to validate them... for example, if you've forgotten someone's name, then remember it later, you can call out to them by their name to confirm that you've correctly remembered it. Memories tumble around in the brain all the time, not all memories are easy to access, but that doesn't mean they're inaccessible. The point that memories can also be implanted or fabricated during therapy is absolutely an important one, but dismissing the possibility for memories to resurface (and conflating any situation where this might happen with a specific type of discredited therapy) is needlessly reductive.
• agumonkey 11mo ago
  I beg to differ, or at least I'd need clarification, some people experience traumatic visions from what is assumed repressed memories (with or without therapy) It might be something that one might not understand if he/she doesn't live through it I guess
• bozhark 11mo ago
  Careful with this absolute assumption. The brain rationalizes. Though irrationally. Sometimes yes, created to validate, sometimes no, unlearns to disassociate
• layman51 11mo ago
  This idea of unconscious memories perhaps being a type of fantasy is also discussed in this article too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud%27s_seduction_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud%27s_seduction_theory
• DANmode 11mo ago
  I can see both existing, regardless of my interest in debating probability of incidence of each.