The Paper is Irrelevant, Mostly
The SCOTUS nomination saga continues. It has come out that the accuser wrote an article about, allegedly, using self-hypnosis to create false information. It is then up to the reader to connect that with the allegations and conclude, presumably, she is lying.
But I’ve read the actual paper in question. It says nothing of the sort. It is about using yoga, meditation and hypnosis as a treatment for depression. In a normal world that would be enough. But nothing about any of this is normal, is it?
Yes, the hypnosis does create false scenarios. That may indeed have therapeutic purposes. However, it does have some relevance in a larger context: memory.
Much has been made over memory in this case — primarily because that is all that has been offered. Both those who insist on her veracity and those who insist on her intentional falsehood are ignoring what we do know about memory — which frankly, isn’t really as much as we tend to think.
Now we don’t know how much she was involved in the study. She may have been heavily involved, peripherally, or somewhere between. So lets instead address the connected issues of memory around traumatic events.
One argument goes that she only remembers that it was him and Judge, and that they were laughing as they left, thus it can’t be true because she can’t seem to recall anything else. To which the counter has been “memory works that way”. Which is only partially true. For some people, that is how their memory appeared to work. But there is no end of people who were assaulted, often in even more traumatic examples, who insist she is lying because they remember every little detail. Which is to be accepted? Neither, if we’re reasonable about it.
The truth is that we have a body of research that indicates that not only can memory work either way, we also have a body of research that shows that we can’t necessarily trust memory in either situation. This is because we have a body of research showing, and sometimes arguing about how the brain alters our memories without us knowing it. Notice the emphasis. The argument is about how, not if. We even have different categories of the end result.
For example, we have the “misinformation effect”. In this condition we see that when presenting inconsistent postevent information about an incident the accuracy of memory concerning that event typically decreases. Think of it in the tales of “When I was your age we walked five miles to school, in the snow” become longer distances and deeper snow with virtually each retelling. There is an argument that small inconsistencies are something the brain tries to reconcile, and in so doing adapts the memory to resolve the inconsistency. The more inconsistencies there are, the more adaptation is necessary, which then produces more inconsistencies. You can see where that can lead.
But emotion can also change memories. Not just events that were trauamtic at the time, but one’s state of mind when remembering or attempting to remember an event matters. This occurs, potentially, in several ways and I’ll only reference two of them in the interest of time and space. To start with when remembering events while angry or sad or any other “negative” emotion your brain will interpret the memory it is giving you in that context. Things that had no emotional attachment are more likely to take on a negative emotion.
For example, say you were bit by a dog. It happened out of nowhere — you weren’t knowingly antagonizing the dog, and it wasn’t known for a predilection to biting. In a “neutral” mood you’ll remember it that way. If you’re in a positive mood you’re more likely to “remember” that you were playing around and maybe the dog just played a bit harder — no harm no foul.
However, if you were in a bad mood, you are more likely to “remember” that you were just petting it and it viciously attacked you because everyone knew it was just a mean dog. The more vague the memory is, the more likely it seems it will be rewritten according to your current state of mind. In this case, it was an actual incident and what changed was your “memory”. But what if you had to identify the dog. What if you had to identify when it was and where it happened?
This is where the combination of present emotion and the “misinformation effect” combine to get really nasty. The breed of the dog, the name of the dog, and the location of the incident were not a part of the emotion. So that should be immune, right? Not necessarily. The lack of the other details makes them inconsistent. The more you retell that story with inconsistencies, the more unreliable the memory becomes as the brain tries to “correct” its memory. Here again, mood will alter these details. An average day may become a bright, clear sunny afternoon, or it may become a rainy day on the porch. The whole memory problem is thus compounded.
Now on this scenario we’ve considered a situation that had no emotional affect at the time of it occurring, that being added by the mental and emotional state at recollection time. Does it being traumatic at the time matter? Apparently, not really. Not the least of the reasons why is that we can turn that non-traumatic event into one by “ret-conning” it as above. You can even have told that story in happy or neutral states, then when doing so in a negative state suddenly view it as traumatic and now you remember it was always that way.
Other relevant aspects include “Affect as Information”, “Affect Priming”. Affect Priming, so somewhat oversimplify, is where a concept has been brought to the forefront of your mind, and then gets “added” to your memories. One way to think about this is to revisit the dog bite memory above. I’ve there has been an outbreak of rabies in the news lately, you could well remember “getting sick” after the bite and wonder if you had contracted rabies all those decades ago. You might be unsure about rabies, but you definitely got sick after the bite. See how that works? Again, the “argument” in the field seems to be about how and why that happens, not that it does happen.
But what about “Affect As Information”? I’ll quote some of the research here for the definition:
rather than computing a judgment on the basis of recalled features of a target, individuals may . . .ask themselves: ‘How do I feel about it? [and] in doing so, they may mistake feelings due to a pre- existing state as a reaction to the target
We drop to feelings in a case of too little information. (Sound familiar?) Thus the fewer details we remember, the more we turn to our feelings about the memory — which are biased by our current emotional state as well as risking any priming such as news reports about an outbreak of rabies. It would have been terrible to have had rabies back then, so fear creeps into the memory. Now you can “remember” that you went to get checked for rabies because you were concerned about it.
You might be applying this to the current situation and thinking “well she has a PhD in psychology so she knows about it and can counter those” — or something along those lines. If only that were true. As it turns out we have research on that very question. Turns out that the more aware of that possibility you are, the more likely it is to happen. You can even be given explicit instructions to avoid it, and it will still happen — sometimes to a larger extent. Personally that seems like second guessing yourself, then second guessing that. Ultimately, however, it shows that we can’t seem to stop it from happening.
How does that relate to the paper? While we lack details about what was done, it does show that so long as the “false situations” created through hypnosis in an attempt to decrease depression are positive ones, I could see the potential benefit. But it also means we could not rely on the memories “developed” during those proceedings. Now as to whether or not Ford should know these things, I can’t say. As mentioned earlier, we don’t know what exactly was done and what her involvement was.
Ultimately, this is why we can’t rely on one person’s memory, traumatic or otherwise. Regardless of how much they believe what they say they remember, it may well not be accurate. The more inconsistencies there are the more it is likely to be “corrected”. The more present day emotion — even unrelated to the incident — a person is experiencing the more likely they are to misattribute the event and “correct” it. The fewer details we have the more we rely on emotion. All of which leads to an untrustworthy “memory” that the one “remembering” fully believes and insists on as fact.
As I conclude I want you to go back to the “lack of information means more emotion” effect. It is on full display today. There is no verifiable information being presented. None. As a result we can not make a decision as to the actual veracity. In response, most are dropping down to emotion; he is to be believed or she is and all justifications on it become inherently circular and emotional. The people allegedly involved have to be painted as liars in order to defend our emotional decision.
Who knows, in thirty years you might be telling a very different story about what you thought, read, saw, or did during this time. And you’ll insist it is all absolutely true — even if the posts, articles, tweets, and videos all say something different.
