Memory is imagination pinned down. – Mason Cooley
Many people believe that human memory is like a video camera, in that it objectively records perceived events and stores the images and sounds in some sort of indelible medium which can be erased, mislaid or purposefully hidden, but never distorted; the whole principle of “eyewitness testimony” in our legal system derives from this belief. But as a great deal of research going back to the beginning of modern psychology has demonstrated, it simply isn’t true. The human mind doesn’t passively record events as a camera does; memory is an active and dynamic process which retains information by fitting it into schemata, mental frameworks which shape our thinking and give meaning to perceptions. For example, a chess master shown a board in the middle of a real game can quickly memorize the positions of the pieces with a high degree of accuracy and retention, but if shown a board in which the pieces are randomly arranged he cannot memorize the positions any better than anyone else. This is because in the former case the board layout fits neatly into his highly-developed schema of chess rules and strategy, while in the latter case it’s just a bunch of objects with no discernible order or meaning.
As Victor Frankl observed, human beings have a deep need for meaning; we look for order in even the most chaotic arrangement of objects or events. The same psychological mechanism which causes us to find pictures in Rorschach’s inkblots also causes us to fit memories into the complex web of schemata by which we interpret the world. And just as we ignore those topological elements of a cloud or inkblot which do not fit the meaning our minds have imposed upon it, so do we forget or distort elements of a memory which fail to conform to the schema in which we have embedded it, or even invent elements which were not in reality present, but which the schema predicts should be. This is an extremely important point, so I’ll repeat it: The human mind often completely fabricates memories in order to impose conformity with one’s weltanschauung. One simple example involves police lineups: people will often identify the man whom police imply (subtly or overtly) is their preferred suspect because they believe police to be expert assessors of guilt who would never implicate someone falsely, and this schema of police authority and infallibility actually shapes their memories, sometimes to the point of identifying a person who is later proven to look absolutely nothing like the actual criminal.
Traumatic events tend to induce psychological imbalance which renders the victim even more subject to suggestion by perceived authority figures, which is how False Memory Syndrome develops; a person suffering from depression, anxiety or even nightmares seeks therapy (or has it forced upon her by a court or family) and develops a psychological dependence on a manipulative (and usually agenda-driven) “therapist” who convinces her that all of her problems result from childhood sexual abuse, and then proceeds to “help” her “recover” those memories as one might dig through a closet for a lost videotape. But memory does not work that way; in reality this procedure does not “recover” existing memories but creates completely new ones which conform to the “therapist’s” narrative, and reconfigures existing ones to agree with the confabulations. The syndrome was largely responsible for the Satanic Panic, and also for witchcraft hysteria of past centuries; in the latter case the pressure to reshape memories was inflicted by religious authorities and by the culture as a whole rather than by individual agents such as therapists.
It is important to recognize that people who form false memories are neither stupid nor weak-willed, and their memories are not lies but essentially misfiled fantasies. Everyone files memories for recall by linking them to other cognitive artifacts (memories, ideas, thoughts, beliefs, etc), and when a dream, delusion, fantasy or the like is filed in the same way as a memory the brain treats it as one; moreover, when the false memory is linked to positive reinforcement (such as the approval of a group or authority figure), it is apt to become even more persistent than the memories of real events which lack such powerful associations. If the false memories serve as the passport into an identity group, they are likely to become the person’s most intense memories because they form an essential keystone of self-identification.
There are a number of psychological criteria shared by the majority of those who are unusually susceptible to remembering experiences that did not happen in objective reality (including alien abductions, demonic possession, cultic victimization, etc); research conducted on such people has revealed that they tend to share a majority of the following characteristics:
* They are easy to hypnotize
* As children they played in a fantasy world
* They believed in fairies, guardian angels, etc.
* As children they had invisible playmates
* Even as adults they spent a significant part of their time fantasizing
* They often believe they have psychic abilities
* Most have had out-of-body experiences
* They often believe they have healing powers
* They are subject to hypnagogic experiences
* They have very vivid dreams
* They have good memories
* They receive messages from unknown forces
Though everyone is susceptible to memory distortion to some degree, those who are so vulnerable that they can be readily convinced that bizarre, unusual, fantastic or even impossible things really did happen to them are called “Fantasy Prone Persons”; they make up roughly 4% of the population. Most FPPs are also extremely sexual; many of them can achieve orgasm through fantasy alone, and their false memories usually have a strong sexual element, often with powerful BDSM overtones. Have you ever wondered why supposed “memories” of witchcraft, Satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction and the like often include sexual elements, especially ones in which the person was raped, subjected to bondage, sexually tortured, mind controlled or “hypnotized”, etc? It’s because they all come from the same shadowy part of the brain, and the identity of the abusers (and other particulars of the false memory) are just window dressing. Studies demonstrate that these details depend on the individuals’ beliefs and associates: traditionally-religious FPPs are likely to believe they’ve been possessed by demons or sexually abused by cultists; those with a strong interest in science fiction or UFOs are likely to identify their imaginary tormentors as aliens; and women with an unhappy history of sex work, or who become too immersed in “sex trafficking” porn, remember lurid experiences of vast pimp networks and over a dozen clients a day, etc.
Next time you see one of these “survivor” narratives, compare it to the now-discredited accounts of Satanic ritual abuse and the widely-ridiculed tales of alien medical experiments. Many “survivors” report savage beatings, being shut for days in scorpion-filled sewage barrels or being dragged down the street behind a pimp’s or client’s car, yet never have any permanent injuries to show for it…just as the McMartin Preschool children bore no scars from anal knife rapes, and alien medical examinations likewise leave no marks. Consider the eerie similarity of “survivor” narratives and their convergence since the beginning of “sex trafficking” hysteria, just as Satanic abuse narratives resemble those from 16th-century witch trials and alien abduction stories converged after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Think also about the impossible logistics of the situations described by people like Theresa Flores, who claims to have been “abducted” from her upper-middle-class family home every night for two years and forced to prostitute herself, yet was freed every morning to attend school; supposedly neither her parents nor siblings ever heard her come or go, nor did she ever show any signs of sleep deprivation or psychological trauma sufficient to raise any suspicion. The same miraculous immunity to detection and circumstance protected the McMartin cultists: no parent, delivery person or other outsider ever showed up while everyone was downstairs in the secret Satanic temple, and no child ever suffered trauma or said a word about seeing people fly until the “investigators” questioned them. And nobody else in the neighborhoods from which alien abductees are taken ever see or hear ships, aliens, or hypnotized levitating test subjects. It’s clear that people who recount such stories believe them, and can therefore easily pass the polygraph tests which are sometimes used to prop up their unbelievable tales. They are not lying in the strict sense, because they really do remember these events; however, as the dreamlike (or nightmarish) character of their memories and the lack of physical evidence amply demonstrate, their adventures took place in an unreal Twilight Zone rather than in the mundane world where normal events occur.
(With grateful acknowledgement to the observations of Eileen Lang.)
One Year Ago Today
“Public Service Announcement” politely asks men to stop sending women pictures of their penises.
NO! That weekend I spent with Pat Benatar in a condo in Panama City Beach, FL in 1980 WAS REAL!!!!
They taught us some of this stuff in the submarine navy – how the mind works and can fool you … it’s scary shit. It’s like … “Hey Krulac, did you check the hatch shut because we’re diving you know?” And I’m like … “Yeah, absolutely … I can still see the hatch indicator in my brain and it pointed to the “closed” position”.
“Then why does the indicator on the BCP indicate that it’s OPEN still???!!!”
“Hmmm … you ain’t got a straight board?”
“No, Petty Officer Krulac, we DO NOT have a straight board!!”
And I’m like … “Oh hell, wait – let me check this again!!”
You know, she told me she loved me too! 😛
I’ve got a great imagination, I love sci-fi, and have played fantasy games most my life. I’ve actually read the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
And yet, I know fantasy from reality. as much as I love my fictions, I know I must live in the real world.
That’s why I generally end up in arguments with religious people.
Me, too; in fact, several of those listed characteristics apply to me (even more in my teens and twenties). I’ve known about FPPs since my earliest psychology studies in the ’80s, which is one of the reasons I trained myself to be so rational: I didn’t want to risk falling into that.
Not a damn one of those characteristics applies to me – except for fantasies and those are mostly sexual and happen … (excuse me one sec … ahhhhh) … well there was one just now!
As a kid I fatasized about being Batman and when I got older I fantasized about being Ace Frehley of KISS – but this is all pretty unimaginative stuff.
I mean seriously – I could go down a list of symptoms for any condition on the planet and find several conditions that apply to me – even a list of PMS symptoms.
But this list you have here … nope, it’s a dead bell. Which is prolly one reason I’ve always said I’m pretty “two-dimensional” … easy to figure out … easy to motivate … easy to keep happy. On the one hand, I’m pretty proud that it makes me fairly “low maintenance” – on the other hand, it’s depressing that I’ll never be a great composer or artist. 🙁
Patients who have had a “near death experience” in an ICU often report an out of body phenomenon; as if they were floating above themselves and looking down on the scene. Apparently, they can often describe the resuscitation quite well.
There is now an experiment to test this: the tops of the cupboards have had symbols painted on them, though the staff don’t know what these are. If the patients recover, they are going to be asked about these symbols. It’s intriguing though, that some researchers have heard the same stories so often that rather than rubbishing them, they are testing their validity.
My guess at this stage is that they won’t do better than chance in recognising the symbols. These out of body experiences are more likely to be hallucinations or “altered states of consciousness” phenomena, rather like the ascetics seeing images in the deserts, or what the earliest cave painters are said to have experienced.
Stopped briefly at “Brú na Bóinne” today on the way to the airport. In the exhibition centre the point is strongly made that at least some of the megalithic carvings were made in “altered states of consciousness”.
http://www.newgrange.com/
I used to be very big on the NDE. But after a while they seemed to all be alike, and to lack testability. Then I started reading about drug-induced experiences, trip reports, and the like. And it turns out that the NDE is exactly like a trip. The tunnel of light, meeting God, meeting departed loved ones, the feeling of knowing everything, floating outside and above your own body: ALL of these are common psychedelic experiences. Then when I found out that the human brain produces DMT* and releases an unusual quantity during NDE, that clinched it for me. People who have a near death experience are going on a spiritual journey all right, but it’s the same sort of spiritual journey Timothy Leary talked about.
* DMT is the chemical N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or C12H16N2, a powerful psychedelic drug and the psychoactive component in ayahuasca. It is Schedule I in the United States, the most illegal of substances, and we are all of us in possession of it every day of our lives.
Of course we are, of course…
Now hold still while I crack open your skull to get to the gooey, delicious, DMT-filled center.
Dammit I’m dreaming about Cadbury Eggs again, never mind. You’re, ah, free to go.
DMT is 1 of only 2 remaining substances on my to-do list. I’ve been compiling a playlist & everything! C’mon brain cactus, do your stuff!
I can’t help but to ask (while strapping on a helmet): what is the other substance?
I can’t believe writing of this quality remains so underdiscovered. What Maggie McNeill has posted here is the vanguard of rediscovering the human condition. While so many professional psychologists get it so wrong that I feel embarassed to come from the Western World, Maggie has navigated brilliantly through all the collective, witch-trial reminiscent, delusions that the country takes with bizarre seriousness.
Thank you so much for offering this kind of clarity on a public forum.
You’re very welcome! I’m a lot less undiscovered than I was two years ago, but I still have a long way to go. 🙂
Thanks for replying Maggie.
I’m a little sheltered from all of the weirdness in contemporary America considering I’ve lived 7 years in Nepal and now Northern Thailand, but I can’t help but be intrigued in why any population of civilized human beings would scare-up more anger towards consensual sex or unforced sexually suggestive touching than even violent murder. Even forced, I’d personally rather be raped than murdered, and I’d assume most people – and all non-human mammals would probably choose that lesser of two horrors. Sorry if that’s too taboo or insensitive to speak about on a public forum; where I am, there aren’t that many taboos so I tend to just let my thoughts fly.
A recent day in the news showed incredible rage in response to the witness testimony of the fondling of a child (Jerry Sandusky trial), where comments posted on news articles with wishes he was violently murdered in prison received 100 thumbs up ratings with 0 objections (or thumbs downs).
Just one Page Break down was another top news story about a Miami man who ate the face of a homeless person without any justification or reason. 75% of his face was ripped off by the incisors of the attacker and many of the responses were full of jokes and further insults to the man who sat passively in the street until his face was brutally chewed up.
This is my mind is clearly indicative of a very sick society. I’m trying to come up with some sort of theory on why allegations of fondling (which in some societies in Asia, parents do to their infant/toddler children regularly just to calm them down with no apparent mental abberations) – long or short-term- become national news and the pinnacle of release for pent-out societal frustration.
At some point we must have created this collective neurosis and exerted such social-pressure on members of society to comply that the subject can not even be discussed unless mentioned in the same sentence as guillotines and threats physical torture doled-out by enraged armchair voyeurs at the accused.
I have a few opinions of my own, but I’d like to here any uncensored opinions of your own first. You may not even agree with my premise; as I know the legal right to sell one’s own body safely for mutual benefit is an issue closer to your heart, but I’d like to hear what you think about that. If an article you’ve written already touches upon this issue – could you just redirect me to that article?
Thanks in advance.
Just want to add that although I think both news stories are about what should rightfully be labelled some sort of “crime”, I feel that the order of magnitude and the societal response seems abberational or neurotic.
I realize that some people might read that and think I am somebody trying to defend actions of my own, and perhaps in this internet age, I should be doubly careful to defend myself in advance if I say anything controversial.
Being somebody who has more interest in sexual man from a psychological standpoint than actual participation – I feel rather untainted as to enable msyelf speak out against unfairness wherever it presents itself. I have no gender biases or deep emotional reactions to these issues. Yet, the wiser part of me says the mob is too irrational to even start a conversation about why we react to violently to some sexual crimes which aren’t necessarily violent and – sometimes – not as traumatic as we are led to believe.
I think you’ve touched on one of the reasons I feel it’s important for me to speak out on these issues. As a whore I understand what it’s like to be a criminalized sexual minority, but as a woman I’m generally considered part of the “victim class” rather than the “offender class” by the terms of the current iteration of the hysteria. That gives me the ability to criticize the panic without the fear of “anyone who would defend a witch must be a witch”; Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids also speaks out but from a different angle (the harm done to kids by shutting them off from virtually all adult males). It’s true that some of the fanatics are mired so deeply in psychosis that they imagine the existence of “female pedophiles” (by false analogy with those rare cases of arrested development who become involved with teenage boys), but even there my forthrightness about my own sexuality – a subject about which most people are secretive – would confound them.
Incidentally, you’re right in thinking that most childhood adolescent sexual behavior is not in itself traumatic; the Rind-Tromovitch-Bauserman study demonstrated that even most of the trauma from child-adult sexual contact was attributable to the force rather than the sex, and to the way adults behave when the molestation is discovered. They further discovered that girls suffered more trauma from intergenerational heterosexual contact than boys did, and that if the “victim” was post-pubescent such trauma was minimal to nonexistent in the vast majority of cases.
I am a white, 29 year old male living in Northern Thailand at the moment with a fashion sense and uninhibitedness about the world that draws strange glances from most western women – but nobody else. I’m probably stigmatized by the West with that profile, but I don’t know. I tend to be very sensitive and compassionate notwithstanding a sharp edge that comes out when I see injustice, but often toughness for no reason seems to score points in the states when guys like me are perceived incorrectly as wusses because we don’t get our highs from guzzling protein shakes.
Hence, I’ll leave it up to you to defend prostitution as men are generally on the receiving end in growing cases of “thought crimes”, where the guilty simply had a sexual preference that they weren’t shy to voice. You are exactly right that you are in a unique position to talk about these issues, and you are doing an unbelievable job communicating your position so that others can understand you. I’m already a huge fan of your growing body of work.
A little more… Nobody would believe how I was treated by US immigration last time I came back to the states… they were convinced I must be some criminal of some kind because I spent many years in Nepal and India without having any work there. I honestly don’t think anybody would believe the treatment I received, but I think it would SHOCK Americans to know how I was treated by my own country.
But alas, I had no history of sex trafficking to admit to no matter how much they wished I would answer their questions in the affirmative. Never felt so bad and so good at the same time for being a squeaky-clean, yoga guy who gets his kicks from fruit smoothies, yoga, practicing therapeutic massage. Now THAT was traumatic, especially after 44 sleepless hours of bus rides, flights, and layovers.
For some reason the name “Shelley Lubin” automatically springs to mind whenever I read that checklist.
The Bible of the “recovered memory” fringe is “The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.
The book is filled with unsupported claims, distorted logic and questionable advice, but over the past 20 years it has gone through four editions and has sold over four million copies.
Here is a very critical review: http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/the-courage-to-heal-a-critical-review/
It also works the other way: While I was working on a social project during my high school years (or whatever would be the corresponding level for the gymnasium in the US), I often came into contact with migrants and refugees, some of them sex workers, who had experienced trauma. Because they showed exactly the symptoms of real trauma, namely incoherent memories and confusedness (especially considering the language barriers), the immigration administration didn’t believe them and thought everything made up, so that they were sometimes not granted asylum and force-returned to their country, where there was a high chance of them getting abused or even murdered (because they were political refugees or women who fled from “honor murder” by relatives)
I match just a WHOLE LOT of that checklist, and matched even more of it when I was younger. I had my fantasy world, and still do (though it isn’t as consistent and interesting as it once was). I certainly believed in guardian angels, I thought for a while that I had psychic powers, and then for a while that I had healing powers. I had imaginary (not just invisible, please) friends as a child, and I still do at forty-six. I do a helluvalot of fantasizing, and have my whole life. I don’t always have vivid dreams, but sometimes oh wow. My memory, well… not so good. Or rather inconsistent: sometimes great, oftentimes sucky. I also haven’t had any out-of-body experiences, don’t THINK I’ve had much in the way of hypnagogic experiences, and I’ve never been easy to hypnotize, even when that’s what I was going for. And all of this without subjecting myself to, ahm… Better Living Through Chemistry. 😉
I think that all of this is why I insist so strongly on “realworldism” in my real life. I’m all for Elves and ghosts and alien secret agents and angelic lovers in my fantasies, but I want to keep my fantasy, fantasy and my reality, reality.
And here’s a song about alien abduction, which I’ve been lucky enough to avoid.
Someone being abducted from a middle-class home every night and forced into prostitution, then returned before breakfast, is an inherently ludicrous idea. Someone being tortured and abused so she will remain a relatively passive sex slave when she is too young to give meaningful consent is sadly not implausible at all. Nor is it implausible when someone remembers being sold by their family into prostitution, or sold into forced marriage with an age-inappropriate husband (hi Afghanistan!). All these things happen often in poor countries.
What evidence do we have that the young woman in Kristof’s column has no scars, as is implied here? Has anyone examined or photographed her body and found it scarless? His column is condensed. I agree one would likely die after CONTINUOUS immersion in shit and scorpions over a prolonged period, but if one were brought out to eat one might live. The scorpions wouldn’t sting you to death. They’re terrifying and painful, that’s it. Cambodian people are a) inventive sadists when the call arises and b) capable of surviving conditions that seem fatal. I know someone who lived because his father and mother smuggled snails and worms from the rice paddies back in the folds of their clothing–risking death–to put in his meager porridge. The protein meant he lived, while they eventually died. I’m not sure why you think that the people who brained infants on trees to save the money for bullets would balk at torturing or raping children. This is not meant as a slur on Cambodians; in general they are (paradoxically, I realize) extraordinarily welcoming, gentle and hospitable, and no more evil than Americans or Brazilians. I just have a more jaundiced view of humans than you do, apparently. They can get up to some really fucked up shit.
Somaly Mam has been denounced a number of times by people from affiliated organizations, who are now distancing themselves from her increasingly-bizarre fantasies. Her ex-husband has even shown proof of some of the recent ones, and only the girls who are “rescued” by HER organization and become HER proteges come up with such outlandish tales; are we to believe that Somaly has a sort of radar for brothels with horror-movie practices while other organizations see the normal ones? Or are we to recognize that she’s schooling impressionable girls in what to say?
OK, that’s information I didn’t have. Perhaps I need to read more about her most recent claims and reëvaluate them. I certainly know when I watch an episode of CSI that there are not evil Mexicans trafficking high school sophomores all over America as prostitutes and future unwilling organ donors, since that has bullshit written all over it. So maybe I have been swallowing bullshit on this front and not knowing it.
But I knew someone who was sold to a brothel at 11 in Cambodia. It seems a difficult needle to thread though when there really is forced underage prostitution going on. She never claimed to be tortured in any outlandish way, just beat up, and repeatedly raped. Which, actually, is a pretty awful form of torture so there’s no need to make up a lot of crap. I doubt any of us would volunteer our 11-year-old daughters for it. I’d kill a lot of people before I let that happen to my 10-year-old. I’d drop neutron bombs on Beijing and toss a bunch of cobalt behind for laffs. Fuck the bullshit.
She came out of it…I don’t know, OK? People come out of a lot of horrible abusive situations defiantly OK, like, “nothing can get me down.” Cambodia is full of survivors. When I first met her (at 15) she was the girlfriend of a British guy, a nerd of almost 30 who suddenly had the hottest girlfriend of his life, and I was ready to denounce him until I figured out he was the sucker of all time and she had him wrapped around her tiny little finger. She was supporting her family, and not working as a “taxi girl” anymore, and he gave her like $5 US a day, enough to support her and all her friends to go around shopping all day and getting their eyebrows threaded. Plus she was cheating on him to earn extras, plus she was shopping for an American boyfriend. And the poor British sap was planning to marry her and get her citizenship! Life is complicated.
So far so good, but she said she cried every day for the first year, and that was the thing they beat her for, crying. They didn’t have to worry about her running away because her family didn’t want her back because they SOLD HER LIKE A COW and no one in her town would marry her. But also…who’s going to keep her down on the farm when she’s tasted Phnom Penh? So, yeah, she became a willing prostitute, but only after her chance to be a schoolgirl got brutally torn away. I still don’t respect a man who would visit a brothel like that, willing (?!) girls like my friend at the front, unwilling girls like her 11 year old self at the back. And I think the guys that run that brothel should be tied down and then have straight razors handed out to all the girls. Little girls can be vicious.
Reality is much simplier. “Rescued” prostitutes are the ones that have refused to pay police so they are retaliated and forced through an endless violence process (that includes beatings and rapes) to say what they want. When they are sent to a program of “recovery” it’s like a brain-washing program, they are kept under vigilance 24 hrs, in very small rooms where they suffer from lack of food and rest.
I agree with abolitionist that prostitutes are victims. Victims of them and of our public authorities, that are the executioners.
Since you mentioned polygraphs, it’s worth noting that they’re worse than useless. They’ve been shown to get false positives (reporting a lie when the subject was actually telling the truth) as much as 43% of the time, perhaps even more than that, and it’s easy to fool them into giving false negatives. More info here:
https://antipolygraph.org/
[…] we insist that we endured no such trauma we are said to be lying, delusional or afflicted by “repressed memories”; and if we insist that the men with whom we are personally or professionally involved have not […]
[…] cloth? We simply don’t know and have no way of telling at this time, and I have to wonder if Amy herself even knows any more; given that prostitution is a recurring theme in her writing it seems likely that (as one of my […]