The Memory Illusion

by Dr Julia Shaw

  Similar assertions about enhancement of learning during sleep were tested almost two decades later in 2014, utilising new knowledge gained from neuroscience and sleep research, by a team spearheaded by Maren Cordi from the University of Zurich in Switzerland.21 The team wired up 16 adult volunteers to electrodes attached to devices that measured several physiological responses. They used EEG to measure brain activity, electromyography (EMG) to measure muscular activity, and electrooculography (EOG) to measure eye movements. Together these would give a strong indication of whether the participants were actually asleep, and whether they were experiencing deep sleep or paradoxical sleep.

  Sessions started at 9pm; after being hooked up to the equipment participants were left to sleep from 10.30pm until about 2am. They were then woken and presented with a learning task that involved remembering the location of 15 pairs of cards displaying animals and everyday objects (similar to the card games sometimes known as ‘memory’ or ‘concentration’). This learning task was paired with exposure to a particular smell. Then the participants were asked to go back to sleep, and when the physiological measures indicated they had entered paradoxical sleep, they were either exposed to the same smell as during the task or to no smell. Finally, after being awoken again, the subjects were tested on their memory of the word pairs in a room with no smells. The idea was that being exposed to the smell would reactivate the memory of the task and thus reinforce it.

  So what did Cordi and her team find? Nothing that would support the hypothesis that we can learn, or even reinforce, new complex information while we sleep – they found no improvement in memory if participants were re-exposed to smells during paradoxical sleep.

  Can we actually learn new complex information, or significantly reinforce memories, while we sleep, as the subliminal learning advocates suggest? The answer is a definitive no. There is no evidence that we can learn words or facts, or benefit from any sort of personality-pumping propaganda, while we sleep – not even when information is delivered in the convenient form of an iPhone app. As Madalina Sucala and her research team reported in 2013, ‘technology has raced ahead of the supporting science’. The only people who get rich from ‘sleep your way to success’ subliminal learning recordings are the people selling them.

  But are there other ways of influencing the non-attending mind? The psycho-phone advocates were attempting to extrapolate and widely distribute access to a basic form of hypnosis. Perhaps going to sleep and then being hypnotised by an audio recording as a sort of afterthought is simply insufficient. Perhaps if such techniques are instead administered by a professional, starting when we are in a waking state, they could help us reap the kind of benefits sleep-learning products are striving for, maybe even letting us dig into the hidden vaults of our memories.

  Hypnosis

  ‘It’s not a thing.’ That is my standard response.

  When my students, friends or family want to talk about hypnosis, I generally brush them off. Hypnosis is not a thing, because I know it isn’t. I am arrogantly confident about the answer; dismissive, like the kind of person you would hate to have at a dinner party.

  Yet my mom remains convinced she was hypnotised once, going onstage a sceptic and returning a convert. She is hardly alone in this – there are hypnotists who make their entire living from lavish demonstrations in which they are able to make people go as stiff as a board or take off their clothes. There are also hypnotists who claim to be able to use their skills beneficially in psychotherapeutic or medical contexts. A friend of mine who is a medical doctor insists that hypnosis is effective for pain reduction and can be used in lieu of anaesthesia. He insists that it works with as much vehemence as I insist that it doesn’t exist.

  More than a few people seem to strongly believe that hypnosis can help our memories, too. According to a 2014 review article by Guiliana Mazzoni of the University of Hull and colleagues,22 one of the most persistent beliefs regarding hypnosis is that it can help us transcend our regular mnemonic abilities, enhancing our ability to remember new information and perhaps even allowing us to reach into our past to uncover buried memories

  This sentiment is echoed by some very recent survey studies. In 2011, for example, a study by psychological scientists Dan Simons and Chris Chabris surveyed 1,500 adults in the US. They intentionally tried to sample as representatively as possible, to get a real feel for what the broader American population believes. Of those they surveyed, 55 per cent claimed that memory can be enhanced through hypnosis. In another study in 2014, also in the US, Lawrence Patihis and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine found that 44 per cent of university students believed that ‘hypnosis can accurately retrieve memories that previously were not known to the person’. So perhaps I am being too harsh. All of these converts, with their strong beliefs and compelling stories of the power of hypnosis, might be onto something.

  We can do a quick review of the academic literature and we find hits on a surprising number of research articles on the topic of hypnosis and memory. But not all research is created equal; the quality of these studies must also be considered. We cannot draw firm conclusions from weak research. But it seems the hypnosis researchers are aware of this as well – there is a set of guidelines for hypnosis research laid out by scientists Peter Sheehan and Campbell Perry, the earliest version dating back to 1976.23 It states that ‘no behaviour following hypnotic induction can be attributed to hypnosis unless the investigator first knows that the response in question is not likely to occur outside of hypnosis in the normal waking state’. In other words, we need to make sure that the effects we see from hypnosis are due to the technique itself, and cannot be due to influences that happen in normal everyday life. If your friend quite readily dances like a chicken if you ask him to when he is awake, then chicken-dancing is not going to convince scientists that your friend has been hypnotised.

  Are we now ready to confront a slew of randomised control studies – often considered the holy grail of academic research – which vehemently disagree with some of our views about hypnosis? Most notably there are a number of recent meta-analyses demonstrating that hypnosis is effective for analgesic, painkilling, effects. It has support from medical researchers for use in minimising pain during surgery where no anaesthetic can be applied,24 it can provide long-term symptom relief for some sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS),25 and it can help people with fibromyalgia.26 Even our friend smoking cessation makes an appearance, with researchers claiming that hypnosis can help you quit. However, research demonstrating the usefulness of hypnosis for helping to form new memories, or uncover old ones, remains curiously absent from the search results.

  What it leaves me wondering is whether the debate I have with my mom and others is more semantic than I initially thought. This thing that at least some people call hypnosis does seem to be able to elicit significant results in some situations. It makes me wonder whether perhaps some people are using the word more loosely than I am, or in a different way.

  We often refer to hypnosis as it was traditionally conceived. We think of it as an altered state of consciousness that can only be induced by a hypnotist; a special procedure that is somehow conceptually and empirically different from other non-hypnotic procedures; a procedure that is sometimes said to allow the participant to remember things they otherwise would not, sometimes even from their early childhood. I associate hypnosis with buzzwords such as ‘trance’, ‘reconditioning’ and ‘unconscious barriers’. But perhaps this is my personal misconception, and not the definition that modern hypnotherapists themselves use.

  Pretend for a second that you need to come up with a good definition of hypnosis. How do you begin? In 2011 there was a meeting of two of the major organisations of hypnotists in the UK – the British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnosis (BSMDH) and the British Society of Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis (BSECH) – that addressed exactly this question. It appears that I am not alone in thinking that the definition of hypnosis may need some c
larification. According to the report that came out of this meeting, spearheaded by Irving Kirsch: ‘The unanimous consensus was that conventional definitions of hypnosis and hypnotisability are logically inconsistent and that at least one of them needed to be changed.’ Logically inconsistent?

  To me, this inconsistency is just another reason why the concept of hypnosis is problematic. The report concluded that hypnosis is defined by suggestion to enter a hypnotic state. But it seems that the character trait of suggestibility, in this case known as hypnotisability, is the prerequisite to being hypnotised. It’s a circular argument that makes it impossible to argue whether hypnosis makes people respond to suggestion, or whether suggestibility makes people respond to hypnosis. People who are hypnotisable, the report goes on to explain, are highly likely to follow suggestions made by another person regardless of whether or not they are actually ‘hypnotised’. This is problematic as it takes us back to your chicken-dancing friend, who may indeed dance like a chicken regardless, making it impossible to study hypnosis independently.

  Be you a clinical or dental hypnotist, when key definitions in your discipline not only clash, but actually contradict one another, you know you have a problem. Unfortunately the meeting failed to reach a consensus on the issue, so for the time being the contradictions remain, and formal definitions remain largely elusive. But this problem needs more than lip service. Definitions matter.

  Not me

  The thing is, even if we accept the existence of hypnosis in some vaguely defined sense, it turns out that many people cannot be hypnotised at all. Hypnosis researcher and professor of medicine David Spiegel from Stanford University27 says that while the exact number of unhypnotisables is unknown, he estimates that it is about 25 per cent of us. Studies on hypnosis obviously need hypnotisable participants. Those beneficial effects reported in studies are evident only in samples that are hypnotisable, and many may even be limited to the highly hypnotisable, an even smaller number of people. Thus, if researchers say that 80 per cent of their sample enjoyed a particular benefit, it may sound great, but it may only apply to few of us in the real world.

  If you are wondering whether you are one of the hypnotisables, look no further than the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales. The Stanford Scales consist of a number of assessment activities to be undertaken under the guidance of a test administrator. As an example, a participant may be asked to hold out their arm. The test administrator may then suggest to them that they are holding a very heavy weight, telling them to picture the weight, to feel it pulling their arm down. If the person’s arm starts to sink under the suggestion, the person is said to have passed that part of the test, indicating that they may be hypnotisable.

  While this is how the test interprets such a response, other psychologists may just call this type of reaction a form of suggestibility or compliance, as both of these have to do with a person’s willingness to follow instructions. Or, as the hypnosis researcher Graham Wagstaff28 put it, ‘there is a strong case for arguing that much of the special status that has been awarded to hypnosis may have resulted from a failure to consider the power of social pressures and the normal capacities of ordinary human beings’. He argues, as do many psychological scientists, that the positive effects we sometimes see when people have supposedly been hypnotised may result from regular phenomena such as relaxation, imagination and expectation.

  So we’re back to semantics. To those who simply wish to use hypnosis as a term intended to encompass those more regular psychological phenomena Wagstaff mentions, most notably the power of suggestion, I say go ahead. Telling people to close their eyes and listen to instructions, to picture wonderful things, or not to feel pain, may very well have some kind of beneficial result. Relaxing, soothing, positive, empowering – it all sounds great to me. It may even help us focus our attention on different parts of the brain, different perceptions, and different stimuli. It sounds like something that should – and seemingly does – have real, scientific, effects, but we can acknowledge this without having to resort to the mumbo jumbo of a hypnosis-specific state of consciousness.

  People who are hypnotised are paying attention to what the hypnotist is saying; they are choosing to be hypnotised and to engage in the resulting behaviour. That means their attention is still engaged and functioning, allowing the possibility of behavioural and psychological consequences from stimuli they encounter. And while there is good scientific evidence that hypnotism can help with some medical and psychological issues, there is no such evidence to suggest that it has any kind of beneficial effect on memory. The notion that it does most probably stems from popular media – there are hundreds of books, TV shows and movies that portray hypnosis as a key that can allow access to hidden memories. Unfortunately, this is completely untrue.

  If an event is suggested to a person who has been successfully placed into a susceptible state of the sort sometimes referred to as hypnotic, they are far more likely to imagine and generate false memories of impossible occurrences. In a study as far back as 1962, for example, medical scientist Theodore Barber29 from Boston University found that many of those to whom it is suggested that they are being regressed to their early childhood display childlike behaviour and claim they relive their memories. When examined further, however, the responses given by these ‘regressed’ participants does not match what children would actually do, say, feel or perceive. Barber argues that it may feel to patients as if they are reliving their early years, but in actuality such experiences are creative re-enactments rather than rediscovered memories. Similarly, if used during therapy, suggestive and probing questions combined with hypnosis have the potential to generate complex and vivid false memories of trauma, something we will explore further in Chapter 9.

  So, particularly as it applies to the world of memory science, my sentiment remains: Hypnosis? It’s not a thing.

  Brainwashed

  In my own research I implant rich false memories of complex emotional events. I convince people they did things which they absolutely did not do, and they go on to tell me about those things in incredible detail. When I tell people about my work, they invariably ask me whether I use hypnosis to achieve this. After I explain to them that you do not need any such technique, they almost always follow up with, ‘So how does your brainwashing work, then?’

  To me, brainwashing sounds like something an evil villain in a Batman comic would do. The term was popularised in the 1950s, as populations awoke out of the devastating repercussions of two world wars and tried to explain what had happened; how it was that normal people could commit acts of such monstrous brutality as the Holocaust. In 1957 psychiatrist William Sargant30 defined brainwashing as ‘methods influencing the brain which are open to many agencies, some obviously good and some obviously very evil indeed … beliefs, whether good or bad, false or true, can be forcibly implanted in the human brain … people can be switched to arbitrary beliefs, altogether opposed to those previously held’.

  In my personal conception of the term, brainwashing refers to changing a person’s ideology or epistemology – changing their ideas about the world and the knowledge they believe they have of it. In certain kinds of false memory research, including my own, scientists have been able to have a small temporary effect on a person’s view of the world – perhaps, for example, making them think they have committed a crime when they have not. I’ll go into exactly how that can be achieved in Chapter 7. This arguably has the hallmarks of a brainwashing process but we take steps to ensure that no permanent skewing of a person’s world view can occur by placing a great deal of emphasis on the debriefing. During the debriefing we ensure that the experimental process is rigorously explained, and ensure that any false beliefs that a participant may have acquired as a result of their experiences in the study are debunked. For me at least the term brainwashing also implies intent – the desire to reprogram people’s fundamental ideologies – and this is absolutely not something my colleagues and I wish to do; we are simply intereste
d in discovering how memory works.

  While I would still be hesitant to call them ‘brainwashing’, preferring the more universal term ‘influence’, there certainly seem to be many examples of changing a person’s thinking or behaviour without their knowledge in our everyday environments. Propaganda, the selective presentation of information to influence our views and behaviour, is all around us: buy this soft drink, it will make you happy and surrounded by friends; vote for this politician, they will make everything better; join the army, it will be exciting and fun. Certainly this kind of media is almost ubiquitous and has the potential to influence our everyday decisions. But in almost all of these situations, while we may not realise that this propaganda is changing our opinions, we do usually realise that we are seeing it. This has been referred to as supraliminal advertising, ads that we actively perceive. We know that we see billboards on the street and commercials on TV, and that things in stores are organised to grab our attention and money– we aren’t idiots. These may have the same effects as brainwashing, but without being concealed and secret.

  But, maybe there are things that we do not see that still influence us, subliminal messages. In 2012, researcher Dobromir Rahnev and his colleagues from Columbia University31 argued that ‘despite the general notion that attention and awareness are necessary for higher cognitive processing, recent studies are beginning to demonstrate that in some cases, complex behaviours can be influenced without conscious attention’. In support of this, a small study published in 2009 by Simon van Gaal and his team from the University of Amsterdam found that subliminal stop signs influenced participants completing a simple computer task that involved discriminating between two coloured circles. The stop signs in this experiment were presented so quickly, for 16.7 milliseconds, that participants did not report seeing them at all. In spite of this, the signs slowed down participant button-pressing in response to the coloured circles they were supposed to identify.