So biological garbage collection pauses then? skip sleep, and the brain tries to run gc cycles during runtime. Causing attention and performance latency spikes. Evolution wrote the original JVM.
replies(5):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy (see research section)
One remembered memories of a WWII pilot named James Huston Jr. and the other a deceased Hollywood agent named Marty Martyn.
Putting aside the reincarnation hypothesis for the moment, do you think the kids invented the details and coincidentally happened to match to a real person or were they fully coached? Maybe they didn’t get enough sleep or got too much sleep?
On the other hand, I do have some Gandalf "I have no memory of this place" moments for other things.
You're saying that those memories are exactly the same as all the other memories.
Every time you "recall" something, you are not pulling up some file that is always the same. You are actively recreating the memory.
There's nothing "fun" or insightful about this, this mechanism has been known for a long time.
Obviously it's not unique to psychotherapy.
> may have been created
Most things that "may" have happened do not warrant absolute statements such as "that's not a thing" (which, incidentally, is a particularly empty statement in any context, since every thing is a thing)
I'm reminded of the story of dragon sightings in Great Britain: after the printing press and newspapers and newspaper reporters chasing stories emerged, as news distribution out from city centers into rural areas increased, it seems dragons picked up and moved farther away, only being spotted in the hinterlands without news.
You apparently would keep your mind open to the idea that dragons don't like the smell of newsprint as no other conclusion could be more plausible sheerly on the basis of logic?
The idea of "repressed memories" was that people had hidden memories that they couldn't access, even if they tried. According to the theory, even if someone brought up the past event and tried to remind the person about it, they would be unable to recall it happening because their brain had blocked it out.
The idea was that only intervention by a therapist or some other special event could help the person "unlock" the repressed memories, making them available for remembering again.
What was really happening was that some therapists were leading people into "remembering" things that didn't happen through aggressive prompting and pushing, much like what happens when an aggressive investigator convinces a vulnerable person to falsely confess to something they didn't do.
Some of the techniques used in the therapy include giving patients sedative-hypnotic drugs to put the patient in a waking dream-like state while the therapist asks leading questions to get them to "remember" an event. The same drugs they used are known to be associated with false memories, like when someone falsely recalls something from a vivid dream as having actually happened.
Some of the techniques included hypnosis or even giving the patients (including children) sedative-hypnotic drugs before pressuring them with the leading questions.
If they could eventually get the person or child to claim to have some memory of the event (after asking a lot of leading questions and maybe even drugging them) they considered it to be a recovery of the memory.
It is specifically about trauma, and generally you don't forget traumatic events and that's often a big part of the problem. We are not talking about trivial things like the name of your maths teacher in high school, which have a tendency to come and go.
It is also specifically about therapy, that is an environment where you are actively encouraged to recall memories. We know how easy it is to make up memories, especially with the help of a third party (here, the therapist).
Combine the two: memories that are hard to forget and an environment conductive to making false memories and it becomes very likely that the "lost" memories are completely made up.
On top of that, I have legitimate memories that were not traumatic, but still related to the same traumas because said person attempted to encourage these activities throughout my young life on rare occasions. I didn't remember what happened as a kid, but I knew something wasn't right and I wasn't comfortable. It wasn't until I was almost 30 that I had my first "flashback" which was a fractured memory, I still remember it looked like a faded photograph in my mind, and it was accompanied by an extremely uncomfortable feeling.
The re-surfacing memories aren't real in a sense, but in my case they aren't entirely fake either.
I wonder if it's possible that things can be completely imagined with absolutely no basis what-so-ever in certain circumstances, and I also wonder how difficult it is to discern that. It seems to be a difficult concept to manage.
If it happens in therapy, that doesn't mean the memories are "implanted". And not all memories lack the ability to validate them... for example, if you've forgotten someone's name, then remember it later, you can call out to them by their name to confirm that you've correctly remembered it.
Memories tumble around in the brain all the time, not all memories are easy to access, but that doesn't mean they're inaccessible.
The point that memories can also be implanted or fabricated during therapy is absolutely an important one, but dismissing the possibility for memories to resurface (and conflating any situation where this might happen with a specific type of discredited therapy) is needlessly reductive.
Yes, witness testimony is always potentially flawed.
But knowing "some repressed memory recovery is false" does not justify saying that repressed memories are not a real thing. Repressed memories do happen. They do come back sometimes. When they do, they are just as valid as any normal memory that a person thinks they always had.
I know because I had them myself. Mine were of trauma in the age range from 5-9. I had a high "ACE score" when I eventually looked into this. I did not have any therapy session prompting the recall, I just remembered them spontaneously around age 15 when I was empathizing with a schoolmate who told me about domestic violence. It was a sickening feeling to have this whole phase of my past come unlocked.
Amazingly, it submerged into repression again. I next remembered it at about age 20. In between, I had years of basically not remembering/knowing that I had any of this trauma or that I had experience the earlier recall. They all came back together, again triggered by an empathetic moment in college. Again it was disorienting to have this whole aspect of my past reopen.
At that later point, I confronted people who were around my childhood and got enough of a painful discussion, confession, and apology to know that these memories were not invented.
I had other forms of childhood trauma that never submerged. I don't know why this one section did.
I find it very offensive for someone to make broad statements that these phenomena do not exist.
Other things about that day were surfaced. How my braces felt and the fear I felt about forgetting a textbook.
All real, but unsurfaced until then.
It might be something that one might not understand if he/she doesn't live through it I guess
I am not advocating for it, just stating the near total lack of substantive scientific evidence presented either in support or opposed.
That depends on how many you endured really. Only so much room in the old noggin with everything else important going on.
The thing that changed though is since the 2010s everyone has a high definition camera in their pocket. Everything you do is recorded online. Kids that grew up in the last few years will have their entire childhood recorded in some way or another. Every movement tracked by GPS. Therefore, while I don't agree completely, I wouldn't be surprised if some assumptions about psychology are upended and a great deal of so called repressed memories turn out to be bogus when we can easily disprove them.
When such memories come back, it can be like a mini identity crisis. You suddenly know things that are counter to your self-identity from the moment before. Once I was able to absorb the whole picture and not recoil back into repression, it became a permanent and unpleasant part of my self. .
There can be flashbacks of related events, some of which I also might feel are remembered for the first time in a long time. Those little flashbacks might be like remembering your specific uncomfortable cafe. The overall memory recovery is like suddenly realizing I spent years in a theater of war, that happened to have such cafes in it.
If you hear the first tones or words of a song you're much more likely to be able to tell the lyrics that follow compared to being asked to say those lyrics based on the title.
Yes, real life is messy and ideals like justice are quite difficult or impossible to achieve.
Don't assume you can cleverly deduce a nice, absolute and comfortable answer. That's just another coping mechanism called rationalization.
The comments in this thread are indeed disturbing. Clearly many on this forum have led blessed lives and can’t imagine people having it differently,
This whole thread is gross. I’d say you should be ashamed of yourself but you likely lack the prerequisite self inspection.
Like, if kissing is derived from impulses relating to breastfeeding (which is a hypothesis that, AIUI, is in good standing, though not the only one in good standing nor necessarily more favored than a couple others), I wouldn’t think that therefore someone who was only ever bottle-fed as a baby would therefore not get anything out of kissing. The appeal of “my lips on another person” should be there regardless, just as it was for the first time a baby is breastfed (though, of course, it is also a cultural thing: not all cultures have had kissing as a standardized way of expressing affection, so whether one grows up in a context where kissing plays a role, that probably also plays a part in whether one finds it appealing to have one’s lips on another person).
the craziest one I had, my reaction wasn’t “oh my god i never knew i had this memory” it was “wow, i cant believe i havent thought about that in 25 years.” I knew and had known it was there all along, I just literally never thought of it to the point my other thoughts just didnt collide with it, ever. It’s almost like your brain just puts it in storage in a dark corner of your garage.
I understand it isn’t the same for everyone, but that was how it felt for me.
TLDR for me it was dissociation, and the only treatment that ever worked was scraping the corners of my mind for stuff like this and it got so much better the issues basically went away. I used a great deal of meditation, particularly tibetan buddhism.
demanding citations is the favorite trick of people who want to waste your time precisely because they disagree with you and no matter what you come up with, they'll never give in. therefore, one should never give in to it.
rather, doing your own research and contributing it to the discussion is the lifeblood of online communities.
If it takes long, intense therapy to "bring back", it's almost cerainly untrue or falsified. There was a case of accused childhood abuse among close relatives of me, by someone who found out about this in therapy. It tore apart the family. I cannot take any sides because I was not there and cannot know the truth, but it checks all the boxes of falsified memories. It has destroyed multiple lifes. That's how I even learned about that stuff, and why I care.
Btw, better source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory (I originally mostly read stuff in my native language, so I didn't what to look for initially)