G’day. Welcome to Catalyst. How much do you trust your own memories? In a court, of course, being able to accurately recall events from the past is critical to the course of justice. Recently, in a US Supreme Court trial, a contentious debate of repressed memories has been reignited. Jonica Newby went all the way to Boston to check out the complex tale and ended up questioning her own memories. In 2002, a Boston priest became, as some reports put it, the most hated man in Massachusetts. Defrocked priest Paul Shanley now resides in a US jail, convicted of serially raping a young boy. But is it possible his accuser remembers in vivid detail something that never happened? The story and all the facts, to me, look like there’s a very real chance that there could be a false memory. Oh, my god. I had no doubt that the vast majority of what he remembered was accurate. This is a case that gripped a nation and reignited the so-called “memory wars.” And whatever you think really happened, by the end of this story, there’s one thing you will know for sure– how frighteningly easy the recipe is for creating false memories. It was at the height of the scandals in the Catholic church when, in 2002, four young men came forward with nearly identical accounts of childhood abuse at the hands of Father Shanley. It would be waiting for him, Shanley. Usually, the light would be off. And he’d stand at the door with the hall light on. They told of being raped repeatedly from the ages of six to at least nine. He said no one would believe me if I told them. When it came to court, three of the men were dropped by the prosecutor, leaving one to testify. Is the defendant guilty or not guilty? Guilty. It was enough for the jury. Shanley was sent down. But there was an unusual element in this story. The accuser, Paul Busa, claimed these events were so traumatic, he walled the memory off in his mind. He had no recollection of the abuse until he was an adult, when he saw reports about Shanley in the news and the memories came flooding back. Hi. Hi. Dr. James Chu is the Boston psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution. If you’ve been heatedly traumatized, you’re actually much more likely to block it out eventually than if it’s happened to you once or twice. So one theory talks about repression. There is some kind of process, itself unconscious, that makes things that are too overwhelming or two conflictual not then available to your conscious memory. The trouble is other scientists say there’s no good evidence memory repression exists. Well, it got incredibly nasty– Across the continent is perhaps the most famous of them. I had armed guards-She testified on Shanley’s behalf. Professor Elizabeth Loftus. When I got into the memory wars, which was about the early 1990s, I thought, well, maybe there is some evidence for massive repression of horrific brutalization. And when I began to delve into the literature, I was really pretty shocked to find there really wasn’t any credible scientific support for this. And that view hasn’t changed. She cites a multi-study analysis of 11,000 victims of torture and other major trauma, where not one case of memory repression was found. I don’t really think we ought to be throwing people into prison based on a flimsy theory, no matter how logical the theory might sound to somebody. So is she saying Paul Busa lied? I’ll have banana. No. And can I have the strawberry, please? Dr. Loftus says there’s another possibility. She spent the last 30 years doing the work that made her one of the world’s most influential research psychologists– studying false memories. And now she’s going to try to implant one in me. This is good. So you like strawberry ice cream. I do. Let’s see what we can do about that. Back at the lab, I’m given a list of things I may have experienced as a kid. And I have to rate my confidence they really happened. Got sick after eating strawberry ice cream. Oh, I don’t think so. Later, she tells me her computer has determined I did once get sick from strawberry ice cream. So you need to try to remember this experience. If you can’t remember it, just try to imagine, oh, how it might have happened. We’re almost at the point where you could say we have a recipe for how to get people to have a false memory. You first make a person believe that an experience is plausible. Then you try to get them to believe that it happened to them. So welcome to today’s experiment-And then you try to embellish that belief with sensory detail, engage them in imagination exercises or something that’s going to add some detail to the belief. And you’re well on your way to getting somebody to have a false memory. And following this recipe, she can implant a belief or memory of illness after strawberry ice cream in around 25% of subjects. It’s usually been at least a quarter, yes. At least a quarter. Yes. Wow. What’s more, they no longer want the stuff. When they’re also showing behaviors down the road, then we know we’ve really changed something in their minds. But it’s one thing to show false memories can produce ice cream aversion. Can they really account for memories like Paul Busa’s? Where would he be standing? In the doorway. Where would you be standing? In the back of the bathroom. Did something happen? Yeah. Can you tell us? Oh, my god. He’d unzip my pants. If I had to go to the bathroom, he’d watch me go to the bathroom. There were so many things that just made it incredibly believable. He, for example, remembered certain shapes, archways of the room where the sexual abuse took place. So I had no doubt that the vast majority of what he remembered was accurate. It does seem extraordinary to claim such a detailed and emotional memory might exist without some truth behind it. But here at Harvard, researchers have shown just how compelling false memories can be. And all of a sudden, I wake up. But I can’t move. And I see these beings. And I was terrified. And I see them coming at me-Psychology professor Richard McNally normally with survivors of sexual abuse. But he became intrigued by the memories of supposed alien abductees. I’m in the bed, and it’s morning-Now, what seems to be the case is that these individuals are experiencing an episode of isolated sleep paralysis, accompanied by hypnopompic– upon awakening– hallucinations. So when people have these episodes, sometimes they will seek out experts in alien abduction. And then they become hypnotized. And they start to generate imagery of what happened next. And they stuck it into my body. And I felt this pain. And I couldn’t move. And that is when you get all these vivid memories of being in space ships, being sexually probed, having intercourse with space aliens. But how real are these memories? As real as actual trauma? They’re staring at you with their large, dead, black eyes. As you can see here, the heart rate has increased a bit. Much to our surprise, we found that the alien abductees had very pronounced psycho-physiological reactions to these abductions scripts. You are absolutely terrified. Your heart is pounding. And the magnitude of the reaction was at least as great as the reactions that we’d seen in our previous research with childhood sexual abuse survivors, with Vietnam veterans, with combat-related PTSD. It turns out that the false memories of trauma are just as powerful as the genuine memories of trauma, and in some cases, even more so. Yep, about 18. And that’s about where she’s been. While he’s convinced of the power of false memories, like professor Loftus, McNally sees no evidence the mind can repress repeated trauma. The more traumatic something is at the time, the more likely you are to remember, and certainly if it’s repeated. So for example, you don’t find people forgetting that they were in Auschwitz. And that’s what the memory wars come down to. One side says repeat traumatic events can cause a memory to be walled off in the mind. And the other says that’s not possible. And meanwhile, since 2005, Paul Shanley has been in jail. Yet there were anomalies in Paul Busa’s memories. He gets a call from a girlfriend, saying that there be some accusations occurring about Father Shanley. His first reaction is, oh, gee, that’s a surprise. He was such a nice guy. Everybody liked him. And then he gets another call. And he learns that somebody he used to know is making specific accusations, goes to see a doctor in the military, spend hours and hours with this person. There’s a lot of suggestion in this story, as he goes from no memory to having a memory for years of brutalization, supposedly repressed. In a personal journal, he actually was wondering to himself, did this really happen? Or is this just something I think happened because it happened to my friends? Muddying the waters further, when the four young men initially brought their accusations against Shanley, all four claimed repressed memory. They all say they were raped, and then forgot weekly for years. In 2006, Robert Shore took over as Shanley’s attorney. He decided to run the appeal primarily on the scarcity of scientific support for repressed memory. The only evidence against him was repressed memory. I didn’t think that that should be permitted. Convinced of the importance of this case, Loftus, McNally, and a further 100 memory experts worldwide signed a brief to that effect. And how, here in the Massachusetts Supreme Court, September 2009, Shanley’s appeal hearing became the scene of the ultimate memory wars showdown. There are three possibilities in this case. Paul Busa may have lied. He may be telling the truth, and he repressed his memory of repeat trauma until adulthood. Or he may have a false memory. In a story as dark and complex as this, we outsiders will never know for sure. But of those three explanations, repressed memory is currently the least well supported by science. The Supreme Court’s ruling came down in January. Shanley’s appeal was dismissed. The court decided the original judge made the right decision when he allowed repressed memory evidence to be used during the Shanley trial. [MUSIC] In the 1990s, a new therapy was sweeping across America, recovered memory therapy. Thousands of people were being guided by therapists to remember traumatic events from their childhood. Things that apparently forgotten. Comedian Roseanne Barr and former Miss America, Marilyn van Derbur were amongst those who recovered memories of child sexual abuse. In the thousands of court cases that followed, experts testified to the reality of repressed memories. And assured the court the victims could hardly be remembering in such detail, things that never happened. There were no such things as false memories. But Professor Elizabeth Loftus wasn’t so sure. Well, she decided to find out. Could false memories actually be created? [MUSIC] In her challenge to the idea of repressed memory, Elizabeth Loftus set out to demonstrate experimentally how false memories could be implanted in some people. This came to be known as the lost in the mall technique from the first study that involved trying to plant false childhood memories in 24 participants. >> We contacted their mother or their father or an older relative of theirs. And then we went back to the subject and we said, we’ve been talking with your mother. We found out some things that happened to you when you were about five or six years old. We’d like to see what you can remember about these experiences that your mother told us about. >> Participants were given three true experiences and a false one that involved being lost in a shopping mall as a six year old. >> Your mother told us that you were shopping at the corner shopping mall on a Saturday one time. And you were by the pet store, and all of a sudden you disapeared. And you were gone for the longest period of time. And eventually, we found you. You were crying. And an elderly woman had rescued you and brought you back to the main office. Do you remember that experience? >> The researchers were able to plot false memories in 25% of their participants, a statistically significant figure. What surprised them was the rich detail of these false memories. >> They would start telling us things, details about the appearance of the person who rescued them, other kinds of details that we have never mentioned to them. So that showed that they were putting a lot of sensory detail on to this created memory. >> From this investigation set up what she thought was the recipe for planting false memories. First, you need the client’s trust and therapists usually have that. Then you suggest something that might have happened and bring in persuasive supporting evidence. >> So she would go into therapy with an eating disorder, or depression, or whatever her problem is. And she’d end up with a therapist who says everyone I’ve seen with those problems was sexually abused as a child, I wonder if anything like that happened to you. >> So third, you ask clients if they can remember this happening to them. Sometimes they begin to add their own details. They take ownership of the memory. >> This was going on really all across North America and then other parts of the world. Families were being destroyed in the process because once people developed these memories. They’ve been accused their family members or other relatives, or other former neighbors, or former teachers, former anybody. >> The Lost in the Mall study, the Formation of False Memories, was published in 1995. And critics were quick to point out some limitations. First, it was a small sample, with only 24 participants. Second, being lost in the mall as a child, is quite a common experience. Maybe it really had happened to some of the participants. And third, it was hardly a traumatic experience. Not comparable to those being uncovered by repress memory therapist. >> So Loftus and the co-workers began answering this critique by planting more traumatic and emplores more memories, convincing people have nearly choked to death. Seeing their parents having sex, seeing a wounded animal after a bombing, and witnessed demonic possession. Other researchers working independently of Loftus convinced participants that as a child they’d nearly drowned, been hospitalized, and attacked by a savage animal. She also had to persuade 30% of the sample that they’ve been approached, fondled, and licked by a drug-fueled Pluto. It seemed that Loftus and her coworkers were winning what came to be called the memory wars. But she was paying a heavy price, unable to undermine her academically. Some critics turned on Loftus a south [MUSIC] And, she was making some powerful enemies because repressed memory was good business. Many therapists were building a career around it. Plans were taking out multi million dollar law suits against the families, neighbors, schools and anyone else they could find and of course it was payday for the lawyers. So a lot of people had reason to attack Loftus. She was accused of condoning sexual abuse, participating in satanic abuse, and abusing her own children, even though she didn’t have any. For a while, she became a public enemy. >> They had death threats, so they had assigned an armed plain clothed police officer to be with me the whole day. So, there were letter writing campaigns to the chair of my department, the president of my university, the governor of the state trying to get me fired from my job. So there were a lot of unhappy people out there. >> Nonetheless she stuck to her guns. And as the experimental evidence mounted, courts were becoming increasingly skeptical of evidence based on repressed memory. >> Then in the spring of 1997 there was a case that threatened to put all Elizabeth Loftus’ findings on the scrap page. Gave new impetus to the recovered memory therapists. And that was the case of Jane Doe. [MUSIC] >> In the spring of 1997, the memory wars took a new turn. A psychiatrist, David Corwin, wrote about a young woman he called Jane Doe to protect her identity. Interviewed by Corwin, Jane remembered being sexually abused by her mother. But what made this case different was that Corwin also had tapes of interviews 11 years earlier with Jane as a six year old, saying her mother had sexually and physically abused her. So there, on tape was corroboration. >> So he believed he had the new proof of a repressed memory that had returned while he was filming it. Now, I happened to read about that case because the psychiatrist was not only showing the video tapes, but he also wrote an article about it. I thought it seemed very fishy. >> This was something Loftus couldn’t duplicate and dissect in the lab. She had to go out and play detective. So she and a colleague Malvin Gaye began through court records, databases and obituaries. >> Then when I ultimately was able to find the Doe family and read all the materials in the divorce file, I became convinced that this mother was completely innocent. Loftus believed that Jane had been coached by her father and new step mother to say she had been abused by her mother. The memories hadn’t been planted in Jane the young woman, but in Jane the child. >> More significantly Loftus found that Jane hadn’t repressed the memories. Indeed she had often talked about her childhood experiences to other family members. So whatever the truth of the Jane Doe case, it wasn’t corroborated evidence of recovered memory. So Loftus had diffused a ticking time bomb. >> And now she had a new target, guided imagination. In cases where clients weren’t remembering any sexual abuse, some therapists were suggesting, they should just imagine it. >> You don’t remember anything? Why don’t you just close your eyes and imagine who might have done this to you? And how old might you have been? And where might have this happening? Well we began to wonder, what would this guided imagination do for people who didn’t have the experience? >> So what happens when people are asked not to remember a childhood experience, but to imagine one? As ever, Loftus decided to find out. First, participants were given 40 events and asked to estimate the likelihood that that did happen to them in childhood. [MUSIC] Two weeks later, they were off to imagine some of the events they say hadn’t happened to them. For example. >> Imagine that you are a kid and you’re playing in the living room and all of a sudden, you trip on something. What did you trip on? And then they’ll say I tripped down a toy or I tripped on the rug. Okay, keep imagining. You fall against the window as your hand hits the window, the window breaks. Your hand gets cut and there’s blood, imagine that. >> Later the participants will back and show me original list. And those who’d been asked to imagine an event were more likely to believe that it actually happened. >> We call that phenomenon, imagination inflation. Imagination inflates your confidence that something happened to you. >> And Loftus’ research was having in effect. Towards the end of the 1990s, courts have become much more skeptical of recovered memory evidence, and increasingly reluctant to admitt in court without corroboration. Many former recovered memory clients are now retracting their claims of abuse. One of them was comedian Roseanne Barr, who described making the claims as the biggest mistake of her life. And rather than suing their families, many recovered memory patients were now suing their therapists. Beth Rutherford received a $1 million settlement from her analyst. In therapy, she’d remembered her clergyman father impregnating her and forcing her to abort the fetus with a metal coat hanger. Later medical evidence showed that she had never been pregnant, almost still a virgin. [MUSIC] received a settlement of over $10 million from her psychiatrist, who she claimed help manufacture memories that she ate human flesh and sexually abused her two sons. So, medical insurance companies would no longer cover therapists who practice recovered memory therapy. In the memory wars, it was Clare who was winning and who was losing. [MUSIC] This doesn’t mean that recovered memory cannot exist, but rather, that it remains unproven. >> A hypothesis rather than a fact. [MUSIC] Elizabeth Loftus has suddenly changed the way we think about memory, but her research leaves a big question and answer. Because if memories really are as promiscuous as she suggests, I’m willing to wander off with anyone who’ll tell her the good story, then how can you trust them. And if we can’t trust our own memories, then what can we trust?
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