3

A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

Myths about Memory

Myth #11 Human Memory Works like a Tape Recorder or Video Camera, and Accurate Records Events We’ve Experienced

When people attend reunions or get together with childhood friends to swap “old war stories,” they’re often impressed with a simple fact: Their recollections of many events differ, in many cases dramatically. One person recalls a lively discussion about politics as a friendly debate; another recalls the identical discussion as a heated argument. This kind of observation should be sufficient to challenge the widespread belief that our memories work like video cameras or DVDs. If our memories were perfect, we’d never forget a friend’s birthday, where we misplaced our iPod, or the exact date, time, and place of our first kiss.

Yet despite the sometimes all-too-obvious failings of everyday memory, surveys indicate that many people believe that our memories operate very much like tape recorders, video cameras, or DVDs, storing and replaying events exactly as we experienced them. Indeed, about 36% of us believe that our brains preserve perfect records of everything we’ve ever experienced (Alvarez & Brown, 2002). In one survey of over 600 undergraduates at a midwestern university, 27% agreed that memory operates like a tape recorder (Lenz, Ek, & Mills, 2009). Surveys show that even most psychotherapists agree that memories are fixed more or less permanently in the mind (Loftus & Loftus, 1980; Yapko, 1994).

These popular beliefs are in part residues of Sigmund Freud and others’ convictions that forgotten, often traumatic, memories reside unperturbed in the murky unconscious, neither distorted by the passage of time nor by competition with other memories (Wachtel, 1977). But contrary to these claims, our memories are far from exact replicas of past events (Clifasefi, Garry, & Loftus, 2007). The insight that our memory is imperfect and at times untrustworthy isn’t recent. Before the turn of the 20th century, the great American psychologist and contemporary of Freud, William James (1890), observed that “False memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us … Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so” (p. 373).

It’s true that we can often recall extremely emotional or salient events, sometimes called flashbulb memories because they seem to have a photographic quality (Brown & Kulik, 1977). Nevertheless, research shows that memories of such events, including the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963, the catastrophic break-up of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, the death of Princess Diana in 1997, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, wither over time and are prone to distortions, just like less dramatic events (Krackow, Lynn, & Payne, 2005–2006; Neisser & Hyman, 1999).

Consider an example of a flashbulb memory from Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch’s (1992) study of memories regarding the disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger about one minute after lift-off. The person, a student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, provided the first description 24 hours after the disaster, and the second account 21½ years later.

Description 1. I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about (it). I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that.

Description 2. When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked. I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents.

When we compare the original memory with the memory recalled later, it’s obvious that there are striking discrepancies. Neisser and Harsch found that about one third of students’ reports contained similarly large differences across the two time points.

Heike Schmolck and his colleagues (Schmolck, Buffalo, & Squire, 2000) compared participants’ ability to recall the 1995 acquittal of former football star O. J. Simpson—on charges of murdering his wife and her male friend—3 days after the verdict, and after a lapse of 15 or 32 months. After 32 months, 40% of the memory reports contained “major distortions.” In this and other flashbulb memory studies, people were typically very confident in the accuracy of their memories, even though these memories weren’t consistent with what they reported shortly after the event.

Moreover, eyewitnesses sometimes misidentify innocent individuals as criminals, even though these eyewitnesses often express their inaccurate opinions in the courtroom with utmost confidence (Memon & Thomson, 2007; Wells & Bradford, 1998). Popular beliefs notwithstanding, even eyewitnesses who get a long hard look at the perpetrator during the crime frequently finger the wrong suspect in a line-up or courtroom. What’s more, the relation between eyewitnesses’ confidence in their testimony and the accuracy of their memories is typically weak or even nonexistent (Kassin, Ellsworth, & Smith, 1989). This finding is deeply troubling given that jury members tend to place heavy weight on eyewitnesses’ confidence when gauging the believability of their memories (Smith, Lindsay, Pryke, & Dysart, 2001; Wells & Bradford, 1998). In one recent survey, 34% of 160 American judges believed that there was a strong association between eyewitness confidence and accuracy (Wise & Safer, 2004). Disturbingly, of the 239 criminal defendants freed on the basis of DNA testing, as of June 2009 about 75% were convicted largely on the basis of inaccurate eyewitness testimony.

Even determining a memory’s origins can prove elusive. About a quarter of college students find it difficult to determine whether something they distinctly remembered actually happened or whether it was part of a dream (Rassin, Merckelbach, & Spaan, 2001). Such “source monitoring confusion” may account for many of our most common memory errors, as when we accuse a friend of saying something offensive that we heard from someone else.

Today, there’s broad consensus among psychologists that memory isn’t reproductive—it doesn’t duplicate precisely what we’ve experienced— but reconstructive. What we recall is often a blurry mixture of accurate recollections, along with what jells with our beliefs, needs, emotions, and hunches. These hunches are in turn based on our knowledge of ourselves, the events we try to recall, and what we’ve experienced in similar situations (Clifasefi et al., 2007).

Evidence for the reconstructive nature of memory derives from several lines of research. Psychologists now know that memory is schematic; a schema is an organized knowledge structure or mental model stored in memory. We acquire schemas from past learning and experiences, and they shape our perceptions of new and past experiences. We all possess schemas about everyday events, like ordering food at a restaurant. If a waiter asked us if we wanted our dessert before the appetizer, we’d surely find this request bizarre, as it’s inconsistent with our restaurant schema or “script” for ordering food.

Stereotypes afford an excellent example of how schemas can influence our memory. Mark Snyder and Seymour Uranowitz (1978) presented subjects with a detailed case study of a woman named Betty K. After reading this information, they told some subjects that Betty K was currently living either a heterosexual or a lesbian lifestyle. Snyder and Uranowitz then gave subjects a recognition test for the material in the passage. They found that participants distorted their memory of the original information, such as her dating habits and relationship with her father, to be more in line with their schema, that is, their knowledge of her current lifestyle. We reconstruct the past to fit our schematic expectations.

Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott (1995) provided an elegant demonstration of our tendency to construct memories based on our schemas. They presented participants with lists of words that were all associated with a “lure word”—a single, non-presented item. For example, some participants studied a list containing the words thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point, pricked, thimble, haystack, pain, hurt, and injection, all of which are associated in memory with the lure item needle. Roediger and McDermott found that more than half the time (55%), people recalled the lure item—needle—as having been on the list, even though it wasn’t there. In many cases, participants were sure the critical non-presented items were on the list, suggesting that the false memories produced by the procedure can be as “real” to participants as their memories of the actual items. For this reason, Roediger and McDermott called these false memories “memory illusions.”

Researchers have gone further to create memories of real-life events that never happened. In the “shopping mall study,” Elizabeth Loftus (1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994) created a false memory in Chris, a 14-year-old boy. Loftus instructed Chris’s older brother, Jim, to present Chris with a false event of being lost in a shopping mall at age 5 under the guise of a game of “Remember the time that…” To enhance its credibility, Loftus presented the false event as a vignette along with three other events that had actually occurred. Next, she instructed Chris to write down everything he remembered. Initially, Chris reported very little about the false event. Yet over a 2-week period, he constructed the following detailed memory: “I was with the guys for a second, and I think I went over to look at the toy store, the Kay-Bee toys … we got lost, and I was looking around and I thought, ‘Uh-oh. I’m in trouble now.’ … I thought I was never going to see my family again. I was really scared, you know. And then this old man … came up to me … he was kind of bald on top … he had a like a ring of gray hair … and he had glasses … and then crying, and Mom coming up and saying, ‘Where were you? Don’t you ever do that again!’” (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, p. 532). When Loftus asked Chris’s mother about the incident, she confirmed that it never happened.

A flood of similar studies followed, showing that in 18–37% of participants, researchers can implant entirely false memories of complex events ranging from: (a) a serious animal attack, indoor accident, outdoor accident, and medical procedure (Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999), (b) knocking over a punchbowl at a wedding (Hyman, Husband, & Billings, 1995), (c) getting one’s fingers caught in a mousetrap as a child (Ceci, Crotteau-Huffman, Smith, & Loftus, 1994), (d) being bullied as a child (Mazzoni, Loftus, Seitz, & Lynn, 1999), (e) witnessing a case of demonic possession (Mazzoni, Loftus, & Kirsch, 2001), to (f) riding in a hot air balloon with one’s family (Wade, Garry, Read, & Lindsay, 2002).

These studies demolish the popular belief that our memories are etched indelibly into a permanent mental record. Rather than viewing our memory as a tape recorder or DVD, we can more aptly describe our memory as an ever-changing medium that highlights our remarkable ability to create fluid narratives of our past and present experiences. As the great American humorist Mark Twain is alleged to have said: “It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so” (http://www.twainquotes.com/Memory.xhtml).

Myth #12 Hypnosis Is Useful for Retrieving Memories of Forgotten Events

In 1990, George Franklin was convicted of the 1969 murder of Susan Nason. The basis of the conviction was his daughter Eileen’s memories of him brutally murdering Susan, her childhood friend, some 20 years earlier. In 1996, prosecutors dropped all charges, and Franklin was released from prison. This was the first highly publicized case of “recovered traumatic memory.”

In 1994, Steven Cook dropped a $10 million dollar lawsuit against the respected Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. The suit alleged that Bernardin had molested Cook 17 years earlier.

In 2001, Larry Mayes was the 100th person to be released from prison because of DNA (genetic) testing. Unfortunately, he spent 21 years in jail for rape and robbery before a sample of his DNA was found. He was declared innocent.

Now let’s consider the following facts.

These cases challenge the widespread idea that hypnosis unlocks the vast storehouse of memory the lies within our minds and permits accurate access to past events. In each case, there’s good reason to believe that hypnosis created false memories held with virtually unshakeable conviction.

Yet the belief that hypnosis holds a special power to retrieve lost memories persists to this day. In a survey of 92 introductory psychology students, 70% agreed that “hypnosis is extremely useful in helping witnesses recall details of crimes” (Taylor & Kowalski, 2003, p. 5). In other surveys, 90% (Green & Lynn, in press) or more (McConkey & Jupp, 1986; Whitehouse, Orne, Orne, & Dinges, 1991) of college students have reported that hypnosis enhances memory retrieval, and 64% have maintained that hypnosis is a “good technique for police to use to refresh witnesses’ memories” (Green & Lynn, in press).

Such beliefs are also prevalent among academics and mental health professionals. Elizabeth Loftus and Geoffrey Loftus (1980) found that 84% of psychologists and 69% of non-psychologists endorsed the statement that “memory is permanently stored in the mind” and that “… with hypnosis, or other specialized techniques, these inaccessible details could eventually be recovered.” In a sample of over 850 psychotherapists, Michael Yapko (1994) found that large proportions endorsed the following items with high-to-moderate frequency: (1) 75%: “Hypnosis enables people to accurately remember things they otherwise could not.” (2) 47%: “Therapists can have greater faith in details of a traumatic event when obtained hypnotically than otherwise.” (3) 31%: “When someone has a memory of a trauma while in hypnosis, it objectively must actually have occurred.” (4) 54%: “Hypnosis can be used to recover memories of actual events as far back as birth.” In other surveys (Poole, Lindsay, Memon, & Bull, 1995), between about a third (29% and 34%) and a fifth (20%; Polusny & Follette, 1996) of psychotherapists reported that they used hypnosis to help clients recall memories of suspected sexual abuse.

Beliefs in the memory-enhancing powers of hypnosis have a long and at times checkered history. Hypnosis was promoted by some of the early guiding lights of psychology and psychiatry, including Pierre Janet, Joseph Breuer, and Sigmund Freud. Janet was one of the first therapists to use hypnosis to help patients recover memories of traumatic events that he assumed caused their psychological difficulties. In a famous case, Janet (1889) used hypnosis to “age regress” (mentally relive an earlier time period) his patient Marie to her childhood, when she was traumatized by seeing a child with a facial deformity. By consciously reliving the memory of the child’s face, Marie was supposedly freed from symptoms of blindness.

The belief that hypnosis can help patients excavate buried memories of traumatic events was also the rationale for “hypnoanalysis,” which many practitioners used in the aftermath of World War I to help soldiers and veterans remember events that presumably triggered their psychological disorders. Some therapists believed the chances for a complete recovery were optimized when the emotions associated with the recalled events were released full-blown in a so-called abreaction (a powerful discharge of painful feelings), and the guilt and anger that emerged were processed in later hypnotic sessions.

Confidence in the powers of hypnosis extends to the general public, who are flooded with images of hypnosis as a memory supercharger that rivals a magical truth serum. In such movies as In Like Flint, Kiss the Girls, Dead on Sight, and The Resurrection Syndrome, witnesses recall the exact details of crimes or long-forgotten childhood events with the aid of hypnosis.

Some modern-day researchers and clinicians argue that hypnosis can mine precious nuggets of long-buried information (Scheflin, Brown, & Hammond, 1997). Nevertheless, in general, the tide of expert opinion (Kassin, Tubb, Hosch, & Memon, 2001) has turned to the point that forensic psychologists widely acknowledge that hypnosis either has no effect on memory (Erdelyi, 1994) or that it can impair and distort recall (Lynn, Neuschatz, Fite, & Rhue, 2001). In instances in which hypnosis does increase accurate memories—often because people guess and report memories when they’re unsure—this increase is offset or even surpassed by an increase in inaccurate memories (Erdelyi, 1994; Steblay & Bothwell, 1994).

To make matters worse, hypnosis may produce more recall errors or false memories than ordinary recall, and increase eyewitnesses’ confidence in inaccurate, as well as accurate, memories (this increase is confidence is called “memory hardening”). After all, if you expect that what you recall during a hypnosis session will be accurate in every detail, you’re unlikely to hedge your bets on what you report as true. In fact, most researchers find that hypnosis inflates unwarranted confidence in memories to some degree (Green & Lynn, in press). Although highly suggestible people are most affected by hypnosis, even low suggestible individuals’ recall can be impaired. Concerns that eyewitnesses who are hypnotized may resist cross-examination, and have problems distinguishing real-world fact from mental fiction, have prompted most states to ban the testimony of hypnotized witnesses from the courtroom.

Does hypnosis fare any better when it comes to remembering extremely early life experiences? A televised documentary (Frontline, 1995) showed a group therapy session in which a woman was age-regressed through childhood, to the womb, and eventually to being trapped in her mother’s Fallopian tube. The woman provided a convincing demonstration of the emotional and physical discomfort one would experience if one were indeed stuck in this uncomfortable position. Although this woman may have believed in the reality of her experience, we can be quite sure that it wasn’t memory-based. Instead, age-regressed subjects behave according to their knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions about age-relevant behaviors. As Michael Nash (1987) showed, adults age-regressed to childhood don’t show the expected patterns on many indices of early development, including vocabulary, cognitive tasks, brain waves (EEGs), and visual illusions. No matter how compelling they may seem, “age-regressed experiences” aren’t literal reinstatements of childhood experiences, behaviors, or feelings.

Some therapists go even further, claiming that current problems are attributable to previous lives, and that the treatment called for is “past life regression therapy” featuring hypnosis. For example, psychiatrist Brian Weiss (1988), who was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2008, published a widely publicized series of cases focusing on patients whom he hypnotized and age-regressed to “go back to” the source of a present-day problem. When Weiss regressed his patients, they reported events that he interpreted as originating in earlier lives, often many centuries ago.

Although experiences during age regression can seem convincing to both patient and therapist, reports of a past life are the products of imagination, fantasy, and what patients know about a given historical period. In fact, subjects’ descriptions of the historical circumstances of their supposed past lives, when checked against known facts (such whether the country was at war or peace, the face on the coin of the realm), are rarely accurate. A participant in one study (Spanos, Menary, Gabora, DuBreuil, & Dewhirst, 1991) who was regressed to ancient times claimed to be Julius Caesar, emperor of Rome, in 50 b.c., even though the designations of B.C. and A.D. weren’t adopted until centuries later, and even though Julius Caesar died several decades prior to the first Roman emperor, Augustus. When information reported about a “past life” happens to be accurate, we can easily explain it as a “good guess” that’s often based on knowledge of history.

Nevertheless, not all uses of hypnosis are scientifically problematic. Controlled research evidence suggests that hypnosis may be useful in treating pain, medical conditions, and habit disorders (such as smoking addiction), and as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety, obesity, and other conditions. Still, the extent to which hypnosis provides benefits above and beyond relaxation in these cases is unclear (Lynn, Kirsch, Barabasz, Cardena, & Patterson, 2000).

In sum, the conclusion that hypnosis can foster false memories in some people is indisputable. As tempting as it might be to contact a hypnotist to locate that favorite ring you misplaced years ago, we recommend that you just keep on looking.

Myth #13 Individuals Commonly Repress the Memories of Traumatic Experiences

Some time ago, one of the authors of this book (SJL) was consulted by a 28-year-old female businesswoman who was considering a civil suit against three colleagues regarding a sexual assault. She related the event as follows:

Two years ago, I conducted business in China for two weeks. One night, after dancing at a club in Shanghai, I fell sound asleep. I awoke 3 hours later and thought I was having a very erotic, sexual dream. More and more, I felt like a real presence was there, over me in my bed.

I wondered what happened that night, because I couldn’t recall anything in the morning. I thought I’d repressed a memory of something terrible. So I contacted someone at a medical school who was doing research with hypnosis. After the second hypnosis session, in which I tried to recall what happened, I remembered that one of the men in my company had sexually assaulted me. I was in direct competition with him for a promotion. I think this happened because he thought, “Who does this woman think she is? This will teach her a lesson.”

How likely is it that she’d repressed her memories of a traumatic sexual assault? We’ll soon find out, but for now we’ll point out that her deep concerns touch on the controversial question of whether people can exile horrific memories to the hinterlands of consciousness where they’re preserved intact, perhaps to be later recovered in therapy. Psychologists and psychiatrists refer to an inability to recall important information of traumatic or stressful events that can’t be explained by normal forgetfulness as dissociative amnesia (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

Debates over whether people can banish traumatic memories from awareness have sparked vigorous discussion from the glory days of Freudian psychoanalysis in the late 19th century to the present. There’s little disagreement that memories that people have remembered continuously are likely to be accurate, nor that people can remember events they haven’t thought about for some time, even years after they’ve happened. What’s at issue is whether a special mechanism of repression accounts for the forgetting of traumatic material. Are memories repressed as a buffer against the aftermath of traumatic events (Scheflin et al., 1997; Erdelyi, 2006), or are repressed memories instead, “a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support,” as psychologist Richard McNally argued (McNally, 2003, p. 275)?

From the way the popular media portrays repression, we’d never guess this topic was bitterly controversial in the scientific community. In films like the Butterfly Effect (2004), Mysterious Skin (2004), Batman Returns (1995), and Repressions (2007), and television programs like Dying to Remember (1993), repressed memories of painful events—ranging from child abuse to witnessing the murder of parents and committing a murder in a past life—would seem to be commonplace occurrences. Many popular self-help books also portray repression as a natural, if not typical, response to traumatic events. For example, Judith Blume (1990) wrote that “half of all incest survivors do not remember that the abuse occurred” (p. 81) and Renee Frederickson (1992) claimed that “millions of people have blocked out frightening episodes of abuse, years of their life, or their entire childhood” (p. 15).

Perhaps not surprisingly, many laypersons find these claims plausible. According to Jonathan Golding and his colleagues’ (Golding, Sanchez, & Sego, 1996) survey of 613 undergraduates, most respondents expressed belief in repressed memories; on a 1–10 scale, men rated their likelihood at 5.8, women at 6.5. Eighty-nine percent said they’d had some experience with repressed memories either personally or through media coverage. Most felt that repressed memories should be admitted as evidence in court.

We can trace popular views of repressed memories to Sigmund Freud’s belief that obsessional neuroses and hysteria are produced by the repression of sexual molestation in childhood. Freud (1894) viewed repression as the unconscious motivated forgetting of unpleasant memories or impulses (Holmes, 1990; McNally, 2003). Today, the idea that repressed memories must be uncovered is central to some forms of psychoanalysis (Galatzer-Levy, 1997) and memory recovery therapies (Crews, 1995). These therapies are based on the idea that clients can’t resolve the root causes of their psychological problems unless they excavate repressed memories of childhood trauma, often sexual abuse. Much of this thinking appears to reflect a representativeness heuristic (see Introduction, p. 15): just as we must treat or remove an abscessed tooth to prevent it from festering, this reasoning goes, we must expunge repressed memories of trauma to solve our present problems.

Indeed, as of the mid 1990s, surveys suggested that many therapists were in the business of ferreting out repressed memories from the mind’s hidden recesses. After surveying more than 860 psychotherapists, Michael Yapko (1994) found that almost 60% believed that repression is a major cause of forgetting, and about 40% believed that people couldn’t remember much about their childhoods because they’d repressed traumatic events. Debra Poole and her collaborators (Poole, Lindsay, Memon, & Bull, 1995) surveyed 145 licensed U.S. doctoral-level psychotherapists in two studies, and 57 British psychologists in another. The researchers found that over three quarters of therapists reported using at least one memory recovery technique, like hypnosis, guided imagery, or repeated questioning and prompting (such as “Are you sure you weren’t abused? Please keep thinking about it”), to “help clients remember childhood sexual abuse.” Additionally, 25% of the respondents who conducted therapy with adult female clients believed that memory recovery is a key component of treatment, believed they could identify patients with repressed or otherwise unavailable memories as early as the first session, and used two or more memory recovery techniques to enhance recall of disclosure of past events. A year later, Melissa Polusny and Victoria Follette (1996) reported similar findings in another survey of therapists.

The popularity of memory recovery procedures rests more on informal clinical reports than on controlled research (Lindsay & Read, 1994; Loftus, 1993; Spanos, 1996). Indeed, there are many anecdotal reports of people seeming to recover decades-old memories of abuse in psychotherapy (Erdelyi, 1985). Nevertheless, after reviewing 60 years of research and finding no convincing laboratory evidence for repression, David Holmes (1990) wryly suggested that any use of the concept be preceded by the following statement: “Warning. The concept of repression has not been validated with experimental research and its use may be hazardous to the accurate interpretation of clinical behavior” (p. 97). More recently, after canvassing the literature in detail, Richard McNally (2003) concluded that the scientific support for repressed memories is feeble. He argued that many case histories put forward as supporting dissociative amnesia (Scheflin et al., 1997) failed to verify that the traumatic event occurred, and that we can usually explain memory loss in these cases in terms of ordinary forgetting rather than repression.

Contrary to the repression hypothesis, research shows that most people remember such traumatic events as the Holocaust and natural disasters well—sometimes all too well—in the form of disturbing flashbacks (Loftus, 1993; Shobe & Kihlstrom, 1997). Moreover, the fact that some people recover allegedly repressed memories of highly implausible undocumented events in psychotherapy, such as widespread satanic cult activity and alien abductions, casts doubt on the accuracy of many other more plausible memories that clients allegedly recover in treatment. The problem is that therapists often can’t distinguish the “signal” of accurate memories from the “noise” of false memories (Loftus, 1993).

Richard McNally (2003) offered the following explanation—as an alternative to repression—for how delayed recall of child abuse can occur. As he pointed out, children may be more confused than upset by sexual advances from a relative, yet years later recall the event with revulsion as they realize that it was, in fact, an instance of abuse. The delay of recall of events isn’t all that unusual in that people sometimes forget significant life events, such as accidents and hospitalizations, even a year after they occur (Lilienfeld & Loftus, 1998).

Yet another problem with studies of dissociative amnesia is the fact that people’s failure to report an event doesn’t mean they repressed or even forgot it (Piper, 1997). Gail Goodman and her colleagues’ (Goodman et al., 2003) work is a case in point. They repeatedly interviewed 175 people with documented child sexual abuse, about 13 years after the incident. Of those interviewed across three phases of the study, 19% at first didn’t report the documented incident. Nevertheless, when later interviewed by phone, 16% didn’t report the incident, and by the third (in person) interview phase, only 8% failed to report it. Clearly, the events recalled were available in memory, even though participants didn’t report them initially. Perhaps people were too embarrassed at first to report the abuse, or required several prompts to recall it.

The tendency to label ordinary or unexplained forgetting as repression appears to be deeply embedded in our cultural heritage. Psychiatrist Harrison Pope and his colleagues (Pope et al., 2006) offered the scientific community a fascinating challenge. They placed a notice on professional Internet sites offering a $1,000 award to the first person who could produce an example of dissociative amnesia for a traumatic event, in any work of fiction or nonfiction, in any language, prior to 1800. Although more than 100 scholars responded, none could find a single clear description of dissociative amnesia. The authors reasoned that if dissociative amnesia were a naturally occurring psychological phenomenon, like hallucinations or delusions, there should be evidence for it in nonfiction as or fictional characters. Pope and his colleagues concluded that repressed memory seems to be a relatively recent product of our culture dating from the 19th century.

In the past decade, the repressed memory controversy has de-escalated to some extent in the scientific community. A consensus has emerged that suggestive procedures, such as hypnosis, guided imagery, and leading questions, can generate false memories of traumatic events, and that delayed recall of accurate events often results from ordinary forgetting and remembering, rather than repression.

As in the case of the 28-year-old businesswoman described at the outset, it’s crucial to consider alternative explanations for delayed recollections, such as being abused by a satanic cult, that strain credibility (Lanning & Burgess, 1989). For instance, the woman described in this case might have sensed someone was in her bed because of a strange yet surprisingly common phenomenon called sleep paralysis, caused by a disruption in the sleep cycle. As many as one third to one half of college students have experienced at least one episode of sleep paralysis (Fukuda, Ogilvie, Chilcott, Venditelli, & Takeuchi, 1998). Sleep paralysis is often associated with terror, along with the sense of a menacing figure close to or even on top of the person, who’s incapable of moving. The frightening episode of sleep paralysis, combined with her attempts to reconstruct what happened during hypnosis, might have convinced her that she was sexually assaulted. When offered this explanation, she decided not to pursue a lawsuit against her colleague.

We end with a note of caution. Not all memories recovered after years or even decades of forgetting are necessarily false (Schooler, Ambadar, & Bendiksen, 1997), so psychotherapists must be careful not to dismiss all newly remembered memories of childhood abuse. Still, they shouldn’t assume that recovered memories are genuine unless they’re accompanied by corroborating evidence.

Myth #14 Most People with Amnesia Forget All Details of Their Earlier Lives

“Where am I?” “Who am I?”

These are probably the two questions most frequently asked in Hollywood films by characters who’ve awakened from a coma, that is, a prolonged period of unconsciousness. In most movies, the portrayal of amnesia—memory loss—has two major things in common. First, amnesics’ most glaring problem is almost always a loss of memories of their past. They usually have little or no difficulty learning new things. Second, if amnesics have been unconscious for a long time, say a few weeks or months, they typically lose all recollection of their earlier lives. Their minds are essentially a blank slate, with much or all of their past wiped clean. More often than not, they’ve forgotten what year it is, where they live, to whom they’re married, what they do for a living, perhaps even who they are.

Let’s examine a few choice examples from the cinematic and television world. In one of the earliest depictions of amnesia on the big screen, Garden of Lies (1915), a newly married bride forgets everything about herself, including who she is, following a car accident (Baxendale, 2004). On a lighter note, in Santa Who? (2000), Santa Claus falls off his sleigh and loses his identity and, along with it, all of his previous memories. In the three films in the Jason Bourne series (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum, spanning 2002 to 2007), the hero, portrayed by Matt Damon, loses all memories of his life and assumes a new identity as a governmental assassin. Variations on this theme are especially common in Hollywood films featuring hired murderers, including the Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), in which a secret agent forgets everything about herself after experiencing a bump on the head. As one writer observed, profound amnesia in Hollywood films “is something of an occupational hazard for professional assassins” (Baxendale, 2004, p. 1481). And in the recent television sitcom Samantha Who?, starring Christina Applegate, a psychiatrist awakens from an 8-day coma following a car accident, only to find that she’s lost all memory of herself and her past despite being otherwise mentally intact.

These cinematic depictions of amnesia are largely mirrored in the views of most Americans (O’Jile et al., 1997; Swift & Wilson, 2001). In one survey, 51% of Americans said that people with head injuries have more trouble remembering events that happened before than after the injury (Gouvier, Prestholdt, & Warner, 1988). In a more recent survey, 48% of Americans said that following a head injury, remembering things from one’s past is harder than learning new things. Large percentages of Americans also believe that following head injuries, people routinely forget who they are and can’t recognize anyone they know (Guilmette & Paglia, 2004).

Yet the popular psychology view of amnesia bears scant resemblance to its real-world counterpart. In fact, the primary problem among most people who experience a head injury or stroke isn’t retrograde amnesia —loss of memory of the past—but rather anterograde amnesia—loss of memory for new information (Schachter, 1996). That is, people with amnesia typically have trouble forming new memories, although some have lost past memories too. The best known case of severe anterograde amnesia in the psychological literature is that of H.M., a lonely man (who died in 2008 at the age of 74) who underwent brain surgery in 1953 to halt his severe epilepsy, which hadn’t responded to any other treatments. Following the surgery, which removed both of H.M.’s hippocampi (brain structures that are crucial to long-term memory), H.M. became virtually incapable of forming memories for new events, or what psychologists call “episodic memories” (Corkin, 2002). H.M. read the same magazines over and over again as though he’d never seen them before, routinely had no recollection of meeting people he’d been introduced to 5 minutes earlier, and experienced catastrophic grief each time his doctors informed him of his uncle’s death (Milner, 1972; Shimamura, 1992). Although H.M. experienced some retrograde amnesia as well, anterograde amnesia was his primary problem, as it is for most amnesics.

In one of the rare exceptions in which American films got scientific psychology largely right, the brilliant 2000 thriller Memento showcases a character, Leonard (portrayed by Guy Pearce), who experiences severe anterograde amnesia following a head injury. Unable to create episodic memories, Leonard is exploited mercilessly by others, culminating in his murder of an innocent man. Cleverly, the scenes in the film unfold in reverse order, reflecting Leonard’s sense of living almost completely in the present.

There’s still another way in which the popular media usually gets amnesia wrong. Film portrayals to the contrary, so-called “generalized amnesia,” in which people forget their identity and all details of their previous lives (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), is exceedingly rare. In the unusual cases in which generalized amnesia occurs, it’s almost always believed to be associated with psychological causes, such as extreme stress, rather than head injury or other neurological causes (Baxendale, 2004). Nevertheless, some psychologists doubt that generalized amnesia due to psychological factors even exists (McNally, 2003). They may be right, because in these cases it’s difficult to rule out the possibility that the apparent amnesia is due to malingering, that is, faking of symptoms to achieve an external goal, such as gaining financial compensation or avoiding military service (Cima, Merckelbach, Nijman, Knauer, & Hollnack, 2002).

We’d be remiss not to mention two further misconceptions regarding amnesia. First, perhaps inspired by scenes in many films (Baxendale, 2004), many people believe that, immediately after emerging from a prolonged coma, people can experience complete amnesia for their past yet otherwise be entirely normal. If we were to believe the typical Hollywood portrayal, such people can respond coherently to questions and talk in complete sentences, even if they believe the year is 1989—when they lost consciousness—rather than 2009. Indeed, in one survey a whopping 93% of respondents said that people with severe amnesia for virtually all of their pasts can be normal in every other way (Hux, Schram, & Goeken, 2006). Sadly, research demonstrates that this view amounts to little more than wishful thinking. People who emerge from comas with significant amnesia are almost always left with lasting and serious cognitive deficits, including problems in perception and learning (Hooper, 2006).

A second and more peculiar misconception is that following a head injury, one of the best ways to rid oneself of amnesia is to experience another head injury. This creative method of memory recovery is a plot device in many cartoons and films, including those featuring Tom the Cat and Tarzan (Baxendale, 2004). In the 1987 film Overboard, starring Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Hawn’s character loses her memory after bumping her head following a fall from a yacht, and regains her memory later in the film following a second bump on the head. This thinking may reflect a misapplication of the representativeness heuristic (see Introduction, p. 15): if a bump on the head can cause us to lose our memories, a second bump on the head can cause us to regain them. After all, if two heads are better than one, two head injuries might be too (Baxendale, 2004). Surveys indicate that anywhere from 38% to 46% of Americans and Canadians hold this misconception (Guilmette & Paglia, 2004). Like a number of other misconceptions in this book, this one isn’t merely wrong, but backwards. By damaging brain circuitry, earlier head injuries typically leave patients more vulnerable to the adverse effects of later head injuries.

So the next time you see a film featuring a character who’s lost all memories and all sense of who she is following a head injury, be sure not to “forget” a key point: The true amnesia is Hollywood’s profound loss of memory for scientific evidence.

Chapter 3: Other Myths to Explore

Fiction Fact
The memory of everything we’ve experienced is stored permanently in our brains, even if we can’t access all of it. There’s no evidence for this claim; moreover, our brains aren’t big enough to store memories of everything we’ve experienced.
Some people have true “photographic memories.” Even among people with “eidetic imagery,” the closest approximation to photographic memory, there is evidence for memory errors and memory reconstruction.
With effort, we can remember events back to birth. Because of the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, we can’t recall anything prior to about age two or two and a half.
Memory is chemically transferable. Attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to transfer learning in planaria worms by chopping them up and feeding them to other planaria were never replicated.
The suggestibility of memory is only a problem for preschoolers. The memory reports of all age groups can be affected by leading questions; in some cases, older children are even more vulnerable to suggestions than younger children.
People who can’t recall what they had for lunch yesterday have a poor “short-term memory.” The duration of short-term memory is about 20 seconds or less; these people almost all have a poor long-term memory.
Rote memorization is the best way to retain information. Information processed by its meaning is better retained than information that is merely repeated over and over again.
Almost all forgetting is due to decay of information in our brains. Much of forgetting is due to interference as well as decay.
Gingko and other herbal remedies improve memory in normal individuals. The effects of Gingko on normal memory are weak or nonexistent.

Sources and Suggested Readings

To explore these and other myths about memory, see Della Sala (1999, 2007); Gold, Cahill, and Wenk (2002); Loftus and Loftus (1980); McNally (2003); Schacter (2001); Solomon, Adams, Silver, Zimmer, and DeVeaux (2002); Turtle and Want (2008).