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This podcast covers the fascinating world of psychological science through discussing the research behind popular myths related to psychology, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. Hosted by Dr. Karla Lassonde and Dr. Emily Stark, psychology professors, we discuss misconceptions about psychology and how they have been researched by psychological scientists.
Emily, you know that I teach human memory. Yes. And I've done that for a really long time. And I love it because when we think about psychology and we think about memory, it takes a while for you to understand that memory is actually your identity. It's how you develop your sense of self.
Karla:And when you connect with people, you know, speaking of teaching memory, the first thing that people usually say is, Oh gosh, you know, I have a terrible memory. And Emily, I say, So do I. Right? I mean, this is one of the kind of great human equalizers, is thinking about both how memory is who you are, but also that unless we work at it, it generally can be, you know, has flaws, and it's maybe not what we think it is. So when people think about that, they're talking about their ability to remember.
Karla:What does that look like? How much control do we have? When you're learning something, attention is a huge part of it. Am I listening to someone completely? What is it that I remember from these interactions?
Karla:And so it's common to forget. We forget it actually helps us in a lot of cases, so we don't feel as much pain or sadness when things go wrong. But we get into this space when it comes to remembering about this issue, and a lot of people, you hear this in pop culture quite a bit, and they talk about, Well, in order to not remember, I will repress.
Emily:Yeah, the word repressed.
Karla:The word repressed.
Emily:Repressed it, yeah. Yeah.
Karla:So, you know, this is a huge issue. If I forget, if I remember, but somehow I have this ability to put it away when it's bad and set it aside, I think the population really struggles with, do you repress memories
Emily:or not? Yeah, I think we don't really have a good understanding, especially just like the average layperson, of how memory works in the brain and there's a few different, perhaps mistaken beliefs about memory, about maybe how much we can control what we do or don't remember or even how that whole process works. But yeah, that idea of repressed memories or things that our brain has somehow hidden from ourselves for whatever reason is definitely a thing you hear people talk about.
Karla:Yeah, and the brain is so fascinating and so complicated, and it's not a wonder why we have a lot of ideas of how it works.
Emily:Yes. Memory is so cool.
Karla:The misconception, Emily, that we're gonna be talking about today is that some people believe that it's common for individuals to repress their memory, in particular for things that are bad or traumatic.
Emily:Oh, interesting. I can't wait to hear more.
Karla:Yeah. My name is Karla Lassonde and I'm a cognitive psychologist.
Emily:And my name is Emily Stark and I'm a social psychologist and this is Brains vs. Beliefs Debunking Psychological Misconceptions.
Karla:Let's talk a little bit, Emily, about what people believe.
Emily:Yes.
Karla:When it comes to repression. The idea of something to repress means that you have a negativity, a traumatic experience, or something that generally you don't want to remember.
Emily:Yeah. Okay. So we put it away.
Karla:We put it away. And I mean, to be honest, think about the times in your life where things go poorly. You have a bad experience. We all have a number of these.
Emily:Yeah, I like to joke that I can maybe remember maybe fifteen total minutes of seventh grade, and it really wasn't even that bad. But yeah, but I think there are certainly times that I don't remember clearly, and that's probably a good thing.
Karla:Yeah. I I think, you know, seventh grade, well, you're probably more ideal than you think. So this term repression actually comes from, one of our buddies in psychology, Sigmund Freud. And I wanna say Invent is maybe too much of a contribution, but he was one of the first people in the field of psychology talking about repression to use it as a tool for our thoughts. Now, if you go back to 101, Intros to Psychology, you know very well that there's a lot of discussion of what we call defense mechanisms.
Karla:And this idea that have Freud talks about this emphasis on how do I put things out of memory, what are the things that I can't remember? So there's a lot of lead up to use this tool of repression when it comes to psychological stress.
Emily:Yes, and that's one of the things, when I talk about Freud in my classes, because so much of his work, there's really no empirical evidence that he a lot of his ideas about people have not been confirmed by research, but one piece that he did really add to psychology in general was this focus on the unconscious. That there is a large aspect of our human nature that we don't have conscious access and awareness of. But from Freud's perspective, that could be really important to understand, to help address, like you said, some of this anxiety and stress and that, in general, his defense mechanisms are the way we manage this stress by just how do we make it unconscious so we don't have to think about the thing that's upsetting us. And I do think that is a contribution, a unique contribution of Freud's in that he really is an early person who was thinking about the unconscious and how that might be. Yeah, exactly.
Emily:Important to understand.
Karla:And again, at this period of time in which he was working, we don't know much about the brain. It's like a black box.
Emily:True.
Karla:And so, like a lot of things in life, as you're learning the truth, you're coming up with these pretty grandiose theories about how our thoughts work, how it helps our functioning, our general well-being. And so Freudian style of therapy is something that has moved forward in The United States for, you know, centuries, if not decades, where we think about how we wrestle with our conscious self versus our unconscious self. Okay. And and so, like, there's... You think of the classic armchair psychology, where we get
Emily:lay on the couch
Karla:and talk
Emily:about our dreams. Yeah. So it's digging into that unconscious.
Karla:Yeah. And it is not to say that, you know, therapy has science behind it. And so it's really important to look at, like, therapy can be highly individualistic. It is important to think of your cognition, your behaviors. But the thing is, what is it about this part of repression?
Emily:How does this actually help us?
Karla:Yeah. Is it a term that occurs in terms of a mechanism or a practice to help us, like, snuff out terrible memories, life altering scenarios, terrible seventh grade years? And I think there's a commonality that people believe that it's more often that you will just, I will on and off, I will repress, I will not repress. And is this the way that memory for trauma works?
Emily:Yes. When we experience traumatic events, are we able to put them out of our minds and does that help us? That's really the question that researchers look at with all types of therapy. Is this a helpful way to think about the human mind and behavior? Are we helping people?
Emily:But yeah, I do think this does seem like a pretty common this vision of Freud and this idea that there's something that I might not be aware of that I need to dig into and to deal with or face to help address my whatever issues I have brought to the counselor.
Karla:Yeah, very well said. And we've looked at some research here with our own psychology students, and misconceptions like, repression have been found to be well believed. So when I looked at work about ten years ago with our undergraduates, above seventy five percent, that's a pretty big margin of students said, I think that we repress memory.
Emily:Wow, okay. Yeah.
Karla:And I'm not alone. There's a lot of other researchers who have looked at repression as a truth or as a mechanism. So we've got researchers at Washington University coming around 60% believing that they not only repressed memories, but more specifically have a repressed childhood memory.
Emily:Interesting. So what might lead someone then to think that they have this repressed memory, say, from their childhood?
Karla:Going back to what I said earlier, when we talk about our memories and we're kind of mirroring this in other people, we are quick to say, I don't understand my memory. I know that it's bad. I know that it's terrible. And what we often do with a lot of things that either we don't understand or we think is bad, that complication sometimes leads us to kind of misdiagnose or misconstrue what's actually happening.
Emily:Okay,
Karla:yeah. Yeah, and to be honest, think about the gaps in your own memory.
Emily:Oh yeah, yeah. We couldn't remember every moment. True. So you're saying some people, like we know we have these gaps in our memory, but some people say, Oh, something's missing. Have I purposefully or has my brain purposefully created this gap because of something that happened?
Karla:Yes. Like, as a teacher of memory, you know, I... It's like I laugh about people who say I have a terrible memory, and that's the rub. Right? Like, so do I.
Karla:But until you realize that it's typical, like actually remembering too much can lead to other psychological issues, obsessions and compulsions,
Emily:or just
Karla:depression. But the general public, I think memory becomes quite a black box, again, of how do people use it, how does it work in general. So when we think about extreme stress or anxiety, if you have this in your life, you often work in maybe a therapy setting as to why am I anxious? Why do I have these feelings? And sometimes these events have really been connected or pushed to something that you don't remember.
Emily:I see. So if I am suddenly having trouble sleeping, I have trouble eating, but I can't connect it to something currently going on in my life, it feels like this just came out of nowhere, I might suggest or a therapist could suggest, well maybe it's something like a repressed memory. Like that's what's leading to these current problems.
Karla:And I will divulge and remind people, I'm not a therapist, Emily.
Emily:I am also not a therapist.
Karla:And that's okay. That's not where my training lies. There are folks, we have a woman, Karen Betram, has a pretty popular book called The Real Story. And in this, the whole book is about anecdotal but compelling evidence that she sees repressed memories operating as a mechanism for people quite often in her practice. Yeah, and we have case studies in psychology where we're able to look at how one case provides us valuable insight.
Karla:I believe that this particular psychologist is documenting repressed memory. And one thing that becomes pretty important is, is there anyone else that can corroborate or confirm that this idea of something bad happened, does anyone, your mom, your brother, your neighbor, can they confirm that it happened? Which is great because you provide this reliability that we often look for in psychology. I'll share with the audience a clip. In this particular clip, you're going to hear a therapist talk about missing childhood memories, not remembering something from when you were little and coming up with a mechanism of blaming these gaps on something traumatic.
Video Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R068_HlNktE&t=341s[04:37]Dr. Alex Howard: And so we have memories that are repressed and held in our unconscious. And what can happen in therapeutic work, by the way particularly when we start to learn to meet those three core emotional needs for ourselves, we actually build the safety safety that allows those memories to start to come back to the surface because there is wisdom in our emotional body. It wants to process, it wants to digest these experiences. And so we build that safety, we build that sense of of love and support, and we could find ourselves sometimes starting to have flashbacks or starting to remember certain things.[05:21].
Karla:When we think about this clip and we think about explanations, particularly for childhood memory, there's a lot of unconscious and unconscious assumptions.
Emily:Yeah, and that's another space where there's still so much more to learn about what is consciousness, what is the extent of our unconscious, what does it mean to have things in our unconscious. This is another rich area for research. It's not something that's fully understood.
Karla:It is. In fact, if I utter the word subliminal, which subliminal has this idea that it's just under our awareness, but perhaps close enough to the surface of awareness or ability for us to be manipulated in terms of a behavior, we're gonna have to open up subliminal messages in another episode.
Emily:Yes, this needs to be a whole episode because there is research on can we are we influenced by these so called, I don't know, we play a record backwards. And yes, there's a lot more to say about Sableau, but I think it does speak to both the interest in the unconscious and how we might be influenced by things we're not aware of, And it speaks to the perhaps lack of understanding of those processes in our own brains too.
Karla:Absolutely. And trauma, subliminal messages, and just understanding the unconscious again is quite compelling.
Emily:I can
Karla:point you towards a channel and uncovering what they call dark psychology. Oh, yeah. On YouTube, it's InsightFlex, and they dedicate their study and knowledge to different areas of psychology. And they're dark, they could be spooky, could be about paranormal, but more of the, like, what are the mechanisms that are psychological that deal with things like anxiety, trauma, and stress, and so on? And it's just important to know that there is an awareness, like people are educating folks that this type of thing is common and that it exists.
Karla:Video Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up-3elZmHqQ [0:24] Insight Flex [unknown host] "Repressed memories, as the term suggests, are memories that our minds have pushed into the unconscious. Usually, these are memories of traumatic or stressful events that might have been too overwhelming for us to process at the time they occurred. Imagine the mind as a safety box, locking away those experiences that are too painful or difficult to handle. Tucking them away in a hidden corner until we're ready to face them. However, these repressed memories can influence our behavior, emotions, and overall mental health in subtle but significant ways." [0:57]
Karla:In human memory, going back to this idea that memory is, related to your sense of self, one of the first things that I talk about in that way is having students in my class report their first memory. So Emily, what is the first memory that you can remember? I throw that out there. And what students often say is they might remember something that smells a certain way from when they're real little. They might remember the grandma's house has specific smells or sensory things that resonate with them.
Karla:Of course, yeah. But when we really get down to it, Emily, there's a range. So the first memory that our students report as children is somewhere between four and six years old.
Emily:Okay. Yeah, that seems accurate.
Karla:Yeah, it comes up again and again. And one of the things that we talk about is that the term infantile amnesia is a fun one because it might be the first time that we hear of the word amnesia, which maybe we think of with a stroke or an accident when students are like, wait a minute, you're saying that we all have amnesia? Like, yes, we do. Amnesia is this idea of not knowing. But certainly, we can't remember a lot of things we don't remember.
Karla:I have a one year old at home, and one of the best things about having a really young child is, of course, meeting their needs, but also being like, well, I couldn't screw up too bad because they don't remember this long car ride that I just took them on.
Emily:Well, when I was an undergraduate and for a couple years between finishing my undergraduate and starting grad school I actually worked in a research lab at the University of Minnesota that studied infant and child memory. Perfect. Babies remember more than we think. But the trick is because they can't talk about it, you have to get really creative in how you do that research. So we created these fun toys that had two steps that were brand new, babies had never seen them.
Emily:So they'd come into the lab and we'd show them the toy and it might be like you do two things and a light lights up, right? Something exciting happens. And this is with nine month olds. So when I say babies, I mean babies. And then we give them the toys, right?
Emily:Like they're old enough to grab things and manipulate things and we could both just see like do they engage in the steps to make the fun thing happen? And this was also an EEG study so we had electrodes which on their I mean you can imagine putting an electrode cap on a nine month old and that was three quarters of the time it took to do this study. But you could see in their brain differences between the toys they had seen before, like they had come in a week before and brand new toys, and they were more likely to show the actions for the toys that they had been shown before. So we think it's not that our brain can't form memories, but yeah, it really is that we're remembering things but until we develop a language ability, we have a really hard time maybe accessing or demonstrating those memories so they tend to get buried. But yeah, the whole field well, and it really speaks to how we want to learn about things that happen before we have language abilities, how creative those developmental psych researchers need to be.
Emily:Absolutely. How do you study something in people who can't understand what you're asking or be able to express themselves? Absolutely. But yeah, I remember that and it really changed how you think about babies and very young children, that they are taking in so much information and it is in there, in their brains,
Karla:In these different research, we often hear of the distinction between learning and remembering, and what babies are doing if they are absorbing all kinds of information. Think about their neural networks and the amount of change. And so we can demonstrate a lot of learning without actually saying, I remember. True. Not only do babies not say what they learn because they don't have the voice, but that happens a lot in our everyday life.
Karla:And it's important to get in the weeds a little bit and talk about some of the memory processes that leads to the idea of remembering and how people forget and how they remember. So if I ask you, What did you have for lunch last Thursday morning, Emily? You?
Emily:Oh my gosh. What even was I doing last Thursday?
Karla:Yeah, exactly.
Emily:I have no idea.
Karla:We rely on a process called encoding. You can think of encoding is laying down the word encoding comes from to code or to transcribe, to put some sort of like rubber against the road and say, I am thinking of this. It smells a certain way. It sounds a certain way. And typically when we encode, we do it really well when we have these detailed cues about our day.
Karla:Yeah, So if of you went to New York City last Thursday and ate an amazing lunch at a fantastic restaurant.
Emily:I would remember that.
Karla:You would remember. Absolutely. And so typically, though, the encoding process is more mundane. You know, it's not that baby learning about how to use that toy where they just implicitly or without understanding remember. On our day to day basis, if we aren't putting down specific cues, if things are not particularly exciting or unique, it's like hearing someone's name for the first time, you don't often pay a lot of attention to it, unfortunately.
Karla:Yeah, When we meet someone new, the way humans work is that we typically are waiting for what we're going to say.
Emily:Yes, I am too worried about what I'm going to say and not looking weird, and then I forget the person's name, which, guess what, isn't great. One day
Karla:I'll Yeah, and not to give too much of an aside, but in an interview situation, I often coach my students, like, this is your turn to really remember the person's name.
Emily:Oh, that's good.
Karla:Nice. But how do you do that? One, you try to focus less on yourself, but you really do have to use, getting back to this word encoding, multiple sensory cues to put this person's face to their name, like literally, without talking negatively about them. Is there something that they're wearing? Is there something about their name that reminds you of something interesting?
Karla:And in that encoding process, the point of all this is to remember we have to be quite intentional most of the time. Yes, absolutely. And so how does this kind of overshadow the idea of trauma or repression? Well, trauma then is a different mechanism where if something is really anxiety provoking or horrific, that would tend to lead to these multiple encoding cues, you
Emily:would Absolutely, yeah. I can think about almost getting into an accident while driving and yeah, there's a lot that impressed itself upon me and that these multiple cues both like how I felt and what I saw and what I heard in that moment. There's a lot of those encoding cues there
Karla:to I don't want to be flippant to say that a trauma is like talking about your great lunch in New York City that didn't exist.
Emily:But now I see the similarity where these major events, whether they are positive or negative, bring more encoding cues. And so that should mean that we have better memories for detailed events, traumatic or non traumatic, right?
Karla:Yeah, because they're unique. We don't want trauma to not be unique. So one way to look at the viability of repressed memories is researchers, one in particular, La Landy in 2011, they tracked the frequency of which people that they studied remembered traumatic versus non traumatic events over a four year period. And so what happens is you often have to use autobiographical or story based remembering where people write down this is something traumatic, this is something that's not traumatic. Okay.
Karla:And what they're looking at is the potential for remembering traumatic memory and the accuracy was actually that they were more so accurate in remembering these standout events than they were more of your everyday mundane memory.
Emily:All right. So this study and similar studies show that, yeah, people have better memories for these traumatic or potentially traumatic events. But then why is this idea of repressed memory still so prevalent and popular?
Karla:Yeah. I think one of the ideas is another misconception of memory is that it's like a recording device.
Emily:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Karla:And so if I would experience some trauma, can I play it back in my mind like I'm playing a song over again? And the truth of the matter is that memory is what we call reconstructive. And so it's like building that Lego block tower again and again. Every time you have a selection of pieces, you're going to create something different. And so in memory work, whenever we bring back a memory, we call that the retrieval process.
Karla:We ourselves have the ability to talk about a memory. So you tell me about this exciting event, and you tell me, and you tell your brother, and you tell your neighbor. Believe it or not, Emily, you might change edit And you're not doing it in a malicious malicious way. But it's important for us to know that we, without causing harm, every time we remember something, we have the possibility of changing the way it took place initially.
Emily:I talk about that when I talk about eyewitness memory because in that crime investigation context, if you've witnessed a crime, you're going to be telling the story of that crime repeatedly and it's definitely the case in both, say, real world studies and lab studies that a witness is going to tell a different story. So later on, maybe there's some details that come up that they didn't mention before. Well, it's not because they repressed those details, it's because they have reconstructed that memory differently every single time they tell the story. So we do this all the time. This do all the
Karla:one of the queens of what we call eyewitness memory, Elizabeth Loftus, usually recounted as one of the top 10 psychologists of our time.
Emily:Wow.
Karla:Yeah, pretty cool. And she has, and a lot of other colleagues, done these studies where you convince somebody of the impossible. One of the more fun examples is children. They are brought into a room when they're visiting Disney World or Disneyland. And there's this little side experiment where they see a cardboard cutout of Bugs Bunny and they are kind of being coached that Bugs Bunny exists at Disneyland and Disney World.
Karla:And so when you talk about, does Bugs Bunny exist at Disneyland? You can make a child believe that it does, even though, what's the problem, Emily, about Bugs Bunny roaming It's not
Emily:a Disney character.
Karla:Go. Absolutely. And we're not trying to be dark when we introduce Bugs Bunny in the wrong context. But the truth of the matter is we can... Implant is maybe a tricky word, but we can convince people using subtle context and corroboration that something happened to them.
Emily:It's just so fascinating to hear, I know Doctor. Laffas has a great TED Talk out there, but yeah, just how amazingly easy it is to convince people through suggestion that this may have happened of a false memory from their childhood. And so I know in her work she's also verifying if she's working with college students, like with their parents to make sure these events didn't actually happen. It reminds me of a study I read too where people were shown photoshopped pictures of themselves in a hot air balloon, even though it didn't verify that they'd never been in a hot air balloon. And that picture was enough to create in people this false memory that, oh, as a kid I guess I went on a hot air balloon ride.
Emily:So even things where, oh, you think you would remember that or be quite sure, then no, our brains can construct this and create a false memory that feels very, very real.
Karla:Absolutely. And that's a fascinating line of work for anyone that has a broader interest in this topic. But there's also a really bad corner that this has turned where there have been accusations of people, for example, doing terrible, harmful, maybe dark, satanic, malicious things to children.
Emily:And this is coming out as a repressed memory.
Karla:Correct. One of the problems is children, they are minors. We have to treat them with a certain degree of care in terms of how their mind works. We just talked about infantile amnesia. And so one very, very bad practice that we know does not happen commonly at this time, But there are examples of high suggestibility, particularly in children, where they have been meant to believe that something just awful, just heinous has happened to them.
Emily:So they're being manipulated maybe by, let's say, a well meaning who might be trying to investigate or deal with some problem, but to think that something happened to them that didn't actually happen. And yeah, in this crime context, it's so clear to see why we need to be very careful and sure, is this so called repressed memory a real memory if we are going to accuse people of a crime? Or, like you said, affect the beliefs of people and what they think their own history has been.
Karla:Yeah, and of course we want to believe children. We want to believe people at any point in their life that if they have some sort of trauma to work through, they should have help, They... And they should be treated ethically. But what has been found with a lot of these terrible stories, but also fun recovered memories like being lost in the mall or riding in a hot air balloon, is that you're looking at the presence of suggestibility. Is it there or is it not?
Karla:And the other key component is what we call corroboration. So if I was eating lunch with you in New York, I'm able to say, Oh no, you didn't order that, you ordered this. And I could be wrong too. But the general idea is when you have something that is terrible or you're convinced, you really benefit from having a witness or a person that can agree with you in life.
Emily:Yes, just to help counteract that knowledge of how our brains could reconstruct memories that we can't just immediately and automatically believe that any memory we have is authentic.
Karla:Yes. And so it's not that we 100% of the time will have corroboration, and that's where we get into a little bit of the murky water. But it's important to point out that researchers in memory and cognition and psychology, they do not find a mechanism in which our brains are designed to repress traumatic memory. And they've done a lot of studies, in fact, showing that it's often the opposite.
Emily:Okay, so let me just make sure. Our key takeaway here is that there is not consistent scientific evidence that traumatic memories are routinely or regularly repressed and then later recovered intactly. Not to say that repressed memories might be always false, but that we should be extremely cautious with a repressed memory because we know that our memory can also be really affected by other pieces and we can embed things that did not happen to us and think of them as real.
Karla:Yeah, that's very well said. We do have to be careful because memory is again completely unique to an individual. I don't know exactly what you experience in your life. But the important scientific piece, the part that we want to echo, is that there hasn't been a scientific mechanism or a consistent replication process in which we can see that recovered memory is a process. It's something that our brain will do in order to naturally work with repression or traumatic memory.
Karla:Yeah. Yeah. And so what do we do if someone in your life talks about having a repressed memory? I think you handle it with caution. We want to be respectful of what people believe.
Karla:And in my class, this actually comes up a lot. And You never can say never because of the fraughtness of our memory. But I think it's important that if students or people believe that it's very conventional, that I don't remember and it's naturally repressed because it's bad. That's when we get into this cycle that in the science of psychology we can actually refute. So while the idea of repressed memory is powerful and emotional as a tool, we've now seen that science tells us a more complicated story about how memory actually works.
Emily:So interesting. But yes, most things are probably a little more complex than we might automatically think, and it seems like memory is no different.
Karla:You're right. You can learn more about this podcast on our website called communicatingpsychologicalscience.com. You'll find references and a link to this episode. Feel free to contact us on our website with any comments or ideas for future episodes and follow Brains versus Beliefs wherever you find podcasts. Thanks for listening.