now along comes a study that says I should doubt them. Good news? give it 6 months and they will change their minds.
This information isn’t all new. One of the issues is that until recently (and still, in many circles), any kind of study that in any way supported the notion of “False Memory Syndrome” was lumped together with the “False Memory Syndrome” Foundation, which was set up by a person accused of molesting his daughter, who claimed to have recalled repressed memories during therapy. The ‘Syndrome’ itself was as much generated as a potential criminal defence as the result of psychological study.
That movement lost a lot of credibility because of the obvious potential motives of its founders, and the study and discussion of the accuracy of traumatic memory became sharply divided between False Memory supporters, and trauma survivor supporters.
However, knowing that our memory is often
unreliable is not a new thing. Criminologists have been concerned about it for yonks.
We also know that there was a wave of alleged satanic cult abuse recalled by patients with repressed memories in the US in the 1980s that had some uncomfortable hallmarks of social hysteria, and not much in the way of substantive evidence that there was a freakishly populace underground of satanic cults operating thick and fast across the country.
So too has there been issues of recovered false memories attributed to certain therapeutic approaches, such as the combination of hypnosis and IFS, although much of that data is now the subject of legal confidentiality agreements between the dodgy therapists and the patients who accused them of implanting false memories. That small crisis didn’t help the concept that recovered traumatic memories are reliable.
The
good news is that to counter the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s creation of this alleged new ‘syndrome’, there was a proliferation of studies into the accuracy of traumatic memories generally. A lot of those studies indicated that
yes, traumatic memories are
stored differently by the brain to other memories, and where those memories can be verified by external sources (such as contemporaneous hospital records), repressed memories can be freakishly accurate - sometimes including levels of verifiable detail that you might think somewhat impossible or superhuman.
We know for absolute certain that the way our brains store and retrieve information? Is incredibly complex, influenced by all manner of internal and external issues, and oftentimes not completely accurate. Far from recording little historical movies in our minds, a memory of a single event can be broken up into a myriad of little peices all stored in different ways by the brain (smells go over here, taste of the birthday cake goes over there, names of people in attendance go in the bin, etc), and depending on the data, the brain, your life experience, your health, and on and on, the accuracy of each piece of memory may be more or less reliable than the other parts - it was a delicious blue birthday cake, but it did not taste like pineapple. Fascinating area to read about, so long as you don’t need rock solid answers to all the hundreds of questions we have about memory and the human brain.
