𒀭𒂗𒆠 on Nostr: regression hypnosis is not a method for 'uncovering suppressed memories' because ...

regression hypnosis is not a method for 'uncovering suppressed memories' because 'suppressed memories' are not a thing; regression hypnosis is a method for implanting false memories and integrating them. it makes sense that people would take a while to understand this, because a kind of strict institutionalized freudianism was widespread for basically the entire 20th century. under the freudian model, all memories are stored perfectly but the psychic censor distorts or removes memories during retrieval in order to protect the organism from scary thoughts; this isn't actually how memories work but seems reasonable to somebody who has swallowed other parts of freudianism. memories actually work a little more like statistical machine learning: perceptions slightly modify the action potentials of a bunch of networks of neurons associated with attributes of the perception, and recall involves doing a weighted random walk of these networks -- meaning that any memory of an actual percieved event gets contaminated by similar events (and, because these neurons are part of several networks that correspond to totally unrelated stimuli, unrelated events also get contaminated based on the luck of the draw), and remembering an event (real or imagined) modifies these weights too, which means any time you remember anything it causes both that thing and a random selection of semi- and un-related memories to become slightly more corrupted. the upshot of this, with regard to 'suppressed memories', is that any memory that you avoid recalling will eventually become so distorted as to become inaccessible (like a CD-R left uncovered in the bottom of a bag of badgers) but that also, all that's necessary to implant a false memory is to motivate somebody to 'recall' it. ask somebody a question and, unless they are quite conscientious, they will probably give the system 1 answer (i.e., do a random walk and use whatever vaguely plausible thing it emits) -- and unless the exact answer to the question happens to have been strongly imprinted, you'll get a confabulation (or in layman's terms, bullshit). regression hypnosis involves strongly motivating people to confabulate experiences that probably never happened (and that, if they *did* happen, are irretrievably corrupted anyhow); at best it will produce fragments of actual experiences in a soup of nonsense.