Mind Hacks

Slate has just finished an awesome eight-part special on how memory can be manipulated, shaped and reshaped even when we’re completely unaware of it.

The series is really a retrospective on the life and work of Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most important and influential researchers in the area of false and flexible memories.

The first part is description of an online memory experiment completed by the website. If you’re new to the area it’s worth checking out, but if you’re aware of how easy it is for people to say they’ve genuinely remembered false events, it may be worth skipping to part two where the series really kicks off.

The articles weave together Loftus’ life and scientific work, describing how her own experiences have shaped her interest in false memory and how she has applied her interest in the flexibility of memory to a remarkably wide range of fields.

She is probably best known for her research which countered much of the ‘recovered memories of abuse’ hysteria which arose in the 90s. Loftus demonstrated it was very easy for therapists to encourage false memories in their clients.

This is a wonderfully vivid passage that describes how she developed her early experiments that ‘implanted’ nondescript false memories (such as the experience of being lost in the mall) to more unusual scenarios:

So Loftus ran bolder experiments with more subjects, more trauma, and greater implausibility. She convinced people that they had nearly choked, had caught their parents having sex, or had seen a wounded animal after a bombing. Other researchers planted memories of nearly drowning, being hospitalized overnight, and being attacked by an animal. In one study, Loftus and her collaborators persuaded 18 percent of people that they had probably witnessed demonic possession.

Critics protested that Loftus still hadn’t proved the memories were fake. So she raised the ante. She persuaded 16 percent of a study population that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. In a follow-up experiment, researchers sold the same memory to 36 percent of subjects. This was impossible, since Bugs belonged to Warner Bros., not Disney. When critics complained that the Bugs memory wasn’t abusive, Loftus obliged them again. Her team convinced 30 percent of another group of subjects that on a visit to Disneyland, a drug-addled Pluto character had licked their ears.

The ‘recovered memories of abuse’ hysteria reached its peak with recovered memories of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ or SRA in which both the law and professionals got caught up in despite the fact that no reliable evidence was ever found for its existence.

It is now a matter of embarrassment not least due to several high profile cases, such as the Orkney scandal, where children were removed from their families owing to leading interviews and over-zealous social workers.

However, the ‘ritual abuse’ movement is not completely dead. In fact, only last year London’s John Bowlby Centre ran a conference on ‘Ritual Abuse and Mind Control’ (programme: pdf) which featured Valerie Sinason, author of the book ‘Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse’, which was partly responsible for fuelling the panic.

The Slate series covers some of the most important research to show how people could come to believe they were involved in such incidents and has many extras and links to other resources and the original research.

Link to Slate’s false memory series.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional writer for Slate

The New York Times has an excellent article on the history of the ‘nervous breakdown’ – an inexact term that has never been officially recognised but which has been popular for over a century.

The article suggests that the phrase is common precisely because it sounds medical and, hence, significant, but remains vague enough to be used flexibly and by everybody without seeming pretentious.

The vagueness of the phrase made it impossible to survey the prevalence of any specific mental problem: It could mean anything from depression to mania or drunkenness; it might be the cause of a bitter divorce or the result of a split. And glossing over those details left people who suffered from what are now well-known afflictions, like postpartum depression, entirely in the dark, wondering if they were alone in their misery.

But that same imprecision allowed the speaker, not medical professionals, to control its meaning. People might be on the verge of, or close to, a nervous breakdown; and it was common enough to have had “something like” a nervous breakdown, or a mild one. The phrase allowed a person to disclose as much, or as little, detail about a “crackup” as he or she saw fit. Vagueness preserves privacy.

As the article notes, we have a long history of vague ’emotional exhaustion’ coveralls stretching from neurasthenia to burnout syndrome that come in and out of fashion.

Link to NYT On the Verge of ‘Vital Exhaustion’?

I’ve written an article for the magazine fotografya about how photography was initially used by doctors to document ‘hysteria’ in the 19th century but quickly became a vector through which the condition was spread.

The most influential photos came from the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where, under the direction of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, hysteria was redefined to mean the appearance of apparently neurological symptoms, like paralysis or epileptic-like movements, without any clear damage to the nervous system.

Harnessed due to its presumed ability to objectively record the symptoms of patients, the camera became a vector for the condition, causing doctors to diagnose it in far greater numbers and for patients to express their distress through ‘hysterical’ symptoms in increasing numbers. We tend to think of media fashions as transient and frivolous but we forget that popular culture is as much an influence on illness and its treatment as science itself. For many, Charcot’s iconic pictures became the public expression of their private anguish and their documentary potential extended beyond the hospital walls to capture the broken spirit of the times.

These conditions are now known diagnosed as ‘conversion disorder‘ or considered to be ‘psychogenic’ in nature because psychological factors are thought to be behind the symptoms rather than what they appear to be – namely brain damage.

This means that the conditions are more likely to appear in people who already have experience of them, so early depictions of them were part of the process that led to an explosion in their appearance and diagnosis.

fotografya is a Turkish magazine and it has my original in English but I recommend checking out the Turkish translation as it is wonderfully illustrated by some of the striking photos of the time.

The article traces the history of ‘photographing madness’ from its clinical origins to its place in 19th century pop culture.

Link to article ‘Studio Charcot’ in English.
Link to Turkish translation with awesome illustrations.

In the 1950s, three delusional Messiahs were gathered to live together in the same mental hospital. This is one of the most remarkable experiments in the history of psychology and I’ve written about it in an article for Slate.

I’ve had this tale told to me many times, but in a hazy way almost like a myth. I’ve been asked it as a question (“what would happen if three delusional Christs met each other?”) other times it appears as a trite abbreviate anecdote (“did you hear about the three delusional Christs? One decided he was the Father, the other the Son and the other the Holy Ghost!”).

It was, however, a genuine experiment, carried out by psychologist Milton Rokeach in the 1950s, and written up in the sadly out-of-print book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

As Rokeach realised years later, the whole setup was entirely unethical and thankfully we have moved beyond manipulating patients’ lives for academic curiosity, but it remains a fascinating chapter in psychiatric history and I tried to capture the essence of it in the Slate piece.

These tales are surprising because delusions, in the medical sense, are not simply a case of being mistaken. They are considered to be pathological beliefs, reflecting a warped or broken understanding that is not, by definition, amenable to being reshaped by reality. One of most striking examples is the Cotard delusion, under which a patient believes she is dead; surely there can be no clearer demonstration that simple and constant contradiction offers no lasting remedy. Rokeach, aware of this, did not expect a miraculous cure. Instead, he was drawing a parallel between the baseless nature of delusion and the flimsy foundations we use to construct our own identities. If tomorrow everyone treats me as if I have an electronic device in my head, there are ways and means I could use to demonstrate they are wrong and establish the facts of the matter‚Äîa visit to the hospital perhaps. But what if everyone treats me as if my core self were fundamentally different than I believed it to be? Let’s say they thought I was an undercover agent‚Äîwhat could I show them to prove otherwise? From my perspective, the best evidence is the strength of my conviction. My belief is my identity.

Link to Slate article ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’.