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Memories For Sale!



A lightbulb just went off in my head while reading this news story out of Lancaster, PA about a woman who is suing her psychologist for allegedly implanting false memories of Satanic ritual abuse. No, the lightbulb wasn’t me remembering some long-buried trauma. Quite the opposite. It was more of a professional question for all you hypnotists and psychotherapists out there.

Namely, this whole idea of a “false memory syndrome” seems to be gaining some popularity these days. But I’ve only ever heard it used in a negative context. Usually it’s designed to make survivors of alleged ritual abuse or alien abduction sound like they made the whole thing up. Now, I don’t want to get into a long drawn-out argument about whether or not it’s all in their heads. What I want to know is - for people who think that memories really can be “implanted” in this way, how come they are always traumas of the worst kind? If this is a viable psychological technique, do people use it to implant happy memories into their past?

What would happen if that suddenly came into fashion in psychotherapy? People could go to a specialist and begin to remember a time they made out with a super-model, or went to Disney World, or you name it! I once read a news article about something similar. It was about a retail/ad specialist company who’d been doing research to retro-actively modify people’s memories about shopping experiences. Say you had a bad time at a store and vowed never to come back again. They were looking at ways to convince you that you’d actually had a good time, and to change your own perceptions of your memories and yourself. The weirdest part is that I can’t for the life of me remember where I found that article, and I’m usually really good at tracking that sort of thing down… Maybe there was some kind of crazy trigger in the article that screwed with my memory around it. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants? Does it creep anybody else out that companies are trying to fuck with your own memories?

Hm, now that I think of it, I guess this was part of the plotline more or less of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Except that was more about taking out painful memories, rather than putting in happy new ones. Aside from any possible psychological methods to add or subtract memories though, as technology advances, it seems like we’ll almost certainly see this sort of thing come into our lives in the near future. Memories for sale. Would you buy? Would you sell?

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14 Reader Responses

  1. alistair Says:
    October 26th, 2005 at 10:18 pm

    ok, well, yes, that is the key to all of what i`ve been driving at. when we accidentally remember to have a good day it`s always because of remembering good events in the past or experiencing some powerfully good stuff first thing apon waking. i deliberately scream fuck as loud as i possibly can in the morning and then laugh about it. now that we have a fully detached home it`s easier on the niegbours too. if we choose good feelings for no REASON then we are taking up space usually occupied by the mundane, low tone crap that washes over society by default.
    i have some rules that i live by.
    1) no newspapers
    2) very little t.v. ( a soccer game or two a week.)
    3) no miserable types intent on discouraging anything resembling a smile.
    4) healthy diet and plenty of bottled water.
    5) nothing to the extreme, except the soccer.
    6) a sense of humour, for fuck`s sake.
    7) as little punctuation as possible.
    8) smiling at myself in the mirror and smiling at others until they smile back.
    i do nothing more in sessions than remind people of the best times they ever had and stir up the feelings and imprint them onto an ongoing now. if all you dois learn to do that then you can always choose to be happy with a little bit of effort.
    my dad used to say,”keep smiling, it makes them wonder what you`re up to.” he was a jesuit after all……….

  2. Ant Says:
    October 26th, 2005 at 11:08 pm

    I guess the reason that bringing out or implanting bad memories is more notable is because it’s less problem-solving. Most memory regressions are meant to find the “bad things that happened to you to make you screwed up,” right? I mean, that’s what I figure. And then once you find that part, you can blame your screwed-up-ness on that. :)

    The idea of implanting good memories freaks me out a bit. Imagine how hard it would be for a person with too many good fictional memories about amazing things to handle everyday life. I’d suppose it would affect the whole learning process. I mean, imagine how uncomfortable you’d become if you had a memory of dating a celebrity or winning the Olympics and then you had to face the new strange reality of that not ever being the case, let alone probably even be possible.

    It really creeps me out about the advertising thing, although that sounds like a typical marketing boardroom thing brought up by some lackey. Something like “Damn, our stores suck, I wish people didn’t know that they sucked, or at least embraced that they sucked in some postmodernist indie sort of way. I wish we had those Men In Black flash-zapper-things to make them think we were awesome.” :)

    Great story though. It makes me wonder more about things like multiple personalities, and how memories are constructed within them.

    Unrelatedly,

    “You know, when your baby is eaten, the mother generally doesn’t like it”

    hahahaha.

  3. Ant Says:
    October 26th, 2005 at 11:09 pm

    Dammit, I meant to say “more problem solving.” Sorry about that miscommunication.

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 1:32 am

    Most memory regressions are meant to find the “bad things that happened to you to make you screwed up,” right? I mean, that’s what I figure. And then once you find that part, you can blame your screwed-up-ness on that.

    Hm, maybe what so-called False Memory Syndrome (FMS) really points at is how inaccurate that model of psychotherapy really is. We’re trying to force a linear cause-effect relationship where there may not necessarily be one. We delve in looking for a cause to an effect we’re feeling now, but instead, we end up affecting ourselves even further.

    It’s also interesting to think about how when you dream, the dream events clothe themselves in memories and images from your life. Maybe FMS is something similar, except we are projecting backwards in time during a liminal state. Our current psychological crisis likewise gets projected backwards, but then clothes itself in the images present in and associated with that time period - but in a wholly new and creative arrangement that never really even happened.

    Also raises the question for me of if something didn’t happen but I remember it happening, (or vice versa) is there any difference? The difference will only come out if confronted with conflicting information from outside sources. But how do we know that outside sources have more accurate information than us?

  5. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 1:38 am

    Oh I guess I sort of talked about something similar to that approach to FMS here:

    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005.../10/entities-culture-bound-syndromes/

    My working hypothesis is this: What if deep level hypnosis and other really intense therapy can sort of trigger or “open the gate” on an experience like this? What I’m saying essentially, is that maybe the therapist unwittingly plays the part of an initiating priest in an occult ritual. We know from many many accounts that psychedelic drug use or shamanic trances can sometimes bring participants in contact with strange entities - whether real or imagined. My post on dwarves in the UFO experience has much greater detail in this direction.

    Maybe hypnosis and other deeply probing therapies can have similar effects. Most therapies tend to focus on regression. You move backwards in your mind through your personal history in order to look for the root of your problems, and hopefully come to understand yourself better. If drugs can trigger an otherworldly experience in “the now”, during the present moment, perhaps therapy can trigger one of these events “in your past.” That is, maybe this event didn’t truly happen in your past (although maybe it did), but since you’re delving into your past, the psychic event sort of “takes on the costume” of your past.

  6. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 1:45 am

    YESSS! I finally tracked down the term for that business thing where they try to change your memories: memory morphing!

    http://www.businesspundit.com/archives/000760.html

    Is your memory playing tricks on you, or did you find shopping at your over-priced supermarket last week a wonderful experience? Did you have a great time on that lacklustre package holiday a couple of years ago? And are you quite sure whether you enjoyed that cold, tasteless meal the other day?

    Advertisers have found a new way to mess with your mind.

    A group of US marketing researchers claim that brand owners can make their customers believe they had a better experience of a product or service than they really did by bombarding them with positive messages after the event. Advocates of the technique, known as “memory morphing”, claim it can be used to improve customers’ perceptions of products and encourage them to repeat their purchases and recommend brands to friends.

    “When asked, many consumers insist that they rely primarily on their own first-hand experience with products - not advertising - in making purchasing decisions. Yet, clearly, advertising can strongly alter what consumers remember about their past, and thus influence their behaviours,” he writes in his book, How Customers Think. He says that memories are malleable, changing every time they come to mind, and that brands can use this to their advantage. “What consumers recall about prior product or shopping experiences will differ from their actual experiences if marketers refer to those past experiences in positive ways,” he continues.

    Other links on the subject:

    http://laura.moncur.org/archives/2003/11/01/2003-11-01-06-40/
    http://www.hakank.org/webblogg/archives/000245.html
    http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2003/10/23/memory-morphing-by-ads/

    I’ll have to look into this more. This is also interesting:

    http://www.religionnewsblog.com/8951-Untrue_confessions.html

  7. Monster Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 1:56 am

    Yeah I think the mind will distort memories that are very painful and mask it with things that never happened. Which is cool with me. Like the Doors said: “Learn to forget.” Or that Family Guy episode where the German guy, when the tourists ask him about WWII, denies there were any nazis or anything saying “no, no we were all on vacation,” man that was so hilarious but you had to be there.

  8. alistair Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 6:58 am

    in sessions i will requently future-pace a client, that is take them into an imaginary future where they are already living in thier ideal oucome as a successful non-smoker, thinner person or whatever. the mind is elastic, suggestable and powerful in it`s ability to fool it`s self into believing whatever it wants to, whether the memories are from past events, on going present occurances or things that will happen at either specific times in the future or just as a flow.
    it is, without a doubt, far better to imagine a positive yet false memory than a negative one that causes problems now. phobias are a classic example of negative memories that have become unmanageable. the power of memory is in the effects it has in our present state and our present state is what sets our brain chemistry now. interestingly memories of our future also effect us now. these memories are called anxiety and are always imagined, yet are as powerful as real memories from the past in how they make us feel.

  9. Error 404 Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 10:00 am

    That was the key concept of the move “Total Recall”. The title of the book on which that was based is “we can remember it for you wholesale”.

    Personaly, I have several early childhood memories that are probably false - I clearly remember flying around the apartment we lived in, for example.

  10. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 11:20 am

    Oh yeah, you’re right. I forgot about that in Total Recall.

    Personaly, I have several early childhood memories that are probably false - I clearly remember flying around the apartment we lived in, for example.

    How do you know that’s false though? It could have been you leaving your body…

  11. Anonymous Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 5:13 pm

    We Can Remember It for You Wholesale was written by Philip K. Dick. You probably read it and then forgot about it.

  12. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 5:18 pm

    No I never read it.

  13. lisa Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 8:53 pm

    Tim,
    Did you see the movie The Island? Parts of it were really lame, but all of the clones “remember” a childhood that never happened, and the childhood they remember is happy. (In the movie, they were never children — they emerge from liquid pod-things as adults.)

  14. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 9:26 pm

    oh no but i wanted to!



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