SIO280: A Scientific Case for Repressed Memory?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 280. I'm Thomas. That's Dr. Lindsey Osterman. How are doing?

0:00:37 Lindsey: Look, I, again, I've delivered no babies. I don't know what this is all about.

0:00:39 Thomas: Mm, that we know of.

0:00:42 Lindsey: Yeah, true. It was that one time in college.

0:00:43 Thomas: There might, I don't know what, I'm not, yeah, I was gonna say, I know what that suggests.

0:00:46 Lindsey: Everybody's delivered one baby at college.

0:00:48 Thomas: I. Yeah, no, I want to say that, though, because we got a question. This was one that we answered on the stream, and apologies to the emailer, because once I mark off that I did something. I have no way of finding it in my 10,000 million emails. Apologies for that. But someone sent a very thoughtful email about mentioning, you know, and using Dr. Lindsay Osterman. And it's absolutely valid. I introduced you that way when we first started recording. And then I think, you and I both kind of think of these things as an ongoing series, you know. And so then sometimes we just go, hey, Lindsay's back, you know. But I think it's very important because a lot of people don't listen to every episode. A lot of people just check in here and there, and I think it's important to do that introduction each and every time. So I will remember to dothat. I think that was a great email. And what do you think, Doc?

0:01:37 Lindsey: Mean, that sounds lovely. I'm totally open to that. And yeah, that, that email was also cool, because he mentioned a the response that we did about the Dunning-Kruger effect and he so if if people want to hear more about that then like go watch the the video of that stream because it was like yeah I really appreciated that email it was very good yeah

0:01:53 Thomas: Yeah, it was a good email. Sorry that that kind of got lost in that weird shuffle I tried to do. But anyway, we're here to do a follow-up on the repressed memory thing. There's... there's some interesting stuff to talk about regarding the science of that I hadn't really intended to have Carrie on to delve too much into the science we need to just cover it a little bit but I more wanted to hear about Carrie's experience and her interest and she explained the science pretty well but you there it turns out there's are they're lot of interesting questions there we had a number of emails and messages and our own Dr. Lindsay Osterman has looked into it and I'm excited I had to talk about it yeah

0:02:29 Lindsey: Yeah no this has been a fascinating journey I say I'm still on this journey so I'm gonna fill you in on where I am so far um but uh I actually don't know at this point what I think about this topic, and I wasn't expecting that. So, yeah, a couple of people reached out to you and made – sort of offered a similar kind of pushback, right? So I thought that Carrie did a fantastic job in the last episode. Everything she talked about is consistent with what I know about what happened in the 80s and, you this horrible thing that came out of, I think it was primarily like, yes,

0:03:06 Thomas: Hair metal she did a whole thing on hair metal and all that it was very well done you agree with all that 80s was kind of bullshit music don't let Andrew hear me say that or I will be fired from Opening Arguments no the satanic panic and all that stuff right yeah Mm-hmmm

0:03:12 Lindsey: I totally did. Pretty bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like there were some really horrific things that were uncovered there about memories being planted. And so what I'm not going to do is say that any of that is wrong because it's not. And Elizabeth Loftus' work that you guys talked about was super important in sort of demonstrating proof of concept about how those memories can get implanted. And as it turns out, our memories are a lot more malleable than we think they are. And that's an important thing for everybody to know. But so at least three people, so Ruth, Frank, and we failed to find the third person who wrote in with this comment.

0:03:28 Thomas: Right sorry my fault

0:04:00 Lindsey: But um They all said you know like great episode but also there actually is this this account um of how memory repression actually could be possible um and it seems to be grounded in evolutionary theory and so like upon reading these the first time I was like wow okay so I've never heard of that and I was a little bit resistant to it honestly from the the sort of the broad strokes description of it, but it seemed worth reading about.

0:04:00 Thomas: Mm-hm

0:04:25 Lindsey: And it's very distinct from the Freudian account. So like, I want to call this something other.

0:04:24 Thomas: So we can still say Freud sucks sucks. Stand by that. Okay.

0:04:31 Lindsey: Oh, of course. Well, actually, I want to push back on that because I love Freud, but only in the way that I love, you know, a lot of fiction writers, like none of that stuff is. Yeah anyway so uh so Freud aside um to I want to call this something else because this is this is very much not the Freudian idea of repression so like just to recap that like Freud's idea was that we have this sort of like homunculus in our minds that's trying to protect us from painful experiences and There is no support for that as as you know I think Carrie made the um the case for convincingly and I agree with all of that

0:05:00 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, good. Cause I was trying to figure out what to name my homunculus. I wasn't, I was already like, gosh, I got to figure that out, but no. Okay, so no homunculous. I'm not, it's just me in here. Oh okay. Well, that's good and bad. Could I borrow a homuncus? Is there any way to get a homonculus attachment or have we not? Okay. It's just mean. Nevermind. Move on.

0:05:14 Lindsey: No homunculus yeah just you um gosh if you

0:05:26 Thomas: Different topic for another show. Show.

0:05:27 Lindsey: If you figure it no If you figure that out please let me know I would love one of those it sounds like take a lot of pressure off yeah

0:05:30 Thomas: Like almost like a personal assistant in your brain that kind of shuffles files around. That'd be nice. Like, you don't need to think about this, Mr. Smith. This trauma you had earlier in your life. Let's just move that aside, you know, file it away. I'll handle that. That'd be nice, okay, but not that.

0:05:49 Lindsey: No, unfortunately not that because that would be really fun I would like that a lot um no it's a little bit different and actually so so parts of this are are pretty much consistent with what I thought I was going to be saying and doing this follow-up We were going to go. I thought that I was going to come on and say, like, Carrie's right about everything. But this pushback that you're getting is also sort of coming from a real place. But there's a really big difference between forgetting and repressing, right?

0:06:13 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, sure.

0:06:14 Lindsey: And the Freudian repression makes this very weird case that makes absolutely no sense. And it's, you know, it's implausible on theoretical grounds. There's no evidence for it in case closed. But again, what I was going to grant is that there may be sort of a less dramatic kind of forgetting of negative information that happens through like very normal channels that is completely understandable so like you might sort of actively inhibit thoughts about something unpleasant and then over a long enough period of time that could make it more difficult to retrieve that event right and so you

0:06:44 Thomas: Yeah. And There was part of the reading I did for that episode. I and part of it was interesting, which is, you know, and, and apologies, you know, this is a disturbing topic. We're not going into depth on any trauma or anything, any, any sexual abuse, but you know it's an unpleasant topic. But one thing was about how if there is a, you know, a child who experiences something like that because they have no context around sex or any of those concepts that they can be it's not a repressed. The repressed memory thing still seems to be bullshit. But it's it's that like because it didn't fit into their conception of the world exactly at that time. It can be a weird thing where they don't maybe really remember that.

0:07:25 Lindsey: Know process it as abuse

0:07:26 Thomas: Yeah, they might not process it as abuse at the time. And so there can be a process of like, you discovering like, oh, shoot, no, that actually was super messed up. But as a kid, your brain didn't label it that way per se. And so but that's still a very distinct thing, again, from having a hypnotist come in and like suggest a bunch of stuff and all that process.

0:07:26 Lindsey: Yes Freudian repression yes Yeah and it is very different and actually that that example is part of the theory that we're going to talk about. It's one piece of it, at least, right? And there's a lot of different mechanisms like this, you know, like, so in that first sort of example that I talked about, so if you, if something happens and you sort of are like, all right, I'm just going to put that away and not think about it. And then you don't retrieve it for like five years. And then, you know, something makes you think of it. That could feel very much like a recovered memory. But it's it's you know again it's not coming from the kinds of processes that Freud was was suggesting and like I've had stuff like that happen you know um

0:08:21 Thomas: Yeah. Well, and also, as one of the emailers pointed out, I believe, and maybe you're going to get to this too, you can forget that you remembered something before, which is interesting. It's like the metadata in your brain hard drive, you know, like you don't, you don'T have like a, Oh, this memory was last accessed on whatever. It's Like you can remember something and you have already remembered it before, but you don't remember that you remember it. And I am confident this happens to me all the time. Like I, I bet you this happens every day. And, I, or at least somewhat often I have these memories where I'm like, Oh my God, I haven't thought about that in in 30 years. And I'm sure what that means is I've thought about it like twice in that time, but I just forget every time.

0:08:24 Lindsey: Yeah yeah a hundred percent yeah yeah and You forget yeah and actually I I've had a couple of times when I've realized that I've done this because I obsessively document everything and So I'll think I'm remembering something for the first time and then I'll like go back through my my emails that's how how I keep thoughts and stuff together. And I'll find out that like, oh, no, I did this five years ago.

0:09:07 Thomas: Oh, wow. Okay. So you do have a homunculus. Hold on. Give me the homuncus that does that. I need to download that.

0:09:24 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, okay. If Gmail is homunculus, then yeah, yeah. So there are things like that, right? We forget things all the time. And there are definitely examples of that that I think could look kind of like repression, right, but it's through these different processes. Essays. But the theory that I want to dig into a little bit, and this is what the emailers pointed us toward,

0:09:46 Thomas: Well, Yeah. So, you um, know, the gist of these emails, uh, as you, as you say, I mean, it mentions Jennifer Freight, who is actually the accuser in that Cut article. So clearly, I mean, she was motivated to maybe look into the science of this or however you want to think about that. I don't know. I think it's interesting. She seems to be the source of this theory. It seems to be largely based on her work. So I think we absolutely have to note that this comes from from the same person who is the accuser in the cut article that we discussed with on Carrie's show. And, you know, as Carrie and I said, and I want to emphasize again, like it wasn't about whether or not we sitting here could adjudicate that allegation because we can't like there's no way to say, you know, and it was just worth noting that the way that I absolutely stand by the way that article handled the science was irresponsible, you know, it wasn't it wasn't a good picture, it don't know what it seems like it was pretty insulting to Loftus and her work.

And so, all those, all that aside, all the caveats, all the everything aside, I think it's worth maybe having you explain to us the theory, you know, because Kerry and I didn't quite get at it. You know, Kerry talked about the idea that you wouldn't want to repress something evolutionarily, because if you have a trauma, she mentioned, if you're a soldier or that kind of thing, like if you have a trauma, something life-threatening,

0:10:21 Lindsey: Yeah absolutely.

0:11:12 Thomas: Evolution wouldn't want you to be like, well, forget all about that so that you'll just run into the danger again, which, you know, how does that logic strike you just right there?

0:11:22 Lindsey: Oh yeah, no, I totally agree with that and it's I mean that that is a, you know, to the point, right? So in this, in this paper where she's, where Jennifer Freight is laying out betrayal trauma theory, that is one of the things that she says up front, is that that would be stupid.

0:11:24 Thomas: Right.

0:11:35 Thomas: Right. Right. So, but, you know, Carrie and I didn't mention this very thing you're about to talk about. That's Jennifer Freyd's work. I just wanted to signpost all of that because, again, you know, there's a weird connection. It's a word thing to look at. It's hard to look in a vacuum. But, you, know, we can at least present the other scientific side of this particular thing. So, having said that, why don't you explain to us Jennifer Freyd's theories and we'll see how we find it.

0:11:35 Lindsey: Yeah yeah absolutely. So again again, this is called betrayal trauma theory. And Jennifer Freight is suggesting with this theory that psychogenic amnesia, which is sort of contrasted from organic amnesium, that's when there's some sort of head trauma or something that causes memory loss. Psychogenic amnesia is when there is no head trauma, there is no clear sort of organic cause, and yet you're still seeing some sort of memory disruption or memory loss. So this theory is suggesting that psychogenic amnesia may be an adaptive response to childhood abuse, particularly when that abuse is perpetrated by a caregiver. And this is an evolutionarily informed account of trauma-related amnesIA. And this is what the logic of the argument is. So first of all, she lays out some important empirical groundwork that is necessary to argue that something could have evolved in the first place.

0:12:53 Lindsey: So for instance, she cites relevant evidence of the claim that this would have been a recurrent threat during childhood, so that abuse would have been a recurrent threat that you would need adaptations to sort of respond to. And she does this, you know, primarily on the basis of frequency of abuse now, right? And there are other sources of evidence that you'd want to get there in order to really make a claim about this being a recurrent threat. But like, nonetheless, that is relevant evidence. And then she starts stepping through the theoretical groundwork for how this could could have evolved and what it would look like. So she notes that the human mind has mechanisms that are designed specifically to detect cheaters. And cheater detection is like a sub-area of the cooperation literature in evolutionary research, which we could spend an entire episode just on that, by the way, because that's a really cool area of research.

0:13:45 Thomas: Maybe someday we will.

0:13:47 Lindsey: Yeah, it would be fun. But the bottom line here is that, you know, humans are an ultra-social species. We rely on cooperation with others in a number of ways that are super survival relevant. And cheaters are very disruptive to a system of cooperators because they gain all the benefits of being helped and they don't incur any of the costs and they don't repay benefits, right? So for an ultra social species with a lot of cooperative adaptations, we also sort of co-evolve these mechanisms to help us avoid cooperating with people who won't repay those benefits of cooperation. And so we have these mechanisms that are designed to reason about social contracts and to be able to identify violations or betrayals of those social contracts very quickly and easily. And, oh, yeah.

0:14:05 Thomas: Right. Yeah, and you can see this in kids, I mean, immediately where they're just so primed to be like, "That's not fair, that' not fair, that's not true." They're actually overloaded on the cheater identification. Like every something will be totally like skewed toward their direction and they'll still be like, "That's not fair." Yeah.

0:14:49 Lindsey: Yeah, no, that's odd. That is absolutely true. And like the fact that those mechanisms come online as early as they do is just fascinating. Like there's Some really cool developmental metal research on this. But yeah, so and then the function of this mechanism, obviously, is that it allows us to further interact with people who aren't going to be cooperative actors. And then that allows us avoid incurring more costs from them, right? So then she points out that the function of a mechanism that promotes forgetting related to trauma related information cannot be about blocking out pain per se, right, which you and Carrie talked about. And that is the sort of the crux of the Freudian account, right?

Because designing an organism to forget survival relevant information, like pain, doesn't make any sense. And that's why the Freudian account doesn't make any sense. So what she does suggest is that if something like psychogenic amnesia is real, the function must have some sort of adaptive value in terms of modifying behavior. And again, generally speaking, you know, we remember betrayals and violations really well, so that we can avoid those people in the future. But what if you're in a situation where the cheater, the person who betrayed you, is actually indispensable to your survival? And so one prototypical example of this would be if you are a child and the person Who Betrayed You is your primary caregiver.

0:14:56 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:13 Lindsey: And so if the normal cognitive modules that relate to cheater detection are engaged in that situation, that would likely lead to avoidance of the caregiver, which could threaten your survival in fairly direct and immediate ways. And so in this situation, she's suggesting that some kind of information blocking, and she proposes a number of possibilities for what this could look like and how it would actually work, could theoretically have fitness value.

0:16:15 Thomas: Okay.

0:16:37 Thomas: You know, playing this, uh, picking this apart a little bit, though, don't we already have mechanisms like cognitive dissonance that could kind of just accomplish accomplish the same thing? I mean, like, if this, if this theory is sound, hypothetically, you know, or, or not the theory, but like looking at this phenomenon and saying, you know, how would, how would we cope with this evolutionarily? I mean, I already feel like this kind of does happen with a lot of abuse, loosely speaking. I know this happened with, you know, not, not again, in my life, not sexual abuse, but with, you knows, certain types of awful behavior from my upbringing, where you rationalize it and you turn it into something that's actually fine. Like, there's a lot of those mechanisms, you know, could that already account for this? Or, you, is there a way to kind of experimentally separate that out or something?

0:17:03 Lindsey: Sure. Yeah.

0:17:25 Lindsey: So there are ways to separate it out. And I agree with you. And I think that those kinds of things are more intuitive to me. And they're actually part of what she's suggestion here. So like in the section where she talks about what these disruptions could look like that sort of cut off this information about the abuse from the attachment system, right, that's keeping that relationship intact, she goes through like all these different cognitive mechanisms and like all the different disruptions that could potentially be useful in maintaining that relationship. And one of them is exactly what you just described.

So you might see like a disassociation between sort of the affective relevance or the affect of like, so, you know, you could experience abuse and remember that and have like an intact memory of that, but not sort of have the affectative portion of it attached to that memory. And so that doesn't imply like actual amnesia or forgetting. It just suggests that like it's possible that you experience that as a kid. It's not attached to that pain response. And then as an adult, maybe you look back on that and realize, oh, actually, that was pretty screwed up.

0:18:18 Thomas: Yeah, right.

0:18:34 Lindsey: Right. And so, yeah, that's a completely different phenomenon than, you know, kind of the prototypical case of abuse-related amnesia. Right? So I don't know if that actually addressed the question, but she's losing

0:18:44 Thomas: Well, sort of. I guess I just still don't know how you would know if there's room for the other thing, you know. Like with beyond, I don't now, gathering a bunch of data on humans and, you know, let me, maybe I'm just misunderstanding this because I'm, you know I'm not a psychologist, but, but it seems like if you're identifying, you know, you're kind of starting from the evolutionary idea of here's a thing that we might look to find, which, know, you as you've taken us through different experiments with plants and all this different stuff, it seems, seems like Evo psych sometimes does that where it's like, well, you might expect to find such and such because of the following evolutionary principles. Right. Right. And then if she's saying that and she's saying, essentially, you might expect to find some sort of coping mechanism, you know, because of the following thing, because the fact that there could be abuse related to somebody that you're completely dependent on as a as a kid or whatever, and you would need some way to cognitively deal cognitively, deal with that without, losing you your caregiver.

0:19:39 Lindsey: The relationship.

0:19:41 Thomas: Yeah. And so I'm just saying, like, well, how would you know if things like cognitive dissonance of I like just don't even know if that's the right phenomenon, but things like just essentially normalizing it or making it OK in some way, if that completely solves the problem or if you still need. OK, maybe there's also on the other side of it, this this possibility that your brain just zaps the memory of it or whatever she's suggesting. I guess. How would you know if both of those things happen or if other things happen? Or, you know, how do you piece that out?

0:19:41 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I get the sense that she thinks that some of these mechanisms are going to come online for for different kinds of abuse experiences. So you can imagine that there are there, you know, I don't want to get graphic here. Right. But like there are things that it would be it would probably be impossible to rationalize as that being OK.

0:20:29 Lindsey: You know, even if you don't have a context to really understand, you're talking about sexual abuse. If you don't really have a context to understand sex. Right. Right. There are things that could happen that, you know, that would be that would be terrifying.

0:20:27 Thomas: Mm hmm. Right, right, right. Right. Sure. Yeah. But what's interesting there, though, is, if doesn't that run into the other side of it, which she already acknowledged, that if it's something, painful, traumatic to the extent where it goes so far that evolution would be like, "Well, you can't forget this, that's too harmful" kind of thing, like, you does that run into that problem?

0:21:01 Lindsey: So potentially, I'll tell you how she's approached this empirically. She has recruited participants that have that self-identify as having been abused. So these aren't people who maybe have repressed memories that they don't know about. They're people who had report experiences of childhood abuse. And they also, she also has them fill out measures of dissociative experiences. So like a normative sort of dissociated experience is like, you know, when you get, you forget when you're driving, like you forget pieces of your drive because it's so automatic.

0:21:05 Thomas: Right. Oh. Yeah, oh.

0:21:36 Lindsey: Yeah, that's on the normal end of things. But there are, you know, sort of way more severe dissociative experiences that have been reported by people like fugues, fugue states, which, again, we're getting into territory that is somewhat controversial. I should flag that. So she has people fill out these scales where they report how many sort of dissociative experience they have typically. And then she uses those things to predict very specific memory disruptions. So she has them do like these basic cognitive tasks, like the Stroop task. I don't know if you've ever heard of that.

0:22:14 Thomas: I have, but I don't remember by name what that, it, what is. That, oh.

0:22:16 Lindsey: Yeah. So the classic Stroop test is where you're presenting people with words, like some of them are like color words and they're printed in different colored ink. So like the word red in blue or something. And you're having people try to inhibit some of the information. So like report the color of the ink that the word is presented in, but inhibit the reading.

0:22:26 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Oh. Yeah. Those are. Super. Cool. That.

0:22:38 Lindsey: Yeah. So, like, some of the experiments that she's done have been like having people do Stroop tasks and see if there are differences in people's ability to inhibit information. And there's some specific reasons that she would test that disruption specifically, that she lays out in this theoretical piece. And she's, she's sort of saying that, like, for people that had extent, or that report extensive abuse in childhood and show these, these sort of dissociative characteristics, those people should, should show those disruptions into adulthood, and that's kind of like a trace of this disruption that was caused in childhood. I,

0:23:13 Thomas: Yeah, okay, how do you find that, because that, that feels like a long way from proving that you could, you know, repress a memory in any meaningful way, doesn't it? Or not?

0:23:22 Lindsey: Don't disagree with you. So, so, like, all right, so that's, that's why I started off by saying, like, I, I found, I found the, the theoretical case that she's laying out, here, um, not implausible, right? Um, it actually sounds pretty reasonable, and, like, rooting it in cheater detection and, like, being very specific in the predictions she's making about these specific cognitive disruptions, to me, right, as somebody who is not a cognitive researcher, seems like a plausible account, right. But when I, I started to read, like, a couple of the, the articles, articles today, and I, I, I'm not sure what to think about the evidence for them that is presented in those articles. So, like, the effects tend to be kind of small, um, like, she's found some differences in, in these groups that she's testing, but they tend to me kind of small, she's found reversed effects in some of the studies, um, like you, know, yeah.

0:23:33 Thomas: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:19 Thomas: Like, what do you mean? Like the opposite of what she was expecting to find or.

0:24:23 Lindsey: Like, in some of the studies, she finds that the groups that experience more childhood abuse show, like, worse performance on the Stroop, task. And then under other circumstances, they show enhanced performance. And, know, she has an explanation for this, but, like, given how small the effects are that she's reporting, and given that there's sort of some unreliability in them, like, that's part, part of why I wasn't intending to go, like, whole, hog, and talk about the evidence here on one side or the other, because I don't feel like I have a good enough sense of what's actually being shown here yet.

0:24:33 Thomas: Huh. Mm-hmm, yeah. Well, but that's at least the framework, I guess. And then I don't know, maybe we I don'T if you want to look more into it or if we put a, you you know, possible episode in the future, but I think it's definitely worthwhile at least taking us through the steel bot, as Aaron says, to use a gender neutral term, the steelbot version of the scientific argument on the other side. I think that's important to acknowledge that and look into it. But, so having said all that, I think we should double emphasize what things you're acknowledging might be real. It still Still doesn't mean that if you have a, someone hypnotize you and do it like we, I think it's very much worth emphasizing that we're not, you know, throwing the baby out with the bath water here. So what are you, what do you still want to state as like unequivocally, this is where you come down on, on that kind of thing.

0:24:59 Lindsey: Yeah, I agree.

0:25:36 Lindsey: Oh, yes. Yes. I am very glad you said that because I wanted to start with that actually. So the, I mean, I think that the main takeaway from what happened in the the 80s and what Loftus uncovered through her research on how memories can be implanted, like the definite takeaway there is that if you extract a memory through this process of very leading tactics in interviewing or in these psychotherapeutic sessions where you're putting people in the super suggestible state and then doing this guided imagery with them, that is very, very likely to be a false memory.

0:26:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:25 Lindsey: And I don't think that that's controversial. But that actually doesn't touch really this other piece about whether it's possible that something, again, I don't want to call it repression, but like some kind of forgetting happens as a result of painful experiences in these very specific scenarios. Areas, yeah.

0:26:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That's a really interesting situation, you know, because I think what is important, and this is where, again, if we're diving back into the allegations in that cut, you know, the cut as the website account of that story, again we can't evaluate it, we weren't there, we don't know, you know, I don't know, but it does seem to be disputed, like if the parents say they have emails saying she was seeking this type of therapy, you know, that that that's very significant, you know, but maybe that's bullshit. I don't you know. There's no way to know. Like, maybe that'S bullshit. Maybe they don't really have that. Or maybe she didn't do it. Or maybe it could be a number of things, but it would be real. I guess either way, it's incredibly fascinating. You know. Like, you.

0:27:34 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:27:34 Thomas: She did have these memories and they weren't recovered and there was abuse and that's obviously terrible and all that. And that's that story is really fascinating and tragic and in millions of ways. Or the if the if the other thing were true and like she did go through this suggestive hypnosis and you know did have memories that like were fabricated or at least not not accurate and then like went into this field to try to account for it or you know that that's also incredibly fascinating and tragic in a million ways, it's such A weird story, yeah.

0:28:05 Lindsey: Yeah. I I think I I the I really I find um the abuses that were that were uncovered that were being perpetrated by by these therapists and everything, I find them horrific, like I I can't

0:28:23 Thomas: We'll talk about That for a moment, I don't know if we we address that, you know, maybe enough on the last episode.

0:28:24 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, so I mean the this uh this this therapy kind of spread in the 80s, so I'm not saying that like every therapist was doing this intentionally, but like the place that it started, right, was with these like, you know, Christian sort of fundamentalist groups that were on a witch hunt, right? And this has happened tons of times throughout history.

0:28:49 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Like Like almost a literal witch.

0:28:51 Lindsey: Yeah, I mean, pretty much, right. And yeah, there were a few bad actors at the beginning of this that just did horrible things. There was one – there was a social worker that, like, just did these terrible leading interrogations with preschoolers, I believe, right, you know, essentially, like rewarded them for answers that confirmed that, yes, they had been sexually abused and sort of, you know, punished answers that suggested they hadn't. You know, voila, they found, you know, they got sort of admissions from all of these kids that they'd been sexually abused. Of course they did. Like, yes.

0:29:10 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, geez. Yeah. And that is horrifically abusive in and of itself. Like,

0:29:39 Lindsey: Yes. So, yeah. So what was uncovered in the 80s was horrible abuse by the people who planted these memories. It's terrible.

0:29:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And it's very much worth it. And that's why in all this stuff, there are obviously things we can't answer. Things we can say, as is kind of the theme of this part of the episode, is that's abusive, awful bullshit, shit, and also that probably should have been accounted for somewhere in this cut article, you know, like account for that a little bit and account for the harms there and at least explain that, you know, while there may be, who knows about this, this uh, family tragedy, and by all means, and you know, the allegations should get their uh, get their time, I guess, in publication, and people can evaluate them how they think, um, but, but to distill that entire side, like the anti-repressed memory side, you know, sort of the frayed institution, they started to distill that down to, they tried to protect abusers, know, you, is that was just really gross and like inaccurate, and regardless of, you know, regardless of where you come down on some of these stuff that I think we can unequivocally say, I mean, there was horrific abuse by these therapists, as you're saying, and it was important to fight back against that.

0:30:49 Thomas: Well, yeah, yeah.

0:30:47 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. And also at the same time, child abuse actually exists and is awful, right? So, like, those are not incompatible beliefs about the world.

0:30:53 Thomas: No, of course. Right. Of course. Really interesting. Wow. What a, what a, geez, what a topic. That's just, there's so many layers to this. You know, I did want to read, unless, is there anything else you want to talk about along those lines? I had a couple more comments about this that I guess I could, I could read while we're kind of in a listener response section here.

0:30:56 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh.

0:31:14 Thomas: Well, Danielle said, "I don't totally buy into the recovered memory stuff, but I'm on the autism spectrum and I have alexithymia." I don't what that is. I'm sure if you're familiar, but it says, "which means I have trouble identifying and processing emotions. If I'm in a stressful situation, I will literally tend to forget the entire thing. This is super frustrating in arguments with my husband, for example. I can remember we had an argument, but I'll forget all the details. It leads to really dumb workarounds like taking notes in the middle of an argument so I can record the resolution and know what we'd agreed on." Oh, my gosh. I'll also completely forget trauma or stressful events, but the memories will be foggy if another witness reminds me of the event. I guess my brain just likes to remove everything negative from my memories. Wow, how fascinating. Is that alexithymia, anything you've heard of before?

0:31:47 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:31:59 Lindsey: I I know that word, but I don't, I, yeah, no, that's not an accessible thing to me.

0:32:07 Thomas: That is really interesting though. Imagine, you said at the top of the show that you're a rigorous documenter. Do you ever take notes during an argument or?

0:32:07 Lindsey: No.

0:32:18 Lindsey: No, I want to be right there in the moment. Yeah, yeah.

0:32:21 Thomas: Okay, you really want to have that argument. But that's that's a that's a really interesting way to deal with that, though. And I can imagine like if you had an argument and you couldn't remember the result, like that would be really frustrating. So it's like, hold on, let me turn on my tape recorder if we're to have an argument here. That would be an interesting conversation. But I feel like it'd be worth like I feel Like, know, if like if Lydia had that, for example, I feel like I'd be kind of an asshole if I wasn't like, yeah, OK, fine. Let's take notes here so that we both remain, you know, let's let's work through that. Interesting.

0:32:34 Lindsey: No. Kidding. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:32:52 Lindsey: Uh.

0:32:53 Thomas: Get out that. Well, I just wanted to read that comment. I thought it was fascinating and we got so many good emails and messages about that episode. And again, many thanks to Carrie for coming on and talking about that. And thanks to Dr. Lindsay Osterman for coming out and breaking down the scientific claims kind of on the other side of that. Really interesting. Who knows? Maybe we do more on this. What do you, what do you think? Maybe.

0:33:14 Thomas: Yeah. There's a lot, there's a Lot on the docket.

0:33:14 Lindsey: Maybe. I I I'm gonna keep reading. I'm

0:33:17 Thomas: Yeah, well,

0:33:17 Lindsey: Down this rabbit hole, so I want no more. Yeah.

0:33:19 Thomas: Cause it does seem like the, the, you know, holy grail for that theory would be you find, I know, you studies have to be done a certain way and all that, but ideally you would want to find somebody who had had been abused, not remembered it, but then some sort of documentary evidence or something came up later on that confirmed it, and then they were able to remember, right? Like, wouldn't that be kind of what you're hoping for, I guess? Just the odds of that are, you know, they're not zero, but like they're gonna be hard to find that person, I guess.

0:33:44 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

0:33:52 Thomas: Well, interesting. Cause I, I gotta say like, I'm a little like not a hundred percent convinced by the, these people couldn't, focus you so much on a test. Was that what it was?

0:33:54 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:34:04 Lindsey: That's not the only research, right? Like, so it's but it's that it's that kind of stuff from what I can tell. She's she's like looking at disruptions and these very basic cognitive tasks.

0:34:05 Thomas: Okay. Ooh, I remembered where I read about that stoop test before, which is, cause that's the one where it's like, because your mind, cause we're so So primed on reading words, we we cannot help like it's involuntary that we recognize the cult, the written word blue, even if the the color is red. Right. Isn't that the. And so apparently they could you could use that to to figure out if there's like a spy who secretly spoke Russian or something, because if you write it in Russian, the Russian words for the colors, someone who didn't speak Russian can just go, oh, blue, red. They can just look at the color of the text and easily say it.

0:34:26 Lindsey: Yeah yeah. Yeah inhibit

0:34:53 Thomas: Yeah, but because it's like involuntary to read the words first, if you know the language, you know, it's very evident if you are taking the time to read it. It's really, I read that somewhere. Yeah. I can't say that I've like a hundred percent sourced that or anything, but I did read that somewhat and I thought it was interesting. So that's where I remembered, or that's what I remember where I, where I had read read about that test before. Yeah.

0:34:53 Lindsey: It. Yeah that's awesome. I had not heard that.

0:35:16 Thomas: All right. Well, thanks for coming on as always. And, uh, we've got a lot more topics and a cool project in the works that I hope we can tell people about somewhat soon, but Lindsay, thanks as always, and everybody check us out on Twitch on the regular. We have a lot of fun there. Twitch.tv slash S R S N E S. That's where you can find us hanging hanging out, um, talking about weird animal reproduction sometimes, but not always hashtag spider dicks, that kind of thing.

0:35:15 Lindsey: Yeah, I like that. Yeah.

0:35:38 Lindsey: It's the best.

0:35:48 Thomas: All right. This was fun. Thanks so much, Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.

0:35:50 Lindsey: Thank you.

0:36:01 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.