In Anatole France’s book Penguin Island, the chapter called “The Dragon of Alca” is immensely interesting. It is about a frightful dragon who supposedly had ravaged the Penguin people, a peaceful group who ordinarily inhabited Alca in tranquillity. One day a beautiful maiden, Orberosia, disappeared. At first, her absence caused no uneasiness because she had often been carried off by men who were consumed by their love for her. But when she did not return, the Penguin people feared that the dragon had devoured her. Later, a young orphan and several animals also disappeared, providing proof of the existence of the dragon. The village elders finally assembled to figure out what to do about the terrible circumstances. They called together all Penguins who had seen the dragon during the disastrous night and asked them:
“Have you noticed his form and his behavior?”
And each answered in his turn:
“He has the claws of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the tail of a serpent.”
“His back bristles with thorny crests.”
“His whole body is covered with yellow scales.”
“His look fascinates and confounds. He vomits flames.”
“He poisons the air with his breath.”
“He has the head of a dragon, the claws of a lion, and the tail of a fish.”
And a woman of Anis, who was regarded as intelligent and of sound judgment and from whom the dragon had taken three hens, deposed as follows:
“He is formed like a man. The proof is that I thought he was my husband, and I said to him, ‘Come to bed, you old fool.’ ”
Others said:
“He is formed like a cloud.”
“He looks like a mountain.”
And a child came and said:
“I saw the dragon taking off his head in the barn so that he might give a kiss to my sister Minnie.”
And the Elders also asked the inhabitants:
“How big is the dragon?”
And it was answered:
“As big as an ox.”
“Like the big merchant ships of the Bretons.”
“He is higher than the fig-tree under which you are sitting.”
“He is as large as a dog.”
Questioned finally on his color, the inhabitants said:
“Red.”
“Green.”
“Blue.”
“Yellow.”
“His head is bright green, his wings are brilliant orange tinged with pink, his limbs are silver grey, his hind-quarters and his tail are striped with brown and pink bands, his belly bright yellow spotted with black.”
“His colour? He has no colour.”
“He is the colour of a dragon.”
In this passage Anatole France said much about his view of memory; namely, that people differ in what they think they remember. Each individual is unique. Each is the product of his or her inheritance and environment. Each has a unique memory. Even identical twins who have lived in what seems like identical environments have different experiences and thus different memories.
Memory is imperfect. This is because we often do not see things accurately in the first place. But even if we take in a reasonably accurate picture of some experience, it does not necessarily stay perfectly intact in memory. Another force is at work. The memory traces can actually undergo distortion. With the passage of time, with proper motivation, with the introduction of special kinds of interfering facts, the memory traces seem sometimes to change or become transformed. These distortions can be quite frightening, for they can cause us to have memories of things that never happened. Even in the most intelligent among us is memory thus malleable.
Three myths about Sigmund Freud’s life are widely accepted: that he lived all his life at the cutting edge of poverty; that he suffered continually because of discrimination against Jews, including being denied university appointments; and that he was ignored and neglected by Viennese physicians and others in his intellectual community.
Whether these myths are true or distortions has been the subject of great debate. Some deny the myths, alleging instead that Freud made good money as a doctor, that he was not discriminated against until very late in life when Hitler drove him into exile, and that he achieved enormous recognition and academic honors.
What is most interesting about these myths is that Freud himself believed them. Not only did he invent them, he publicized them. Throughout his letters, he stressed them; obviously they were important to him. Why? One explanation that has been advanced is a Freudian one: The myths are Freudian slips.1
According to Peter Drucker, who knew Freud’s family, Freud suffered from “poorhouse neurosis,” the secret and suppressed obsession with money. The poorhouse neurosis shows itself in a continual fear of ending up poor and a constant nagging worry about not having enough. His own neurosis has been used to explain why he could not notice that his parents were actually comfortably middle class and that he himself was living quite a comfortable life. This was simply repressed.
As to the complaints that he was the victim of anti-Semitism, these too covered up another fact; namely, his inability to tolerate non-Jews. He could not admit, especially to himself, that he found the non-Jew “irksome, difficult, a stranger, and an irritation.” He dealt with this conflict by coming to believe that it was they who were rejecting him.
And finally, he complained that he was ignored by Viennese physicians. In fact, they discussed him, doubted him, and rejected him but did not ignore him. But this was too painful for Freud to accept, so he covered up his belief by suggesting that they were ignoring him.
Others in Freud’s time managed to distort their memories similarly. Many doctors in the Nazi hierarchy have been studied by Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who asked himself how these doctors could possibly continue to regard themselves so favorably, given what they had done. Could they possibly have forgotten the terrible things they perpetrated? Lifton has concluded that they use a very effective form of self-delusion called “middle knowledge.” Middle knowledge is a form of knowing and not knowing at the very same time. One doctor involved in shipping large amounts of cyanide to the Nazi death camps was genuinely shocked when told the cyanide had been used to exterminate people. Lifton commented: “He had worked very hard not to know.”2
This brings to mind the term Pentimento, the title of a book by Lillian Hellman and a way of referring to a painter who paints over a painting, as if he had repented or changed his mind. Even so, part of the original painting, like memories, may show vaguely through the overlay.
The alleged distortions in portions of Freud’s memory may seem unusual, but they are not. The same sorts of distortions occur when people’s memories are tested in a controlled laboratory situation. A classic example is the case where subjects were shown an illustration of several people on a subway car, including a black man with a hat and a white man with a razor in his hand. Using the method of serial reproduction where one person describes the picture to another, who describes it to another — much like the childhood game of “telephone” — two investigators found that the razor tended to migrate in memory from the white man to the black man. One person reported, “This is a subway train in New York headed for Portland Street. There is a Jewish woman and a Negro who has a razor in his hand. The woman has a baby or a dog. The train is going to Dyer Street and nothing much happened.”3 How does someone create so detailed an image? And why do people remember the razor in the hands of the black man? In this case, stereotypes are affecting what they see and remember.
When we try to remember something that happened to us, these sorts of “constructive” errors are common. We can usually recall a few facts, and using these facts we construct other facts that probably happened. We make inferences. From these probable inferences, we are led to other “false facts” that might — or might not — have been true. To paraphrase C. S. Morgan, we fill up the lowlands of our memories from the highlands of our imaginations. This process of using inferences and probable facts to fill in the gaps of our memories has been called “refabrication,” and it probably occurs in nearly all of our everyday perceptions. We supply these bits and pieces, largely unconsciously, to round out fairly incomplete knowledge.
We fill in gaps in our memory using chains of events that are logically acceptable. There are so many real-life illustrations of this to choose from. For example, a taxi traveling on a busy street makes an emergency stop. A passenger in the taxi sees that a red Buick in front has stopped abruptly, its right-hand door is open, and an elderly man is lying unconscious on the street. The passenger assumes that the man either fell or was thrown out the door of the Buick and remembers seeing this happen. In fact, the driver of the Buick had stepped on his brakes suddenly so as to avoid hitting the older man who had wandered into the intersection. The collision was unavoidable and the man was knocked to the ground. The only thing the passenger actually saw was the unconscious man lying on the ground and the open door of the Buick. These fragments were then integrated into a logical sequence and a new “memory” was created. Our biases, expectations, and past knowledge are all used in the filling-in process, leading to distortions in what we remember.
These distortions force us to ask a fundamental question. Although it may seem as if a person has forgotten some important idea (like Freud’s “forgetting” his financial situation, or people “forgetting” that it was a white man who had the razor), have they truly forgotten it? Is there any way in which we could get a person to become aware of these “forgotten” facts? Are they there to be found? Or are they lost?
Few people would deny the existence of the very prevalent experience that we call “forgetting.” This is the common occurrence of having facts, events, and details in our memory become less available as time passes. It is obvious that there are items we once knew that seem to be forgotten; they cannot be recalled. Yet a fundamental question remains to be answered: Does forgetting mean that the items are irretrievably lost? Or have they simply been overlaid with other material so that they cannot be found? The notion that they have been overlaid suggests that the door to memory could be unlocked, if one could only produce the key, and the crucial memory would then come tumbling out.
Freud, whose private medical practice predominantly attracted individuals suffering from a variety of “nervous disorders,” is perhaps one of the best known individuals to put forth the view that memory is in some sense permanent. In treating his patients, Freud thought it necessary to trace his patients’ symptoms — such as tremors, tics, and paralysis — back to more remote memories, to the early and seemingly conmon amnesia that covers early childhood up to about the age of five. In order to understand a particular hysterical symptom, Freud argued, one must reach back into the earliest years of childhood. He reasoned that these early experiences, typically forgotten, must have been crucial. By forgotten, Freud did not mean that these memories were lost forever. Rather, in his classic work, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he claimed that
. . . all impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in all the forms which they have adopted in their further developments. . . . Theoretically every earlier state of the mnemonic content could thus be restored to memory again, even if its elements have long ago exchanged all their original connections for more recent ones.4
Despite his preoccupation with nervous patients, Freud observed that everyone suffers failures of memory. Repressed traces of memory suffer no change, he argued, even over very long periods of time. A wise commentator on Freud reminds us of a clinical anecdote from the early nineteenth century: An illiterate young woman had a seizure of “nervous fever” during which she could recite at length in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Her physicians were puzzled until they discovered that many years before, the young woman had been a servant in the household of an elderly Protestant pastor. It had been the custom of this pastor to pace up and down a hallway next to the kitchen reading aloud to himself from one of his favorite books. Apparently the young woman had absorbed these sounds, even though for her they had no meaning, and under the stress of her mental illness they had emerged from the recesses of her mind. This anecdote gave support to the thesis that “all thoughts are in themselves imperishable.”5 Freud held that our impressions — even those from infancy — have never really been lost but are “only inaccessible and latent, having become part of the unconscious.”6
Is there anything to this idea that all thoughts are imperishable, that no impressions are ever really forgotten? Is it common for people to believe in this idea, or were Freud’s ideas unusual?
Not too long ago I conducted an informal survey to find out what people believe about the permanence of memory.7 I asked 169 individuals from various parts of the United States to give their views about how memory works. These people had varied occupations; while some of them had had some formal training in the field of psychology, most had not. Some were lawyers, some were secretaries, some were taxicab drivers; others were physicians or philosophers. There were a few fire investigators, and even an eleven-year-old child. Each person was asked whether they agreed with:
1) Everything we learn is permanently stored in the mind, although sometimes particular details are not accessible. With hypnosis, or other special techniques, these inaccessible details could eventually be recovered; OR
2) Some details that we learn may be permanently lost from memory. Such details would never be able to be recovered by hypnosis, or any other special technique, because these details are simply no longer there.
They were also encouraged to offer comments supporting their choice.
I found that about three-quarters of these individuals chose answer number one — that is, they indicated a belief that information in long-term memory is there, but cannot be retrieved. Most of the rest chose answer number two; a few people could not make a choice.
Why do so many people believe in the permanence of memory? The most common reason is some personal experience usually involving the recovery of an idea about which the person had not thought for quite some time. For example, one person wrote: “Sometimes I will have a thought, out of nowhere, about a person whom I have not thought about for a long long time.” Another wrote: “Just this past week, I was reading a book about Japan and I began thinking about the trip I took there a long time ago. I remembered the time I took a taxi to the Mitsukoshi Department Store. Then I took a walk down Ginza Street and saw some of the finest shops I’d ever seen before. It has been years since I thought about that trip and it seemed that I could remember it as if it were yesterday.” A third person: “I’ve experienced and heard too many descriptions of spontaneous recoveries of ostensibly quite trivial memories which seem to have been triggered by just the right set of a person’s experiences.”
In spontaneous memory recovery, facts or details that appear to have been forgotten reappear spontaneously. Spontaneous recoveries can be striking phenomena and psychologists have wished they could study them. Unfortunately, this is very difficult since the experimenter might be forced to wait for a long time before a spontaneous recovery happens. So psychologists have instead tended to do experiments in which particular cues are provided in an attempt to recover certain memories. Typically some material is given to subjects who are then asked to recall it. Those given cues generally recall more than those who are not. But when people who were not originally given the cues later received them, they too could recall additional material. The additional material must have been stored in memory, but it could not be retrieved without a special retrieval cue. In other words, the material was available in memory, but not accessible. Experiments such as these indicate that retrieval cues are instrumental in eliciting desired material from memory. Such recovery, whether spontaneous or prompted, constitutes evidence for some people that memories are stored permanently.
Occasionally people supported their belief in permanence with reference to the work on electrical stimulation of the brain. It has been reported that stimulation of certain parts of the brain can lead to the recovery of a long-forgotten memory. Sometimes people offered a comment about hypnosis, or about repression, or about truth drugs, or even about reincarnation to support their belief in the permanence of memory.
Can brain stimulation, hypnosis, truth drugs, or other artificial means unlock the library of our minds? These phenomena seem to support rather impressively the belief that information, once in LTM, is permanently stored. Careful evaluation of the evidence in each case, however, raises substantial doubts. As we shall see, reports of “memories” that occur, either spontaneously or as a result of such memory probes as electrical stimulation, hypnosis, or drugs, may not be memories of actual events at all. Rather, there is good reason to believe that such reports may result from reconstruction of fragments of past experiences or constructions created at the time of report that bear little or no resemblance to past experience. The unlocked memories prove as subject to distortion as memories naturally recalled.
No one would deny that it is possible to recover memories that appear to have been forgotten. This happens. But it does not constitute evidence that all memories are recoverable. It is plausible that we have some memories that are recoverable and other memories that are not. When something happens in life, we generally store fragments of the experience in memory. It is reasonable that some of these fragments may be altered by new experiences that we have later on.
Most of the anecdotes that suggest impressive persistence of memory never receive any independent verification. In cases in which there have been attempts to verify a memory, sometimes an actual event matches recollection, but other times the verification reveals that people are generating not memories of true events but fanciful guesses, fantasies, or plain confabulations.
This sort of phenomenon has been demonstrated in studies where people are shown films of everyday events. Later on, the people get some new information about the event, usually presented in a fairly subtle way. For example, after looking at a film of a traffic accident, people have been asked a question such as: “How fast was the car going when it ran the stop sign?” or “How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road?”8 People who are asked questions that mention these objects or details later come to tell you that they have actually seen those objects or remembered those details. People will say that they saw the stop sign or saw the barn, when the stop sign was really a yield sign and no barn existed at all. This seems to happen because the information in the questions, whether true or false, can become integrated into the person’s recollection of the event, thereby supplementing that memory.
But the new information can do more than add to a recollection. It can also alter or transform the recollection. In a clear demonstration of this sort of transformation, people looked at a series of slides depicting successive stages in an accident involving an automobile and a pedestrian. A red auto was traveling along a side street toward an intersection at which there was a stop sign for half of the traffic and a yield sign for the remaining traffic. The slides showed the auto turning right and knocking down a pedestrian who was crossing at the crosswalk.
After looking at the slides, everyone answered some questions about them. Some people were asked, “Did another car pass the red car while it was stopped at the stop sign?” Others were asked the same question with the words stop sign replaced by yield sign. This means that some people got a question with correct information while others got a question with incorrect information. Later, people were tested for their memory of the sign that they had seen. The correct information helped their memory. But, interestingly, the incorrect information hurt. In one case, over 80 percent of the people who got incorrect information were wrong on the final test. They told us they had seen the slide that corresponded to what they had been told rather than what they had actually seen.
In one final case, people saw a film of an accident and then answered some questions, including: “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” The people came back a week later and answered a few more questions, one of which was “Did you see any broken glass?” There was no broken glass in the film, but those who had earlier heard the word smashed were more likely to tell us that they had seen the nonexistent broken glass.
Why does this happen? As we go through life we take in information from our environment. After an accident, we might take in some fragments from the experience. When an investigator comes along and asks: “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” a new piece of information is supplied; namely, that the cars “smashed” into each other. When these two pieces of information are integrated, the person has a memory of an accident that was more severe than in fact it was. Since broken glass is associated with a severe accident, the person is more likely to “remember” that broken glass existed.
Demonstrations like these tell us that false information can be introduced into a person’s recollection. It can add to the memory (as in the case of the barn) or it can actually transform the memory (as in the case of the traffic sign). Take a person who sees a stop sign, is later told it was a yield sign, and now claims to have seen a yield sign. What happened to the stop sign in memory? Certain studies that we might conduct could illuminate the issue of whether the details stored at the time of the event are in memory but simply temporarily unavailable or whether they are truly altered by information that comes in later. These studies could convincingly show that the original event remained intact. Any technique that pulled the original stop sign out of memory would tell us that it has been there. But studies cannot prove that an alteration has occurred and the original memory has been destroyed.
Suppose we used the strongest possible technique to induce a person to produce a particular memory. If the person failed to do so, we have not proved that the original memory is altered, for it can always be argued that we have not used a sufficiently strong technique. However, if we try every available technique to get at the original memory, and all of them fail to work, it would be reasonable to speculate that the original memory may have been altered. This position would be at least as plausible as the speculation that the memory is there but temporarily unavailable.
Psychologists have tried inventing strong techniques for digging deep into memory. In some cases nothing has worked. In these studies, an individual sees one object, say a stop sign, and is made to believe that he or she saw another object, say a yield sign. During a later test, pictures containing the two different signs have been shown and many people pick the yield sign. These people choose the sign that they heard about later, even though the truth — the true sign — is staring them in the face. Paying people in order to motivate them to do better does not seem to help. People who were offered as much as twenty-five dollars for a correct response still stuck to the sign that they heard about after the event was over. Other psychological tricks similarly failed to produce the original memory.
Even hypnosis, thought by many to have special powers in terms of getting at buried memories, doesn’t work. Psychologist Bill Putnam showed people a videotape of an accident involving a car and a bicycle. Afterward some people were hypnotized while others were not. The hypnotized people were told that under hypnosis it would be possible for them to see the entire accident again just as clearly as they had seen it the first time, only this time they would be able to slow it down or zoom in on details if they chose to. But the hypnotized people made more errors and were more susceptible to leading questions than their unhypnotized counterparts. The study showed that hypnosis does not reduce retrieval difficulties; it does not allow people to retrieve a true memory. Quite the contrary, people appear to be more suggestible in the hypnotic state and more easily influenced. Suggesting some detail, like a license plate, when it could not possibly have been seen, not only induced hypnotized people to say they had seen it, but also led them to offer partial descriptions of the license number. One person said it was a California plate beginning with W or V, and this obviously made-up information was not given under any duress. Suggesting another detail, that the major character’s hair was blond when it was actually black, caused hypnotized people to “remember” blond hair. Showing these people the videotape again upset them. One person said, “It’s really strange because I still have the blond girl’s face in my mind and it doesn’t correspond to her [pointing to the woman on the videotape]. . . . It was really weird.”
In sum, many attempts to pull out an original memory after it seems to have been changed have failed. This could mean that the memory can be altered or transformed by events that take place after the memory has originally been stored. New information to which a person is exposed seems to replace irrevocably the original information in the person’s brain. This means that many of our memories are quite fragile. Whenever a memory for an event is called to consciousness, the potential appears to be there for substitution or alteration to occur. Memory seems not to be permanent. Rather, we have a mechanism for updating memory that sometimes leaves the original memory intact, but sometimes does not.
When does the original memory stay and when does it go? This depends completely on the type of memory. Most people know that Jacqueline Onassis was once named Jacqueline Kennedy. We did not lose the original information when we learned the new name. But this is because in our society many women undergo a name change in accord with their marital status. Our memory “knows” that it is possible to have an old name and a new name for any given individual. But, in many circumstances in life, it is logically impossible for an object to have two properties simultaneously. An automobile that was involved in an accident stopped at either a stop sign or a yield sign, but it did not stop at both. A shirt worn by a thief was not simultaneously green and yellow. In such instances, the most economical procedure may be to dismiss one memory in favor of another, much as a computer programmer will irrevocably destroy an old program instruction when a new one is created.
The implication of the notion of nonpermanent memory should give pause to all who rely on obtaining a “truthful” version of an event from someone who has in the past experienced that event. Clinical psychologists, counselors, and psychiatrists who use the amnesic interview to gain information about the prior events in someone’s life typically do so to be able to make intelligent decisions about what kind of help should be given. Anthropologists, sociologists, and some experimental psychologists query people about their past in the course of studying some particular problem of interest to social science. It is important to realize that the statements made during these interviews may not be particularly accurate as reports of prior events. The contents of the interview may not reflect a person’s earlier experiences and attitudes so much as their current picture of the past. It may not be possible, in some instances, ever to discover from interviews with people what actually happened in their past. Not only might the originally acquired memory depart from reality in some systematic way, but the memory may be continually subject to change after it is initially stored.
Probably the most impressive evidence for the notion of permanent memory comes from the reports that events long forgotten are vividly recalled during electrical stimulation of certain regions of the human brain. Wilder Penfield, who is best known for this work, was operating on epileptic patients during the 1940s, removing the damaged areas in their brains in order to cure their epilepsy.9 To guide him in pinpointing the damage, he stimulated the surface of the brain with a weak electric current in hopes of discovering, in each patient, an area in the brain that was related to the epileptic attacks. During this electrical invasion of their brains, Penfield discovered that when he moved his stimulating electrode near a portion of the brain called the hippocampus, some patients re-experienced events from their past life.
Here is an example that reached millions of Americans through The New York Times in 1977:
One of Penfield’s patients was a young woman. As the stimulating electrode touched a spot on her temporal lobe, she cried out: “I think I heard a mother calling her little boy somewhere. It seemed to be something that happened years ago . . . in the neighborhood where I live.” Then the electrode was moved a little and she said, “I hear voices. It is late at night, around the carnival somewhere — some sort of traveling circus. I just saw lots of big wagons that they use to haul animals in.” There can be little doubt that Wilder Penfield’s electrodes were arousing activity in the hippocampus, within the temporal lobe, jerking out distant and intimate memories from the patient’s stream of consciousness.10
It is of interest to examine Penfield’s original writings. In his 1969 work, he seems to suggest a belief in the relatively permanent nature of memory:
It is clear that the neuronal action that accompanies each succeeding state of consciousness leaves its permanent imprint on the brain. The imprint, or record, is a trail of facilitation of neuronal connections that can be followed again by an electric current many years later with no loss of detail, as though a tape recorder had been receiving it all.
Consider now what happens in normal life. For a short time, a man can recall all the detail of his previous awareness. In minutes, some of it has faded beyond the reach of his command. In weeks, all of it seems to have disappeared, as far as voluntary recall is concerned, except what seemed to him important or wakened in him emotion. But the detail is not really lost. During the subconscious interpretation of later contemporary experience, that detail is still available. This is a part of what we may call perception.11
Penfield apparently bases these conclusions on his observation of “flashback” responses:
The flashback responses to electrical stimulation are altogether different. They bear no relation to present experience in the operating room. Consciousness for the moment is doubled, and the patient can discuss the phenomenon. If he is hearing music, he can hum in time to it. The astonishing aspect of the phenomenon is that suddenly he is aware of all that was in his mind during an earlier strip of time. It is the stream of a former consciousness flowing again. If music is heard, it may be orchestra or voice or piano. Sometimes he is aware of all he was seeing at the moment; sometimes he is aware only of the music. It stops when the electrode is lifted. It may be repeated (even many times) if the electrode is replaced without too long a delay. This electrical recall is completely at random. Most often, the event was neither significant nor important.12
Wilder Penfield’s stimulating electrode captured the imagination of psychologists and has provided one of the most vivid pieces of evidence for the contention that memories are stable and permanent — a theory that might be dubbed the videorecorder model. But let us look more closely at what Penfield actually did, and what he found.
He started off with about eleven hundred patients, most of whom suffered from seizures. Typically, these people were given a local anesthetic before exploratory stimulation was carried out in order to locate the damaged areas of the brain. On the route to discovering these critical areas, some patients apparently had long-forgotten memories revived. But Penfield himself said that this “memory” response occurred in at most only forty cases — that is, only 3.5 percent of the time.13 Thus, these “memory” responses produced by the stimulating electrode were relatively rare.
In an article written for the journal Brain, Penfield reviewed each one of these cases. There were eighteen men and twenty-two women. It turns out that many of these forty people claimed to hear nothing more than some music or some people singing. Only a handful said anything that indicated they had an experience even remotely resembling a real memory. And even with this handful, a closer look at exactly what the patients said during surgery reveals that real memories were not being revived, but rather the patients were “constructing” memories that did not necessarily correspond to any real experience. For example, take the patient who said, “. . . I think I heard a mother calling her little boy somewhere. It seemed to be something that happened years ago.” She said it was “somebody in the neighborhood where I live.” When the same spot was stimulated eighteen minutes later, she said, “Yes, I hear the same familiar sounds, it seems to be a woman calling. The same lady. That was not in the neighborhood. It seemed to be at the lumberyard.” She added that she had never in her life been around a lumberyard.14 When a patient under stimulation seems to recall people in locations in which she has never been, there is a clear indication that the individual is not “reliving” the experience but making new creations that may be in part based on memories, in that same way that we do in our dreams. A noted cognitive psychologist, Ulric Neisser, came to the same conclusions about the brain stimulation work:
In short, the content of these experiences is not surprising in any way. It seems entirely comparable to the content of dreams, which are generally admitted to be synthetic constructions and not literal recalls. Penfield’s work tells us nothing new about memory.15
A hint as to what might go into these reconstructions is provided by a study in which individual cases were examined in great detail. In one case the patient was a twenty-seven-year-old housewife who had a history of over five years of seizures. She entered the hospital in search of help. Her doctors tried to locate the damaged portions of the brain, the portions that were responsible for her seizures. During the course of this exploration, the woman seemed to experience what Penfield might have called revivals of memory. But on closer examination, it turned out that the content of these “memories” was simply the thought or conversation that happened to occur just before and at the time of stimulation. A direct connection could be made between what the patient said during stimulation and what was said in a discussion that had taken place within the two minutes before stimulation.16
In short, although Penfield would have us believe that the stimulation of the brain causes actual memories to surface to the conscious mind, the sketchy utterances of the patients do not show that they were reliving past experiences, thus casting suspicion on Penfield’s “remarkable record.”
Since the eighteenth century, hypnosis has been studied extensively. At one time people thought hypnosis was a form of sleep. Later it was believed to be a state of narrowly focused attention in which the hypnotized person somehow becomes extremely suggestible.
A person who is in a deep hypnotic trance can be made to act as if his or her sensory inputs have been totally cut off. People can be made to see things, smell things, and hear things that aren’t physically present. While under hypnosis, people can learn a lot of facts with apparent ease and can also recall past events in their lives with what seems to be surprising clarity. Each one of us is suggestible to some extent, although the exact amount depends on such different factors as the situation we find ourselves in and our ability to become deeply involved in imaginative experiences.17
Since the early 1960s, various U.S. law enforcement agencies have used hypnosis as an aid to criminal investigation. There are those who believe that it gives utterly fantastic results. Many of these successes have been reported in a recent book by Eugene Block called Hypnosis: A New Tool in Crime Detection. Here, for example, the reader will learn how hypnosis was used by the Israeli National Police Force in solving or helping to solve scores of cases. When terrorists bombed the Nahariya–Haifa bus in 1973, the driver was questioned about any suspicious passengers. He could remember nothing — until he was hypnotized. Then he was able to describe a suspicious rider with a brown paper parcel under his arm. Using this information as a lead, the Israeli police eventually caught the terrorists. Also in Block’s book are descriptions of the successful role that hypnosis played in other cases, for example, in finding the Boston Strangler, the San Francisco cable car nymphomaniac, and Cleveland’s Dr. Sam Sheppard, accused of killing his pregnant wife, Marilyn.
In addition to its use in solving crime, hypnosis has been used in a variety of other exotic ways. In the mid-1950s, for example, a plane crashed and the pilot claimed he could not remember what happened for about two minutes prior to the crash.18 Under hypnosis, the pilot revealed a great deal. First, he showed both considerable concern with relative heights and a striving for relief from anxiety. With this knowledge, Dr. Raginsky, the psychiatrist conducting the inquiry, was able to guide him under hypnosis to the area of the “clouded moments” before the crash. During the first session, he was certain that he had known the correct altitudes for the letdown but was confused about why he had not used them. He also admitted that he had trouble in using the new altimeter. In the second hypnotic session, he was able to reveal the real cause of the accident. About two or three weeks before the crash he was checked out on the use of the new Omni-Magnetic Indicator. He did not understand it because of the new colors used and the opposite swing of the needles from the direction to which he had been accustomed in the past. In fact, many pilots found this instrument difficult, and it was withdrawn by the manufacturer two weeks after the accident.
If one looks at what the “experts” are saying about hypnosis, one gets a clear impression that some of them believe it works because of the permanence of memory. For example, hypnotherapists Cheek and LeCron wrote in their book, Clinical Hypnotherapy:
It seems that everything that happens to us is stored in memory in complete detail. Conscious recall is limited to a very tiny part of total memory. Regression under hypnosis can bring out completely forgotten memories. It is also possible to bring them out merely by suggesting that they will be recalled. In this situation the patient remembers but doesn’t relive the event.19
Acceptance of the power of hypnosis has reached an audience far wider than researchers in the field. An example is the case of a thirty-eight-year-old woman whose boyfriend had been murdered. She saw it happen, but the shock — and heavy drinking — almost totally blocked her memory. She was brought to the police station where a hypnotist, speaking soothingly, explained to her that the mind is like a videotape machine. What we observe is recorded, stored in the subconscious, and available for recall through hypnosis, he said. Information that she provided, previously unreported, helped crack the case. An article reporting the events noted the enormous success that the Los Angeles police department has had with hypnosis. One spokesman said it provided valuable leads and evidence in an impressive 65 percent of the cases. He further said:
Frequently when someone is shot, raped, beaten or otherwise attacked, he or she performs a defensive maneuver. They throw up a guard against fright, anxiety, and other traumas. Acting on a survival instinct, they hide the hurt. Through hypnosis, we make the conscious mind passive and communicate with the subconscious to release what’s buried there.20
In sum, many proponents of hypnosis have taken successful memory recoveries to support a version of a memory permanence hypothesis. Widespread publication of these views, along with examples in which hypnosis was apparently successful, have been passed on to laypersons through the popular press.
Some people believe that hypnosis works because of the fact that every experience a person has had in life is somehow recorded in blazingly accurate detail deep in the person’s brain. Hypnosis merely opens up the floodgates and lets all these memories come gushing forth.21 People’s memories have often been compared to an ordinary onion in that the memory comes in layers, with the early memories at the center and the later memories surrounding the core. Hypnosis is thought to be able to strip away the outer layers, leaving the central core exposed.
But although hypnosis is held up by many to be the magic cure for getting at deeply buried memories, this isn’t necessarily the case. Even when hypnosis does work to revive a memory that is temporarily blocked, it does not involve any awesome, mysterious power. Rather it seems that hypnosis encourages a person to relax, to cooperate, and to concentrate. In this state, people feel free to talk. What they say is on occasion a new important fact, but on other occasions nothing useful is said. All too often, totally false information comes out.
That hypnotized subjects who are asked to relive former experiences often produce a wealth of fabricated material was vividly shown by one psychologist who hypnotized college students and then regressed them back to their sixth birthday.22 He asked them to go back in their minds to this day in order to relive the events just as they had originally occurred, and to describe exactly what had happened to them. The students gave lengthy descriptions, peppered with numerous tiny details. Unbeknownst to these students, the psychologist had gotten descriptions from the students’ parents and other sources to compare with the students’ memories. The result: Although the “memories” were rich in detail, they were hopelessly inaccurate. Events from other birthdays got mixed up with the events from the sixth birthday. Facts that the students had merely read about in books and magazines got included in their “memory” for their birthday. In some cases, the students made up things that never actually happened.
Some of the hypnotized students who were allegedly remembering their sixth birthday made critical mistakes. When the psychologist asked a question about the time, they looked at their wrists, even though none of them wore wrist watches when they were six. They answered questions about news events that had occurred long after they had reached the age of six. When given a test that they had actually taken when they were six years old, they could not answer the items as they had when at that early age. They knew too much.
No solid studies exist that show recall during a state of hypnosis is any more accurate or complete than recall under ordinary waking conditions. What is worse, people under hypnosis have been known to “recall” events from their past confidently and to fabricate future scenarios with the same confidence. The American Bar Association Journal expressed its nervousness with the use of hypnosis in legal areas:
People can flat-out lie under hypnosis, and the examiner is no better equipped to detect the hypnotic lie than any other kind. Even more serious, a willing hypnotic subject is more pliable than he normally would be, more anxious to please his questioner. Knowing even a few details of an event, often supplied in early contacts with police, may provide the subject with enough basis to create a highly detailed ‘memory’ of what transpired, whether he was there or not.23
Throughout history, the belief has been held that certain drugs could strip away the chaff in memory and force a person to speak the truth. An ancient Chinese test required a suspected wrongdoer to chew rice powder during an interrogation; the suspect then spit out the powder, and if it was dry, he was condemned. In Aztec Mexico, it was believed that peyote cactus (which contains mescaline) conferred the “power of second sight.” This power could help in discovering the identity of a thief or in recovering stolen property. More recently in times of war, prisoners have been forced to take certain narcotic drugs to assist in their interrogation. And modern therapy has included the use of sodium pentathol and similar drugs to assist patients in talking about things that trouble them. This technique, sometimes called narcoanalysis, proved useful for treating emotional casualties in wartime. Even the usually noncommunicative patient would talk freely under the influence of these drugs.
Truth drugs have also been used by police investigators to facilitate the interrogation of suspects and witnesses to crimes. A person who has been accused of a crime is often desperate for some sort of corroborating evidence to support his or her innocence. Many have been tempted to submit to being questioned while drugged. To force someone to submit involuntarily to such an examination is, of course, repugnant, but voluntary examination in a drugged condition is not. In the early 1920s a physician in Dallas, Texas, tried using a drug called scopolamine for interrogating suspected criminals. He interviewed two prisoners at the Dallas County Jail, both of whom received injections, and both of whom denied the charges against them. At their trial, they were found not guilty. Enthusiastic about his results, the physician remarked that under the drug a person “cannot create a lie . . . and there is no power to think or reason.”24
In another investigation, two doctors attempted to get information from patients — all soldiers — who were known to have committed serious crimes, but who refused to admit it. The doctors used one of the so-called truth drugs, sodium amytal, to try to get these people to confess. Five of them were accused of robbery, ranging from thefts of butter for sale on the black market to theft of an automobile, and five were drug addicts who had illegal access to narcotics. One of them had been accused of molesting women and young children, while two were allegedly guilty of homicidal assault. They steadfastly insisted they were innocent of the charges.
After the drug had been injected into a vein, the soldiers felt sleepy, but could speak. Their speech was typically thick, mumbling, and disconnected. The interrogator’s questions depended on the patient’s individual history and attitude. One trick that was used was to pretend that the patient had already confessed and urge him to elaborate details he had “already described.” Nine individuals confessed. Even those who did not confess gave some information which had previously been withheld from other investigators.25
Why did these soldiers confess while under the influence of the drug? Many explanations have been advanced. One of the most reasonable is that the drug diminishes the person’s caution and restricts the desire for self-preservation. Sometimes people strongly want to confess but cannot bring themselves to do it. The drug gives them an excuse. Another explanation is that the drug has some special ability to strip away any conscious control and lay bare the “truth.”
The evidence looks impressive at first blush. But the soldiers who remembered many “true” facts also “remembered” many false ones. Several of the soldiers revealed fantasies, fears, and delusions that approached the quality of delirium and could readily be distinguished from reality by their fantastic quality. At times, however, the examiner was simply unable to distinguish the truth from the fantasy. The two doctors who studied these soldiers urged caution in interpreting the evidence. They explicitly stated that “testimony concerning dates and specific places is untrustworthy and often contradictory,” that “names and events are of questionable veracity.” Furthermore, “contradictory statements are often made without the patient actually trying to conceal the truth, but succeeding in this by his confusion between what has actually happened and what he thinks or fears may have happened.”26
A good example of this is the soldier P. V., who was accused of being involved in a robbery of the Post Exchange. At first he denied having been present at the actual scene of the robbery, but later described plausible details of “what happened” the night the Post Exchange was robbed. A subsequent investigation revealed that the soldier had not been a direct accomplice, but had bought goods from the men who had committed the robbery. His description of the details of the crime was a reconstruction of second-hand information and pure fantasy. Numerous observations of reconstructions such as this one make it hard to believe in any supposed power of truth drugs. At the end of their report, the doctors express their beliefs: “There is no such thing as a ‘truth serum.’ ”
So-called truth drugs have also been used in psychiatric interviews, for example to aid a patient’s recollection of traumatic experiences. The drugs are popular because they are easy to give, have few unpleasant side effects, and have a dramatic effect on a patient. Typically, the body relaxes immediately. A few people become momentarily excited, silly and giggly, but this passes and the person falls into a state that is similar to what you feel when you have just awakened from a deep sleep. The drugs then seem to relieve the patient from the anxiety and guilt that block good communication. But the two medical officers who made the most extensive use of the technique concluded that in almost all cases they could obtain essentially the same material and emotional release in the course of therapy without using any drugs at all.
Another prominent psychiatrist who has used sodium amytal extensively in investigating the personalities of men accused of various antisocial acts does not seem to have much faith in its ability to get at the truth. The people he talked with ranged from those with character disorders and neuroses to psychotics. They had been charged with offenses that ranged from mild delinquency to murder. Even after hours of interrogation with a person in a drugged condition, the psychiatrist did not feel that he knew the objective reality any better. He still had no idea whether a given antisocial act had or had not occurred. The drugs seemed to be useless for getting at some underlying truth: “Guilt-ridden subjects under sedation were prone to confess to offenses they had imagined in fantasy but had not in fact committed. Psychopathic individuals could, to the point of unconsciousness, deny crimes that every objective sign indicated they had committed.”27
Other studies with “normal” people have shown that it is relatively easy for people to maintain a lie despite injections of a truth drug. In one case, subjects revealed shameful and guilt-producing episodes of their past life and then invented false self-protective stories to cover up these episodes. They were injected with sodium amytal and subjected to rigorous cross-examination on their cover stories. The results showed that normal people with no overtly pathological traits could stick to their invented stories and not confess. On the other hand, neurotic individuals tended to confess more easily, but often to offenses that they had never committed.
In sum, it appears that people can withhold information and lie despite the drug. More dangerously, some individuals are so suggestible that they will describe — especially in response to suggestive questioning — behavior that never in fact occurred. The drugs may facilitate access to psychological reality, but they do not seem to be useful in getting at the facts.