Popular Myths in Psychology

Myths about Memory

Myth: Hypnosis is Useful for Retrieving Memories of Forgotten Events

by Kent Bastell

Can you imagine that as you are going through your daily routine, minding your own business only to find a police car in front of your house, wanting to question you over a crime that happened at a train station you frequently use? And as you are being taken to the police station, the officer tells you that you will have a picture taken of you and put in a lineup for the victim to identify a suspect for yesterdays attempted murder. By this point you would probably be really confused and most likely start to freak out when two weeks later the victim who has notified police that he is 100% confident that you are the one who assaulted him that night. Sure you take the train everyday, sure you were home alone doing homework and no one can vouch for where you were at that time, but you know that your not guilty and there should be enough evidence (or lack there of) in order to prove your innocence.

Well technically this is how the legal system works, except when you throw a monkey wrench into the equation that comes in the form of eyewitness testimony through regressive hypnosis. Regressive hypnosis is a technique used by some professionals in order to help patients’ retrieve, usually traumatic, memories that they experienced in the past, through “hypnotic” process.

You are getting sleeeeeeepy…which actually means you are might mean you are in the process of making crap up in your head. What if the man who was assaulted was unsure the day he looked at your photo, but all of a sudden became unshakably confident after he could visualize your face while in a hypnotic trance, even though it wasn’t you? How could the victim visualize you doing the crime even though you have never even occupied the same air space as this person?  It’s called false memory. Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of our environment and when it can’t figure it out it creates a story to try and make sense of it. These stories are not always accurate however, as seen in a variety of studies done. A study by Elizabeth Loftus (it’s in one of your textbooks) really highlights how scary false memories are. Long story short, she took a 14 year old kid named Chris and had his older brother, Jim, make up an untrue story of Chris getting lost in a mall when they were younger. Chris read the untrue story along with 2 other stories that actually happened in his life so it “seemed” like it was a legit event. Loftus asked Chris to write down exactly what happened the day of the untrue event. Surprisingly Chris wrote down exactly how he perceive the event saying things like “I was with everyone for a second and after I went to look at the toy store I realized I was lost” Chris’ mom vouched that this never happened and that the entire story was made up.

This is all scary stuff because the suggestibility of hypnosis leaves a lot of room for error when trying to retrieve memories. The situation described above has happened to countless people, where these people have had to serve several years in prison due to a false testimony based on hypnosis, just ask Larry Mayes how 21 years felt in the pen, when he was completely innocent. Approximately 70% of intro psych students believe that hypnosis is effective for retrieving memories, where the number rises among other disciplines. Don’t fall into the trap of taking things at face value, because you may be the unlucky bloke who gets burned by it in the future.