The existence of a selective memory mechanism was not invented by women. Many psychologists believe that we can omit from memory a traumatic or even unpleasant event or information. In the structure of the mind outlined by Freud, the ability
Suppressing unwanted memories is a cornerstone.
Illustration: Michal Bonano
Forgotten by order
The existence of a selective memory mechanism was not invented by women. Many psychologists believe that we can omit from memory a traumatic event or information or even just unpleasant. In the structure of the mind outlined by Freud, the ability to suppress unwanted memories is a cornerstone.
However, like most psychological theories, this one is also very difficult to test in the laboratory, which leads to theoretical debates and even legal disputes. Many indictments, especially in the US, accused parents of abuse that occurred decades before the lawsuit was filed.
The plaintiffs claimed, with the backing of their therapists, that the traumatic event was erased from their memory by this selective suppression mechanism and only after many years and intensive psychological treatment did it surface and emerge, and immediately after that came the lawsuit.
Memories made to order
The defendants rely on psychologists who propose to categorically doubt the reliability of the information retrieved in these late recollections. Psychological research, as mentioned, had difficulty arming one of the parties with a winning weapon. Much work in cognitive psychology and brain research has shown that memories can be strengthened on demand. That's possible
Memorize for an exam, or remember where you were when Kennedy was assassinated. But is it also possible to erase unwanted memories? Michael Anderson and Colin Green, two researchers from the University of Oregon, argue that it is. They managed, for the first time, to design an experiment that showed that not only could it be done, but that it was even quite simple. They simply asked the participants in the experiment to forget.
This was enough to make the subjects throw the requested information into the abyss of femininity. Later, even when the subjects were offered money, they were unable to take it away. In the first stage of the experiment, the subjects learned by heart pairs of words that had no connection between them, for example "test, cockroach". Each subject had forty pairs of such words. Only those who managed to remember most of the pairs by heart continued to the next level. In the second stage, the researchers presented each subject with one word from each pair. In some cases, they asked the subject to say out loud what the accompanying word was for the word that was presented to him.
If "test" appeared on the screen, the subject had to rush and shout "cockroach". But in the other cases the researchers actually asked for a request that sounds quite silly: they asked the subject to keep quiet and erase from his memory the partner of the word that was shown on the screen.
There were researchers who speculated that a request in the style of "don't think about it" would actually achieve the opposite goal. But the third phase of the experiment, conducted a few hours later, caused a surprise. Again, the subjects were presented with one of the words they learned by heart, but this time they were asked in all cases to recall the word accompanying it. The pairs they repeated aloud in the second phase of the experiment were well remembered by the subjects. But in the pairs that they were asked to forget, they had difficulty remembering. Anderson and Green begged and even offered money if only the subjects could recover what they knew well a short time ago, but those memories were simply lost.
The researchers repeated the experiment several times with different subjects, and noticed an even more surprising phenomenon. If the subject was asked once in the second phase of the experiment to forget the word accompanying a certain word, "test" for example, there was a good chance that he would indeed forget it. But if the word "test" was presented to him several times, and each time he was asked to forget who her partner was, the chances of him remembering "cockroach" in the third stage of the experiment are surprisingly small.
The results of the study were published by Anderson and Green last week in the journal "Nature." Articles accompanying the publication saw the study as a breakthrough in understanding the psychology of mental trauma, not only in cases of child abuse, but also in victims of combat shock, rape, accidents, and others suffering from post-traumatic disorders ( PTSD). This is the first time, it is written, that someone has managed to investigate in the laboratory one of the most important mental mechanisms related to these phenomena.
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