Forgotten Memories of Traumatic Events Get Some Backing from Brain-Imaging | Hacker News Reader

Forgotten Memories of Traumatic Events Get Some Backing from Brain-Imaging

scientificamerican.com

63 pointspseudolus43 comments

Unfortunately, I feel like this is one of those things that those who haven't experienced trauma first hand tend to dismiss.

Maybe it's because folks assume traumatic events are something the person can't help but constantly think about.

But for me, and I'm guessing most others, you tend to simply block off that part of your psyche. For example, I have forgotten my sister during introductions in the past, despite the fact she didn't leave my life until I was eleven. And I suppose she didn't really exit my life then either, she would continue to show up over my teenage years as well. But it's like my mind wrote her out of existence.

Also, when I write about the events of my past, I tend write them from a perspective that is dissociated. It's hard to explain. But I think it's a way of protecting myself. Like pretending the events happened to someone else.

I’d like to add that this also sometimes goes along with either being in denial of having experienced trauma or convincing oneself that the experience “was not that bad after all”.

Been there, done that. To the shock of the people who witnessed said situations, who couldn't believe I dismiss them. I just can't remember being that bad.

Definitely true. I realized talking to my therapist that I was afraid I would be chastised for talking about my trauma or abuse.

> this is one of those things that those who haven't experienced trauma first hand tend to dismiss.

So do many of those who did. Having experienced a trauma doesn't imply even remembering it, let alone being consciously aware that was a trauma, still actively affecting you.

> Having experienced a trauma doesn't imply even remembering it

I've even seen the same thing happen in people who beat their depression.

A few friends of mine were depressed in the past 5 years and are doing well now. However, they are having a very hard time understanding and helping a currently depressed friend. They know this friend is depressed, they see the signs, they have talked about it, but because they themselves are not suffering from depression right now they are genuinely having a hard time understanding it. They find it incredibly difficult to not blame their friend for not calling back, "being lazy", etc.

Having a deep depression is, if not exactly traumatic, certainly something that I’ve blocked out of my psyche in the same way.

I suspect that might be at least partially because, in some cases or for some people, getting out of a deep depression might involve kind of disowning or denying the kinds of emotional states and thinking that were part of the depression. If the depression was hard enough, it could be that one doesn't want to feel them again, and genuinely understanding a feeling requires feeling it at least in some way.

This is just a hunch, based on personal observations, not any kind of psychological theory.

This to me feels like that event, the exit of your sister from your life may be considered somewhere on a spectrum of post traumatic stress - stress that's formed the development of your thinking and feelings patterns - and not necessarily considered as a dis-ordered or dis-eased state.

MAPS.org did highly successful research for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in treatment of PTSD in veterans; ~80% of non-placebo participants who had average of 17.5 years of treatment resistant PTSD, after just 2-3 sessions with MDMA (100-125mg) - with non-MDMA sessions initially and afterward for integration etc - no longer had PTSD after just 1 year; Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS - Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies - had said from his own experience he realized the most important part of any psychedelics you take is doing the work to integrate whatever you unlock to have access to again.

Yeah, to be honest her exit was the least traumatic thing that happened. She's just collateral damage in my brain's attempt to section things off.

I've been watching the MDMA treatments with some hope that they'll become legal and mainstream in the USA.

I think psychologists / therapists are also to blame.

I faced some kind of trauma as a kid (who hasn't), and while visiting a therapist to see if therapy was right for me regarding my lack of sleep and depression the therapist constantly tried to make me believe I was molested as a child and was blocking that memory or had forgotten it.

Maybe he was trying to do his job well, perhaps it's a common scenario and I showed all the signs of being such a person, but it didn't sit well with me at all. I didn't remember any such thing. No one in my life stood out as someone who would so such a thing. I could have forgotten such an event but so could anyone on Earth. I really didn't like this suggestion and how commonly it was repeated and the questioning of my memory and sanity. I eventually thought therapy is not for me and left and I imagine I'm not the only one with such an experience.

The book “Try To Remember” lays out the terrible damage done by such therapists.

I'm not the person you replied to, but it looks very interesting. I will give it a read.

Thank you.

This was common for a while, and the backlash against it is one of the things the article is addressing. I for instance have very little memory of my life before 18, and accessing that has been taking many months of intense therapy. There was a time when literally any memory recovery would’ve been regarded as highly suspicious, and it’s true memory isn’t always exact, but it’s not as if my therapist is implanting suggestions. They all come from my mind and they do not guide it, only expand.

>In an effort to provide a firmer grounding for their arguments, Kaufman and her McLean colleagues used artificial intelligence to develop a model of the connections between diverse brain networks that could account for dissociative symptoms. They fed the computer MRI data on 65 women with histories of childhood abuse who had been diagnosed with PTSD, along with their scores on a commonly used inventory of dissociative symptoms. “The computer did the rest,” Kaufman says.

Knowing a little of the issues with MRI studies (see dead fish fMRI study, https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-... ) and with ML models, and with the replication crisis in psychology, it does not inspire confidence at all that a team who strongly backs dissociative amnesia, feeds a bunch of MRI data into an ML model, and lo and behold after "the computer does the rest" they get the answer they had been hoping for.

Do we know that they got the “answer they had been hoping for”? A good scientist hopes for nothing more than data that conclusive validates or fails to invalidate the null hypothesis.

I appreciate that you admit you have strong biases. That does not mean these scientists also do or that they let their biases get on the way of doing a good job.

In science, rarely is the individual scientist neutral. People have built careers and staked reputations on one thing or another being true. This is why you have publication bias, p-hacking, because scientists are ultimately human and they would like to publish something and something that agrees with their position.

This is why we do double-blind studies for those studies were the answer is critical (like does a medicine work), because humans can't be trusted to completely disregard their biases. We also pre-register trials, so we don't only get results that the person is happy publishing.

The wonder and genius of science, is that there is a process that works in spite of human bias.

If instead, we had to depend on the ideal, bias-free scientist, science would become a lot less useful pretty fast.

If you want some evidence that scientists are not just neutral reporters of fact, see the story with Susan Fiske's accusation of "methodological terrorism" against people who pointed out math errors.

https://www.businessinsider.com/susan-fiske-methodological-t...

You offer no evidence that these scientists were biases for affected by their bias. You offer only speculation.

Interesting that this would be contentious - child trauma victims especially have reported giant chunks of missing memory, like almost no memories before the age of 8.

The ability to elicit fake memories shouldn’t imply forgotten traumatic memory is impossible.

Isn't childhood amnesia -- having very few memories before the age of eight or so -- common to all children, regardless of trauma?

And many times the memories kids do have are traumatic ones. I remember being bullied or being at the funerals of friends/family, or the time I fell down and broke my arm. If anything, trauma made the memories stronger.

Not to suggest your experiences aren’t traumatic but it’s different when your parents/family hurt you emotionally, physically and otherwise. Also what is extremely traumatic for one person may not be as traumatic for another.

It depends, I think, although I'm not sure on what. I broke two bones through childhood misadventure, and I remember both those moments quite clearly. Likewise some of the particularly standout moments of bullying. And too, I spent a lot of time in the hospital as a small child, pretty much all of it unpleasant, and I remember that well enough.

But there are things I don't remember, too. There is enough continuous memory adjacent to such gaps that to infer what must lie within them is trivial, but it has to be inferred, because the memories themselves are either not present or not accessible.

There's nothing in those gaps to which I want or need access, so it doesn't concern me especially that I don't have it. But it does leave me able to attest that both responses not only exist, but can co-exist in the same person.

As I said, though, I really don't know what makes the difference in how memory and trauma interact, why it varies within and between people - certainly there are many who've had experiences like the ones I don't remember, only they do remember, and I wouldn't hazard a guess as to the why of either.

There's reason to expect that, too. Processing an event writes it more durably into the brain, and we have good reason to continue processing bad events until we have extracted whatever learning is possible from them.

What counts as "very few"?

My SO and my mom always seems surprised that I'm able to recall various events from my childhood, but to me it doesn't feel very special.

Although it has entered the public consciousness as fact, it should go without saying that most work on repressed memories etc has been bogus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

>In 2006, psychologist and attorney Christopher Barden drafted an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of California signed by nearly 100 international experts in the field of human memory emphasizing the lack of credible scientific support for repressed and recovered memories.

We look at medieval witch hysterias in Europe and wonder how they could happen. But when you see the McMartin trial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial you’re like “Oh yeah, that’s how it can happen. Cause people are still people.”

And I mean you look at that trial and it’s crazy. It’s not some Qanon type fringe it’s the LA district attorney buying into the most patently absurd allegations.

Good recent New Yorker piece on this topic: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-...

Is there a controlled study on this? I can't remember much, if anything, before the age of 8. I don't think it's very uncommon.

Me either, and I'm quite sure there was no trauma. I also remember more but still quite little from age 9, and more than that but still little from age 10, progressing pretty monotonically until about high school.

All of that for two very non-specific paragraphs about the experiment.

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