Hacker News Reader

Comment by rukuu001 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com