December 09, 2003

Could all of you return the money I lent you?
posted by Gyan 20 years ago
  • Poor Alan Alda, so endlessly abused. Very interesting article though. I have memories of when I was young that I'm not sure are real memories of when I was 5 or memories of dreams I had when I was 5. Is there a difference?
  • Watching John Waters' Pink Flamingos was enough to turn me off the hard-boiled eggs.
  • Pink Flamingos turned me off to the song "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window". The Ludovico Technique, I suppose.
  • I wouldn't mind wiping out the memory of watching Pink Flamingos .
  • falconred: I have a memory of standing at the top of a steep hill and looking down it towards a harbour in a city. I've always thought it must be from a trip to Melbourne when I was about 2 years old. As far as I know, though, there's nowhere like that in Melbourne. I also thought I hated corn because my uncle forced me to eat a whole plate of it when I was small, and that never happened. So yeah, I know what you mean. Fascinating article, thanks Gyan. Imagine what this could mean for recovering memories of childhood abuse. There was a case here in Christchurch, NZ, where a male childcare worker at a creche was convicted of multiple counts of sexual abuse against the preschoolers in his care. Those children were questioned by parents and psychologists and their statements used in the case. Now those kids are forteen-fifteen and are coming forward to say that most of what they told people was invented memories, whether by them, the parents, the social workers or the psychologists. I think this article's really only proving something everyone's known but has been unwilling to admit for fear of invalidating someone's real memories.
  • Tracicle, the same thing happened in the US. Here's a case from Massachusetts that's been compared to the Salem witch hunt. The fear of overturning these convictions has not been invalidating the children's memories, but ruining political careers for everyone involved in the original case.
  • Politics should be defined as "the line reality can't cross".
  • This old SciAm article by the researcher mentioned in the link is pretty interesting too. Having done hundreds of experiments on tens of thousands of subjects, imagine how well trained her ability to plant false memories would be! I wonder how hard it would be to learn that skill? .. hee hee, ha, BWAH HA HA ha, err ahem.
  • False memory is a fascinating subject. As tracicle pointed out, it can be dangerous.
  • I'm sure I had something to add, but I forget what it was.
  • Wolof, you were going to tell us about that time you got locked in the howler monkey enclosure at the zoo overnight. Remember?
  • Some books on repressed/recovered memories: Herman's Trauma and Recovery Freyd's Betrayal Trauma Those are books I read for a course on Psychology of Trauma, and a large part of them is on the validity of recovered memory. Best course I took at uni, that.
  • The modern witch hunts; more on "recovered memory"; detailed recounting of a few cases, notably the one in which Janet Reno tried her damnedest to convict a 14-year-old boy for "molesting and abusing in Satanic rituals young children for whom he baby-sat": "Thanks to Ceci's testimony showing how the 'child abuse experts' had corrupted the children's testimonies, Reno's trip to the courthouse that day was wasted... Reno has never apologized for this aggressive prosecution, or even acknowledged that it was improper in any way."
  • Why do you love Satan so much, languagehat? ;p
  • Wolof, you were going to tell us about that time you got locked in the howler monkey enclosure at the zoo overnight. The poo-flinging was hellacious, the vittles poor.
  • And then ... at once, the gibbering stopped. A rancid stench filled the cage
  • I browsed through Amazon searching for the book The Myth of Repressed Memory which is mentioned in the article and I found a bunch of interesting one-star reviews. Most of them are of the Will-somebody-think-of-the-children? sort, but some give thoughtful criticism about the research done being biased toward healthy adults. I still believe that those critics are probably psychotherapists trying to justify their own jobs.
  • -1 Janet Reno. Awww...forget it.
  • That money was used for the Idahoanian struggle for freedom, and you'll not be seeing it again this side of judgement day! Oh, and thanks for the banana muffins.
  • Gah! *Idahonian*.
  • My ex-wife and I were volunteer "counselors" (not really counselors) at a large rape crisis center in the early nineties while the satanic-ritual abuse hysteria was at its peak. A good number of the professionals associated with the center were skeptical, although others were very credulous. My ex-wife, herself a victim of childhood sexual abuse, and myself personally felt that most recovered memories were suspect and almost all SRA claims were fabrications; but the culture at the time was such that this was not an acceptable position. Harvard's Daniel Schacter (www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dsweb/Home.html) is one of the leading memory researchers, and his book, "The Seven Deadly Sins of Memory" is very informative and I recommend it highly (even though the title is a bit lurid). People's intuition about the reliability of memory is very faulty. Society would be well served
  • From the article: Although brain-imaging techniques highlight some differences in patterns of brain activation when a person recalls a true as opposed to a false memory, these are statistical differences only. This brings to mind all sorts of sci-fi stories I've read (or did I?) as well as several films I've seen (so I think?) though Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--perhaps because I saw it so recently (right?). It's all so trippy. Like, I remember this one time, where I thought I was going through every thread in MonkeyFilter before I joined... *pauses* *checks back a few threads* Oh, crap.