Badpuppy Gay Today

Thursday, 20 March, 1997

People are easily convinced they're able to recall childhood events that never happened. Such phony events, in fact, can be deliberately planted in their minds by skillful memory-adjusters operating under the various experimental and sometimes dubious guises of the psychological therapies.

At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a group of psychologists explained how they'd conducted memory experiments to show how people often adopt wholly imaginative recollections of incidents that never happened. There are also many cases in which a person may unconsciously manufacture memories to make sense of existence. One psychologist, representing Washington University in St. Louis, announced to his assembled colleagues that he and others had effectively demonstrated that over time, people often forget things that did happen and remember things that didn't.

The existence of such easily-convinced men and women, especially if they're placed under professional guidance, may be among the more commonplace commercial juggles people tend to ignore. "To be aware of one's own gullibility isn't often very common in people, " says an astute observer, Steve Yates, "because if they don't know they're gullible, how can they even admit gullibility? Its really much easier on these people to recall things--real or imagined-- that make them feel comfortable with themselves."

One expert witness, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington in Seattle, explained that such memory pollution--or contamination-- is, in most people, common to some degree. What the new studies express most is the high degree of memory pliancy and fallibility. Experiments performed showed false memories planted can easily become more vivid than real memories. Human beings, to an unsettling degree, are willing to place untrue versions of particular events into their memory banks. Some psychologists call this mental trickery a coping mechanism. Others seem divided on whether anything can be done about it except to forbid professional psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and their like from their practice of summoning, in a manner not unlike witchdoctors, fake memories they themselves may easily plant. A few therapists expressed only mild concern that their profession could be tainted by such revelations, siding, nevertheless, with critics of the now increasingly dubious "profession" of assisted-memory-recall.

Specific characteristics mattered little in those studied, according to findings presented by researchers, Elizabeth Loftus and Henry L. Roediger III. Memory-supplanting can take root in every type of individual.

The sensible person must realize that most people, including himself or herself, actually may harbor virtual realities instead of real memories, and there arises, therefore, disturbing confusions between actual events and imaginative events their minds have, for their various reasons, produced.