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Letter From The Editor - Issue 69 - June 2019

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Science Fact-ion by Randall Hayes

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July 2016

Rewinding the Memory Tape

Last month I wrote about the hypnotic mind-control myth, so richly represented in SF literature and in other media. To review: Sure, humans are suggestible, and we're somewhat more suggestible during neurologically definable trance states, but it's not like a couple of weekend classes in hypnosis are going to turn me into Svengali.

This month, I want to address the other major pop-culture use of hypnosis: the recovery of repressed memories, which I saw again just last month on Houdini & Doyle in a fluffy anachronistic alien abduction story (UFOs were not a thing until after WW2).

Unlike mind control, a concept as old as folklore, repressed memories first appeared in Romantic literature (remember that early SF novels were called "scientific romances"). I personally first encountered repressed memories on M*A*S*H*, where psychiatrist Sydney Freedman helped patients remember traumatic events.

Then during the 1980s there were a lot of news reports about bizarre court cases. In the most famous of these, very young children accused their caretakers of sexually abusing them in Satanist rituals in secret bunkers under their pre-school. Stuff that little kids would probably not make up on their own, even if they had brain damage. It seemed as though their adult therapists were encouraging them to confabulate these false memories under hypnosis. There is at least one study showing that it's possible to induce amnesia hypnotically, and that subjects confabulate under these conditions. However, Elizabeth Loftus and others have shown that it's not even necessary to hypnotize the subject; they can cause at least a quarter of their subjects to "recover" false memories in everyday settings. It's even easier to alter existing memories.

Again, as mentioned last month, there's no reason in this particular case to fall back on cranky doctor Gregory House's favorite line:

"Everybody lies."

It's enough to propose that with brain damage, memories can become unmoored in time, that a patient who is searching for an answer to a question can plug in an old memory in honest desperation. The scary part is the extension of that behavior to everyday life, where none of us has perfect access to our unconscious motivations and very few of us have perfect access even to our own conscious memories. All it might take is a little delay in finding the right memory for the wrong memory--or for a mutation, a memory based fantasy--to be substituted into the ongoing stream of actions and reactions.

In fact, our entire neuro-scientific model of memory is changing. The idea of computation being separated from memory as storage the way John von Neumann imagined it in the 1940s, using a tape metaphor, is finally collapsing. Nerological cases like the famous H.M., who was completely incapable of forming new personal memories after an epilepsy surgery removed both his hippocampi, supported von Neumann's view for decades. To be fair to H.M. and the people who studied him, there was evidence that he could still learn skills and experience classical conditioning, both more dependent on other brain circuits. But these more nuanced findings did not seem to have the same effect on pop culture as the simple tape metaphor (later, the hard drive metaphor).

In the past ten years or so there have been some very interesting experiments showing that every time a memory is recalled, it is re-perceived by the sensory systems, and then re-stored, too--overwritten to some extent. This is opening up all kinds of possibilities for memory management, such as weakening traumatic memories and phobias. The micro-lesion method used on Jim Carrey's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a relatively crude fictional example based on this principle. He recalls a memory inside a scanner, and as its location is revealed, that location is targeted and destroyed. Chemical manipulations could potentially be much more subtle, simply weakening a memory or weakening the emotional connection to a memory while leaving the content more intact.

Finally, just a few words about reincarnation, a common theme in science fiction stories from the beginnings of the genre. Those first stories were about transmigration of souls, which is an ancient religious idea. My personal favorite is the Tibetan idea that souls are not atomic; they can come apart and recombine in different bodies, like in the movie Little Buddha. During the von Neumann age (and even now, if you're a Singularity buff) science fiction embraced the idea of "recordings" of memories and personalities being "uploaded" into other bodies, whether those bodies are organic or robotic. Recent findings that memories are essentially recreated every time they are brought back into consciousness causes some real problems for the idea of a stable, permanent recording. The best we could achieve is probably a blurry snapshot, meaning that no two uploads from the same person would be the same. A really fun story that plays with the computational idea of version control for human experiences and personalities is here on Escape Pod.

I'm not entirely clear on when and how hypnosis became the preferred method for accessing past lives in pop culture. I'm pretty sure it didn't originate in SF. One practitioner traces it to Freud's use of hypnosis for recovering early childhood memories. However it started, by the mid-1960s it seems to have been an accepted belief in certain therapeutic communities, with multiple books published about it. The National Guild of Hypnotists has one line about it in their training materials:

"Very controversial. We will not discuss it."

Now, I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm not planning on making money off regression in my own hypnosis practice. I haven't applied for any grants to study it as a scientist. And at this stage of my life, as a healthy adult, I personally don't much care whether there is an afterlife or what form it might take. But I am a scientist, and science has a conflicted history with crazy ideas, alternately dismissing them and then championing them in somewhat predictable cycles. What's "reasonable" changes over time as conceptual models get updated by outside information, often brought in by new technology or contact with a new culture.

The history of my own field, neuroscience, is full of these dynamics. B.F. Skinner famously refused to speculate about the inner workings of the brain precisely because he didn't trust the tech or the conceptual models available during the early 20^th century (not a bad choice). The problem is that those temporary practical choices have a way of becoming permanent moral directives, especially when money and reputations are involved.

Hm. I never thought about this before, but maybe it's a good thing that science fiction authors are generally broke. Maybe having less to lose allows more room for a spirit of intellectual adventure.

As both a scientist and an entrepreneur, Randall Hayes is really, really sick of hearing the word "paradigm" applied to every damn thing. In between tantrums, he also helps organize the Greensboro Science Cafe.

REFERENCES

Svengali

(I had at least three current examples of classic mind-controllers, but none of them was a hypnotist and only one of them, Charles Xavier, was in any way PG-13.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svengali

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSvengali

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MindManipulation

Caution: This is a rabbit hole, going well beyond the entries with the "hypno" key-fix.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RepressedMemories

This one is a more manageable work in progress. Not too many links to other concepts and there are only about 25 example works listed.

http://www.fox.com/houdinianddoyle

A guilty pleasure. Sort of an X-Files lite, with Houdini as the skeptic and Doyle as the believer, with the arc being the backstory of their copper sidekick. Mostly I just like Houdini's suits.

And while we're being all parenthetical, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster" from this season's X-Files revival was one of my favorite episodes ever. Absolutely classic. Watch first, critique later. The review has serious joke-destoying spoilers. You have been warned.

http://www.fox.com/watch/611998787659/7756658688

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/mulder-and-scully-meet-monster-and-he-us-231587

http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/welcome-to-mars-2/

This is a great book, a history of the weird ideas that invaded pop culture during the middle of the 20^th century, taking over SF for a while before being shunted off into the sub-genre we now call paranormal. Thanks to Kernersville writer and GM Chad Bowser for loaning it to me.

http://www.chadbowser.com/index.html

http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/01/repressed-memory.html

Scientific Romances

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/scientific_romance

short

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5870883/science-fiction-before-science-fiction-romances-of-science-and-scientific-romances

longer

http://www.nyrsf.com/2013/05/notes-on-the-origins-of-the-term-scientific-romance-and-its-implications-for-the-development-of-scie.html

longest, with etymology!

http://www.bestcareanywhere.net/freedman.htm

I'm ashamed to say that I had not anticipated M*A*S*H* fan fiction.

http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/

This dissertation, by an investigative journalist, is a exploration of all four of the title's key phrases, plus a history of investigative journalism. It particularly discusses "explosive amplification," when official and pop culture reinforce one another instead of opposing one another as they so often do. Also my first introduction to the phrase "anomalistic psychology," which is awesome.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/memories-of-satan

A more recent case, but vivid.

http://www.memorylossonline.com/glossary/falsememorysyndrome.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Cox%20RE%5BAuthor%5D&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25978080

The top link is the study, which is only available in abstract form. Check out the other studies in their research program, though, as they try to recreate all kinds of brain disorders through suggestion. There's got to be a story in there somewhere.

https://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/eloftus

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of the "memory wars" inside the discipline of psychology is that they seem to take no notice of the well-established neurological syndromes involving confabulation cited last month.

http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/12/4/361.full.pdf+html

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/remembering_dangerously

This article includes explicit links to the witch trials of the 16^th century in Europe, a favorite subject for SF authors and the prototype of moral panics.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183265/

This is a more general review of memory and its implications for the courtroom, a topic that could be the basis for a large number of great SF stories.

http://www.housemd-guide.com/characters/houserules.php

Of course it's also true that people lie. Actually, a surprising amount has been written about lying by patients (and by doctors).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736034/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/brain-fiction

To repeat a reference from last month, this book is a comprehensive treatment of confabulation, both in patients and in "normal" humans. The first chapter is available at the publisher's website here.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262582711_sch_0001.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16517514

First case report of a woman with exceptional (and untrained) autobiographical memory from 2006. Paywalled.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26834661

A more systematic study of hyper-memory. Free article on PubMedCentral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/08/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison

http://gizmodo.com/how-memory-hacking-is-becoming-a-reality-1757888568

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/reincarnation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Buddha