The forgetting brain, the Loftus-refuting mind

Elizabeth Loftus, blithely forgetting she said what she did.

Having an infinite, or practically so, memory capacity seems fantastic, no?

No, in reality.

For the few people who have something like that, it's as much curse as blessing.

How does your brain prioritize anything, first of all, if it doesn't have the capacity to forget — and to judge what is forgettable?

Second, how does your brain easily recall anything if it remembers everything?

That's part of why new neuroscience research on the power of forgetting is so interesting.

One main point is that forgetting comes in a variety of forms, some more active than others. Hold on to that thought.

Main subpoint 1 below that is that some of this forgetting, one variety of it, is "intrinsic." In other words, a base-level "Forgetting 101."

And a subpoint within that is the importance of dopamine in forgetting, at least in the old laboratory staple, the fruit fly. This is another refutation of simplistic takes on dopamine as "the pleasure molecule" or "the addiction neurotransmitter."

Nope, no such thing, going beyond that brain cells have multiple dopamine receptors, all shaped a bit differently.

A second subpoint within that is that scientists are learning by experimentation (with non-human animals only, no "Clockwork Orange," but hold on to that thought, too) to manipulate forgetting. In fact, I wrote about related research with rats back in 2013. Hold on to that, too. We're going to come to the second half of the header in a bit.

The second big point? Many forgotten memories are NOT "100 percent forgotten." At the least, the brain changes caused by an initially created memory aren't totally lost, not even a week or more later, not even with such a short-lived critter as a 1-year-lifespan sea slug.

I'm sure that, in years and decades ahead, we'll learn more about what is behind the unchanged.

Main subpoint?? This refutes some of Elizabeth Loftus' simplistic ideas on how the mind works. If we don't totally forget, but do often semi-totally forget, and emotions are involved with that, that shows her quasi-Freudian strawman of "repression," which she demolishes as quasi-Freudian after setting it up as a strawman, is all wrong. (In fact, a keyword search shows I previously blogged about his issue at the time another story was written about it. But, that's OK. This piece above is longer, and the second half of this header? The issues, and the person behind them, always need addressing.)

Speaking of "Clockwork Orange" and of blogging in 2013, I wondered back then if Loftus had actually mainlined on the movie.

One thing I noted there was the use of the word "repressed." Whether she consciously uses it in a quasi-Freudian sense or not, and whether she consciously does this as an attempt at strawmanning, she often comes off that way.

(Update, April 12, 2021: The LA Times says of this time, it's more than 300 cases, that it's $600 per billable hour. Update, June 7, 2022: Per this Hustle story on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp dual defamation suit and the price of expert witnesses, this may be WAY low. In a murder case in 2017 in Couer d'Alene, Idaho, not exactly Los Angeles, and criminal not civil, one psychologist got $210K in expert witness fees. Hustle reminds us that expert witness billable hours include prep hours and depositions, not just trial time. The piece says that psychiatrists bill $575 per hour on trial time on average and psychologists [we'll put Loftus there] $531 per hour,  So, on the really high side, Loftus may be an expert witness millionaire. )

 

No wonder she loses many cases as an expert witness.

No matter how much she's paid.

And, since Freud has been dead for almost 80 years now, not the 70 I noted then, and Freudianism, except among certain elites outside psychiatry as much as inside it, has been dead for almost 60 years now, not 50, again, it's time for Loftus to move on, whether she's been doing this consciously or not.

Mice offer more partial refudiation of Elizabeth Loftus

Elizabeth Loftus, selectively focused memory psychologist.

That would be memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who makes good money to peddle a seemingly Freudian-based version of "false memory syndrome," and not always correctly or scientifically.

Research on lab rats has already indicated that memory can be more malleable than Loftus presents.

The latest research? It's on mice, not rats. And, it shows that mice can be made to recover seemingly forgotten memories. This, too, is important. And deserves several paragraphs extracted:

Having encountered patients who couldn’t remember their early years, Sigmund Freud first coined the term infantile amnesia in the late 19th century. Since then, scientists have tried to understand why humans, nonhuman primates, and rodents alike experience this phenomenon. Whether these lost memories were due to improper storage or inefficient recollection was unknown. 

 In this latest study, Paul Frankland, a psychologist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and his colleagues sought to establish which of these possibilities was operating in mice. … 

 Frankland and his colleagues were able to switch on these memory-encoding neurons at 15, 30, and 90 days after the initial foot shock. At every stage up to young adulthood, the mice recalled their infant memories and froze when put back in the box. 

 Frankland’s team has previously shown that one reason why infantile memories are lost is because the adult brain adds new neurons to the hippocampus that replace the old memory-encoding neurons. However, this study shows that young adult mice tend to retain traces of their earliest memories.  … 

 “The findings of later accessibility of early memories are reminiscent (no pun intended) of those we see with human children,” writes Patricia Bauer, a psychologist at Emory University who was not involved in this research, in an email to The Scientist. Older children who are given cues can be prompted to remember events from their infancy. Unlike mice, episodic memories in humans are “not only hippocampally dependent, but also are personally relevant.” Still, she says, “we must be cautious about generalizing the present findings” to humans.

First, the third paragraph.

Such memories are retrievable. Period. And, relevant to Loftus and her paid expert witness testimony in courts, these were fear-based memories.

Second, the fourth paragraph. To the degree Loftus was working with scientific information 20 years ago, the idea that humans regularly grew new neurons, let alone in specialized brain areas such as the hippocampus, was not broadly accepted. We have that as a different model of brain development now.

Third, the last paragraph. It appears this applies to adults.

And, on counseling. The difference between cue-provision and coaching can be a fine one at times. The likes of Loftus would probably like to obliterate it to uphold their stances.

Also, kind of sadly, Texas civil liberties and criminal justice blogger Grits for Breakfast thinks Loftus is the bee's knees.

Update, March 1, 2020: And, although Loftus is referenced in this Nautilus piece? Overall, it would seem to partially refute her. Pre-5-year-old memories may be scrambled or hidden, and thus not totally reliable. But, they're not totally lost, and not totally unreliable, either. It too involves research in part from Paul Frankland.

Let's do more to stop April being National Child Abuse Prevention Month

Note: The following is adapted from a newspaper column.

This is April, which means it’s National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

I didn’t do so last year, because I was new to my current newspaper setting, but it’s been a tradition of mine to write one or more columns every month about this issue, primarily about child sexual abuse.

First, I know that this is an uncomfortable topic. And rightly so. Nobody likes to think of the most vulnerable members of our society being abused like this before they’ve had a chance to grow up. But, only by addressing this issue in reality can we hope to translate the pain of that discomfort into reality.

Second, there are myths about child sexual abuse as well as realities. And part of addressing this issue, and reducing it (unfortunately, we will surely never eliminate it) is looking at the realities not the myths.

Some realities are hard to come by. Many victims don’t talk about, let alone legally report, their abuse even after entering adulthood. The pain, as well as the shame, of child sexual abuse, are both reasons why.

That word “shame” is as good a starting point as any for talking about some of the realities.

The shame is there in part because counselors tell us that child victims often believe they did something to cause the abuse, even though that’s not true. It’s often the only way a younger child, especially, can try to make sense of the inexplicable.

Sadly, the shame is also often there for another reason. Exact percentages are pretty much impossible to come by, but “stranger danger” child sexual assaults are a clear minority. Again, without exact percentages being available, perpetrators are normally known to their victims, and often known well, whether as trusted friends of the family, or as family members. A lot of child sexual abuse, because of this, happens at the residence of the victim or the perpetrator.

Girls are more often the victim of child sexual abuse than boys, but boys are a significant minority of victims. And, while men make up the vast majority of perpetrators, women are also sometimes abusers.

Child sexual abuse can include exhibitionism and display of pornography to victims, as well as more graphic physical acts. In some cases, one child may have severe reactions to one incident of abuse than another child does to multiple instances.

Children that come from broken homes or other unstable situations are generally more vulnerable to the effects of child sexual abuse, as are younger children. And, because poverty rates run higher, and stable family lives run lower, among minorities, that means that sexual abuse runs higher there, in general, along with its effects.

And, those effects are great. Childhood and adult depression, other mental health problems, drug addiction and alcoholism, teen pregnancy, children running away from home or dropping out of school can all hurt, even shatter, lives.

Children aren’t perfect, and can tell fibs, or have imaginary friends, even at younger ages.

But, when a child shows signs of depression or anxiety, let alone when a child has sexual-related comments or actions inappropriate to his or her age, that child’s behavior should be looked at with total seriousness. Even more so, when a child makes a comment about a certain adult’s behavior, the child should be listened to in all seriousness.

Doing everything we can to address social situations that may influence the likelihood of child sexual abuse — and physical and emotional abuse — is something else we need to treat with all due seriousness, too.

That includes income raises, and jobs with a better sense of security. In turn, that's yet another reason to address income inequality issues in America.

Beyond that, this includes doing what we can as a society to promote better parenting.

When we fail to prevent the abuse, it means doing a better job of counseling victims, whether as children or those who come forward much later as adults.

It also includes walking a fine line on the issue of old memories. Memories may not be “repressed,” as some researchers almost stereotype some claims, and as some counselors believe, and try to “induce” them to come back to life. That's especially true because not all allegedly false memories are totally false; rather, a fair amount are conflated or blended from two or more true memories.

However, sexual abuse victims can, and do, “detach” from their memories. I don’t care what exact terminology one wants to use, cases where this does happen clearly exist. And, any adult or child who does claim such memories without undue prompting from a counselor should be taken seriously.

Did Elizabeth Loftus watch Clockwork Orange too much?

Elizabeth Loftus/Photo via Nature

Note: With the appearance of a second new article about Loftus, and other matters, this article has been extensively overhauled.

Note 2: With some new-to-me 2021 information about another memory claim by Loftus, there's an addendum at bottom, along with a boatload of biographical background about "where she comes from," which is itself headshaking, and may lead me to a separate new blog post, if nothing else. And there's also more on "follow the money," edited off of this new information, higher up in the post.

Nature, the British science giant, has a good profile a few years ago on the good, and not-so-good, of Elizabeth Loftus.

I won't bother going into the good so much. But, I certainly don't dismiss it. We've seen a lot of follow-up on the fallibility of eyewitness memory. We have seen how false memories can be implanted. And we've seen how that can be tied to weird movements like claims of ritual satanic abuse, an explosion in multiple personality diagnoses and more.

The story's good in that it shows Loftus isn't always right, either. And she's not. And, in fact, Pat Fitzgerald eviscerated her in the Scooter Libby trial. She has shed light on the fallibility of memory, but she's overstated things, too.

Part of the problem is that she seems to overstate her claims, in essence, believing that however memories become "repressed," even if another word gets used, they aren't "recovered." Per the Nature piece:

Ross Cheit, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, started the Recovered Memory Project in 1995 to document and respond to what he says has been a one-sided debate. There are now more than 100 corroborated cases of recovered memory on his website (http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory), he says, including some on which Loftus had consulted.

“Loftus is often on the losing side, and she's sometimes wrong in a spectacular way,” Cheit says. Her testimonies, he adds, can be psychologically damaging for the victims. “If you're telling someone you think their memories are false, when they have corroborating evidence that they were abused, that's corrosive.”

That said, part of the problem is linguistic: Just what does "repressed" mean in terms of memory. If I don't think about a traumatic memory for years, why? Isn't it at least possible, Ms. Loftus, that some "subpersonality," even if not a conscious decision, undertook a subconscious decision to bury that memory deeper?

Loftus does not believe that Cheit's site corroborates recovered memories. “He might have some cases of people who didn't think about their abuse for some time and were reminded of it, but as for actual repression, no,” she says. “I cringe at the idea of hurting genuine victims, but when an innocent person is accused, we have a whole new set of victims, and I'm more horrified by an innocent person getting convicted than by a guilty person being acquitted.”

To be honest, I'm not sure how much she "cringes." In the courtroom, while making some notable contributions, she's also just pushed the ball a bit, just to further her ideas, whether or not they're on a totally realistic foundation or not.

And, she makes good money for doing what she does.

So, let's follow the money!  

Considering that she's been an expert witness in more than 100 cases now, according to the Nature piece's author, it has to be "something" indeed. At $1,000 a pop (and, no that's not an outrageous estimate), that's $100,000. Indeed, there is this:

She is often compensated for her expert-witness work, earning up to US$500 per hour, she says.

That would be $1,000 after two hours, and that's assuming her "billable hours" are only her actual court time. I'm probably underestimating by a factor of three, so, to be liberal, she might have made $300,000 off being an expert witness. That's not counting non-witness legal consulting. That's not counting speaking at conferences.

On the high side, Loftus may have made as much as $500,000 as "the go-to person" for debunking, or "debunking," repressed memory, or "repressed memory." Now, I'll freely admit that's on the high side. But, it's not out of the real of possibility entirely. Let's say that a convoluted case like Weinstein's involves her working with a jury coach from the defense team and other things. That plus her research, etc.? About 16 hours and change at $600 a pop? That's 20 grand right there. Per case. $300K for her last 100. Well, the Times says it was $14K for the Weinstein case. Anyway, it shows I was in the right ballpark. Knock some cases down a bit, and some a fair amount, even. $10K x 300 cases? Yes, this is seven-plus years after my original post, but she's a conservative $300K. Conservative.

(Update, April 12, 2021: The LA Times says of this time, it's more than 300 cases, that it's $600 per billable hour. Update, June 7, 2022: Per this Hustle story on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp dual defamation suit and the price of expert witnesses, this may be WAY low. In a murder case in 2017 in Couer d'Alene, Idaho, not exactly Los Angeles, and criminal not civil, one psychologist got $210K in expert witness fees. Hustle reminds us that expert witness billable hours include prep hours and depositions, not just trial time. The piece says that psychiatrists bill $575 per hour on trial time on average and psychologists [we'll put Loftus there] $531 per hour,  So, on the really high side, Loftus may be an expert witness millionaire. )
 

Now, I'm not saying that's her primary motivation, but a motivation? Sure. Especially if it fuels sales of her 26 books and her TED talks. 

In other words, she's a "brand."

Loftus hadn't always seemed so "ardent" on this issue, or quite so black and white, at least before she wrote "The Myth of Repressed Memory," with the title signifying her stance.

So, why? Well, as I've wondered, and others wonder too, coming back to that Scooter Libby trial, maybe it's in part "follow the money." And, Nature notes that she's not been shy about this.

Maybe it's also, in part, "follow the glory." Or, "follow the (alleged) martyrdom." All valid rhetorical thoughts.

That's why I wonder how much she "cringes." Stephen Ceci, a co-author with her of one report, says:

There are ways in which traumatic memories of real events can be recalled after being buried for years, he adds, but without hard evidence, it is impossible to distinguish false memories from real ones in court.

So, again, it's a gray area that she treats as black-and-white. And, if she really did cringe that much, wouldn't she, at one of her conferences, tell what she knows, or believes she has discovered, about how to tell when memories are real before cases go to court?

Let's pick up the trail of Ceci, from a new Guardian piece that a friend on Facebook shared:

"Think of some embarrassing event when you were a teenager," he says. "You're not going to dwell on it, but you can recollect it if someone reminds you. Likewise, people can have horrible experiences and not think about them for decades, but are capable of retrieving them when questioned." Another is a rare and poorly understood psychological condition called dissociative amnesia.

It is therefore perfectly plausible that memories of childhood sexual abuse could be buried for years and then recalled, and that motivated forgetting, dissociative amnesia, or some other mechanism could account for some of the allegations in cases that Loftus has testified in. But because of the way in which the entire debate has been framed around the issue of "repression" and "recovery," these nuances have been largely ignored.

Loftus is quoted there as agreeing that this issue is "a little slippery." However, she goes on, as elsewhere, to indicate that the burden should only fall on the other side, and not at all o hers, in the "slippery" gray area at center. And she's not alone. See below.

And, she's hardened her position with the passage of years. In 1997, per this Scientific American article, while she came down hard on therapists "leading on" clients, she even then didn't 100 percent reject the idea out of hand, and she addressed the same issue Ceci does. I note:

(A)lthough experimental work on the creation of false memories may raise doubt about the validity of long-buried memories, such as repeated trauma, it in no way disproves them. Without corroboration, there is little that can be done to help even the most experienced evaluator to differentiate true memories from ones that were suggestively planted.

That said, she was a fair ways down the road then. After all, she had written "The Myth of Repressed Memory" before this. Some time between then and Scooter Libby trial, her position finished hardening. And, her paychecks got bigger.

(I add here that some of her expert witness tesetimony, and talks at both legal and psychological conferences, is about memory accuracy issues unrelated to recovered memories.)

She certainly doesn't seem like a "humanist hero," even if some skeptics want to make her one.

Fortunately, not all skeptics have bought the push to put her on an unskeptical pedestal. Skeptical friend David Gluck has a good piece here at Skeptic Friends Network. Also approaching the issue in part from a linguistic and semantic angle, he notes that "recovered" memories aren't necessarily "repressed," and by Loftus' somewhat circular reasoning, obviously can't be "repressed."

He sums up:

We were right to blow the whistle loudly when recovered memory therapy was doing its damage. We are still right in asking where memories of alien abduction and satanic abuse or memories recovered in some New Age quack therapy are coming from. We must be reasonably cautious when regarding memories recovered in or out of therapy sessions. But we may have lost our way when we assert that every claim to a recovered memory is necessarily false because some claims to a recovered memory are obviously false. We may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Indeed.

And all of this gets at another issue with Loftus. Her thinking about consciousness is kind of black-and-white, as I noted above.. She seems to have little room for a "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness proposed by a Dan Dennett, or anything even close to it.

If anything, Loftus' theories of consciousness, or her theories of what types of ideas about consciousness she thinks she needs to fight, look awfully Freudian. Well, Freud died 70 years ago, and Freudianism's been dead 50. Sorry. Time to move on.

When I first wrote this blog post, I wasn't  quite ready to say that she was strawmanning on some of her ideas, but, now I am. I'm also realizing, that, per a FB discussion, she's got plenty of pedestal-builders who are ardent supporters.

That includes assuming that only psychological research, and not readings in (non-pop) neuroscience, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind, even, are "original." Or implying, as I have inferred, that challenging her research on this issue (let along wanting to "toss out" some of it, is the same as wanting to do that to all research on malleability of memory issues done just by psychologists.

But, let me get back to the strawmanning issue.

As I read more of the Scientific American piece ... and her objections to people like Cheit, I think it's more than just semantics over the words "repressed" or "repression."

Rather, I think it's goalpost-shifting, strawmanning, or opening the old Overton Window, whichever you prefer. (That's in addition to her overly black-and-white stance on this issue.)

Having just read his article essentially denying the existence of "scientism," I'm suddenly, and strongly, reminded, of Steve Pinker.

Indeed, Ms. A., I've read original research on issues of memory by psychologists, notably Daniel Wegner, if we are going to trot out who's read what. (Update: Wegner's "The Illusion of Conscious Will" is reviewed by me here.) And, from what I've read of Loftus' own writing, and about her, I'm not aware that she's tried to tie her research to issues of consciousness, free will or lack thereof, and related issues. Wegner, on the other hand, from his point of view, combining psychology and philosophy, without going specifically into issues of false memories or recovered memories, has addressed how his ideas on consciousness and lack of conscious free will relate to memory.

Also (and not to puff neuroscience too much) she's not a neuroscientist, nor is she a philosopher of mind, so she's not researching issues in theory of mind that would have bearing on issues like this.

So, just how strong a scientist is she?

All this is more reason yet to be skeptical of some of her stronger claims in this area. As is new research on "false" memories, showing that some are not "de novo false," but rather, a conflation of two true memories into one new one.

Indeed, as Pat Fitzgerald showed in grilling her as a potential expert witness during the Scooter Libby trial, she's not even that much of a scientist in general.

But when Fitzgerald got his chance to cross-examine Loftus about her findings, he had her stuttering to explain her own writings and backpedaling from her earlier assertions. Citing several of her publications, footnotes and the work of her peers, Fitzgerald got Loftus to acknowledge that the methodology she had used at times in her long academic career was not that scientific, that her conclusions about memory were conflicting, and that she had exaggerated a figure and a statement from her survey of D.C. jurors that favored the defense. 

I think the "exaggerated" is key. I think she's exaggerated other aspects of her work. And I think that, not political disagreements, is why she resigned from the American Psychological Association. And, in fact, under APA bylaws, she should not have been allowed to resign. Its bylaws specify that you can't do that while you're the subject of a formal complaint.

The new Scientific American piece has her saying that she didn't know of the complaints when she resigned. To put it charitably, I don't believe her.

And, that leads to a discussion of ...

Loftus' ethical problems

And, beyond that, skeptics should be very worried about this (as should civil libertarians and others). From the Nature piece:

Meanwhile, her research has shifted into new controversial waters. Taking on board the lesson that memories can be manufactured, she has been investigating the possibility of using those memories to modify behaviour^. “We've shown that you can plant a memory of getting sick eating particular foods as a child,” she says, “and we can get people thinking they got sick drinking vodka, so they don't want to drink as much of it later on.”

There is no evidence that any of this will successfully transfer from the lab to the real world. Even if it does, it would violate therapists' code of conduct, and could have unforeseen consequences.

“Lying to children is a slippery slope that makes me uncomfortable,” says Judy Illes, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Can't we alter their behaviour in a positive way, instead of using subterfuge?” But Loftus dismisses the concerns, suggesting that even if therapists cannot do it, parents might want to. “Parents lie to their kids all the time, about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Would you rather have an unhealthy kid, or one with a few false memories?”

Well, skeptics, and especially atheists, whether self-identified as skeptics or not, would jump all over those last two sentences and rightfully so.

Beyond that, within parenting, this brings up issues of trust, breaking of trust, and possible trauma from that. Besides, re beliefs in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or a god, for that matter, who defines what beliefs are healthy or not?

And, when parents get divorced and they have different ideas on child raising, this could be a nightmare. Think Michael Newdow and his daughter and the Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit.

What next? Loftus telling parents to read "Clockwork Orange"? I'm not saying that she's advocating parents use the Ludovico technique to implant false memories or otherwise modify memory, but she's not telling people, in papers linked off the Nature story, what techniques they should and shouldn't use.

I also find it weird that, given her crusade against therapists and counselors for often leading clients into exaggerating memories or worse, Loftus would still tout memory modification.

Also, Ms. A., per discussion on Facebook, I find it "interesting" that you never engaged the part of the Nature piece in my last pull quote, other than to call it "one comment."

That's "too bad," at least. Because, in a second Skeptic Friends Network piece, Loftus has other ethical problems.

Attempts have been made to show personality types that might lend themselves to false memory syndrome. Loftus thinks these women are “weak.”

That's an emotional term, not a psychologically scientific one like "pliable."

But, it's actually worse. The "weak" comes from this passage in a study paper of hers:

“Today, the accused are often men of power and success… The witch accusations… were most often leveled by men, but today the accusations are predominantly leveled by women. Today’s phenomenon is more than anything a movement of the weak against the strong.”

Well, now, we've gone from psychology to sociological presumptions.

Meanwhile, the use of the phrase "false memory" rather than "repressed memory," like Loftus' own use of the word "weak," could itself be seen as prejudicial and biased.

And per comment above about "who she reminded me of," beyond Pinker? Things like this sound Randian. And, noooo, that's not a reference to James Randi.

Psychologist Kenneth Pope, in a piece linked at the first SFN site, adds to these "presumptions" by Loftus:

Making clear her reference by quoting from Hoffer's (1951/1989) The True Believer, Loftus claims that there are two sides to the recovered memory controversy and those on the other side (i.e., those who disagree with her) are True Believers. Noting that she identifies herself as a skeptic, Loftus writes: "On one side are the 'True Believers,'. . . . On the other side are the 'Skeptics,'. . ." (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, p. 31).  

Wow. Pope himself has no problem labeling this as an "ad hominem."

If a Gnu Atheist pulled one like that, the likes of a Barbara Drescher would surely be all over him or her. The idea that Loftus wouldn't entertain that people can recover some memories makes me think she's moved beyond "skepticism" on this one.

The above are larger ethical issues, ones in which any intelligent layperson, not a professional scientist, if given a blinded "Name X" and a description of actions, would likely raise some eyebrows.

That leads to the question of:

Does Loftus also have scientific ethics issues?

Meanwhile, Pope speculates various ways in which people can detach from memories, for want of a better word:

As noted earlier, such reported memories may be conceptualized as the result of repression, dissociation, implanting, motivated forgetting, directed forgetting, amnesia, betrayal trauma, retroactive inhibition, suggestibility, self-induced hypnotic trance states, personality disorder, thought suppression, retrieval inhibition, cognitive gating, biological protective processes, a clinical syndrome, and so on. 

That's not to say he claims he knows these mechanisms; note the use of the word "may." It is to say that he, like many others, sees the memory issue, and not just "repressed" memories, but memory formation, conflation and loss in general, as much more nuanced than Loftus does.

There's also this, which combines ethical issues with self-contradiction ones:

Loftus says, in The Myth of Repressed Memory (P. 141) “We are questioning the memories commonly referred to as ‘repressed’…” On the same page she makes clear which kind of memories “repressed” ones are. “Because the controversy over repression has become so heated and contentious, clinicians and child protection advocates often use synonyms such as ‘lost,’ ‘buried,’ or ‘dissociated’ to describe repressed memories.” OK, well let’s just take “repressed,” for now. In a study on “Remembering and Repressing” conducted at Lincoln Medical Health Center Substance Abuse Division, Loftus and colleagues, surveyed 105 women for sexual abuse. (It’s interesting that Loftus, an expert in memory, would purposefully chose a sample that might have memory problems due to substance abuse. But that aside…) Loftus and her colleagues found that 57 indicated some form of childhood sexual abuse. When surveying these women for “persistence of memory” 52 women participated in the survey. Of the 52 women that they surveyed they found that 12% claimed to remember parts of the childhood sexual abuse, but not all. And 19% claimed that they forgot the abuse for a time and then later recalled it. Loftus’ study seems to show 31% of the women that she surveyed had partially or totally forgotten their abuse and recalled memories (although, somewhat deteriorated) later (Loftus, Polonsky, Fullilove, 1994)

Ahh, David's too polite to call this cherry-picking, but it is.

Also per the second SFN piece, there's this:

Jennifer Freyd is the author of Betrayal Abuse. She graduated from high school in three years, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, got her doctorate at Stanford and was a research psychologist and tenured professor at University of Oregon when she was interviewed by The Oregonian regarding her accusations of childhood sexual abuse by her father. She said she always remembered things her father had done, “continual sexual talk, sitting in a robe so his genitals showed.” After a therapy session she remembered abuse. Jennifer Freyd does not believe her therapist planted her memories. “I’d try to retrieve more memories and asked her to help me. And we never got anywhere. I asked her to hypnotize me — and I couldn’t get hypnotized.” (Mitchell, 1993)

Jennifer Freyd confronted her parents. She did not attempt to sue or press charges. Fourteen months later, Peter and Pamela Freyd formed the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

If Loftus really were a skeptic, she'd recognize the Freyd parents had "good" reason to create the foundation. So would other psychologists who call themselves skeptics. Indeed, their daughter says that when they went to the press with their side of the story (even though she had taken no civil or criminal action), her parents distorted a lot of stuff.

"Goes to motive, your honor," as to why the Freyds formed the group.

For more questions about her professional / research ethics, here's a decent starting point, though the web publisher appears to have some axes to grind. That's why I said "decent" and not "great." The key takeaways are that some Loftus research has itself uncovered forgotten memories; she fails to allow for dissociation; and, related to that, the biggie, that the "implanted" memory of being lost in a mall can in now way duplicate the trauma of rape or child abuse survivors.

From ethics and research quality issues, we go to another one.

What can we logically deduce from Loftus' findings?

Next, let's ask ... "Just what has Loftus actually 'proved,' or 'disproved'?"

Not a lot, necessarily, according to critics.

Just because the likes of Loftus have done studies about the implantation of false memories, that doesn't itself mean that true memories can't be "lost," "repressed," or whatever language one prefers. That's a logical non sequitur.

Also, Loftus has not at all proven that "lost" memories can never be recovered. She's not explicitly stated that that is exactly her current stance, but it seems close to that. And, it also seems the stance of her most ardent supporters, and the "movement" in general. Such folks seems to (conveniently?) overlook that issues of proof cut both ways in a field like this with a lot of gray area.

But, per the Nature story, admitting to shades of gray in this field would undercut her expert witness, consulting, and speaking fees.

Ms. A. accuses me of conflating stuff in discussion about this. The SFN posts aren't mine, first of all. That said, the intertwining of Loftus' own beliefs (yes, beliefs, not research, by this point) with the work of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation seems clear enough.

And, as for conflation? You... uh, "misled" when you accused me of conflating Loftus and her work with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. In the past, at least, she was on the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the foundation. Oh, and I'm at the point now that I believe you knew that when you made your statement.

Meanwhile, consulting for a group like this run by someone without professional psychological training? Whoa.

Yes, I know that it has other psychologists on its advisory board, like Ulric Neisser. However, they're not the ones speaking at conferences, serving as legal consultants and expert witnesses, etc.

Hey, you don't like it? Blame Loftus or the foundation. It appears you recognize the problems the foundation has, Ms. A., and are trying to distance Loftus from it. Won't work.

I'll admit that I've not read a lot of Loftus, but I'd read a decent amount of her, as well as about her. That said, I've read enough more in the last day to make me even more skeptical than before.

And, to be honest, I've read enough that I wouldn't trust her.

Ms. A. invited a friend to comment, too.

That other person, while a Facebook friend of mine, isn't perfect. I'll stipulate that in one discussion, she misstated what a p-value is, when we were discussing p-value issues in "social" vs. "hard" sciences.

Speaking of all of that, I also note that Loftus has appeared in the past at The Amazing Meeting, a top skeptical convention hosted by the James Randi Educational Foundation. Dots get connected.

That's OK. I've said what I wanted to, and needed to. If neither of you wants to be more skeptical of someone like this, duly noted. We'll see how nuanced some of the ongoing responses are. While not totally holding my breath, for a variety of reasons. I think I'm already being told, indirectly, that faults in not creating "clear communication" is all on the end of Gluck and me.

The defense of Loftus can be ardent, especially when professionals feel their particular approach to memory issues, or their connections within a community, are under purview. Tribalism happens even among social sciences who know what the phenomenon is, after all. (Both people mentioned above have been to at least one psychology conference where Loftus was a presenter.)

And, as I get involved with more discussion on this issue, it appears that, among a certain number of Professional Skeptics(TM) or wannabes that, despite Gluck's warning, that ardent defense, even pedestal-raising, is so ingrained that ... it can't even be rationally discussed.

That's why, in the most recent times I've dropped in a blog post my statement that "Atheism is no guarantor of morality, or of common sense," I've added "skepticism" in there too.

And, Professional Skeptics(TM) have a definite history on this. James Randi overstating what he accomplished when he and Carlos first became an act. Randi quite likely not being fully honest about what he knew about "Carlos's" identity theft and when. Paul Kurtz and others refusing to face reality on Al Seckel for a decade or more. Michael Shermer, Penn & Teller, Brian Dunning and others willfully conflating libertarianism and skepticism, and having many followers sign off on this. And, on this issue, Drescher, Ahironen and others representing what's surely just the tip of an iceberg.

Should we "follow the money" again?

Loftus is certainly in line to pick up even more legal consulting feeds, as well as expert witness fees, should all the further changes she wants to see in courtroom practice go into place. (I'm not saying these ideas are wrong, but that, presenting herself as the "go-to person," she stands to benefit financially. As well as on the walk of fame.)

There's also money to be made on her idea of getting parents to deliberately play around with their kids' memories.

"Child raising and discipline, scientifically proven by the World's No. 1 expert on memory!""

How would that sound in introducing her to a talk radio program or a TV gab show?

Or as a blurb on a new book? Or at a conference where she promised to teach people inside secret skills of memory manipulation?

Now, I'm not saying she would do any of that. I am, though, saying, she easily could.

And, not just to parents and other private individuals. Combine her ideas with the likes of a Cass Sunstein's "Push" ideas, and yikes.

Why is this important?

First, per Ceci's talk about motivated forgetting, we do have particular, if still primarily anecdotal, evidence, about a clear possible mechanism.

It wouldn't fall under "motivated forgetting" in a narrow sense, perhaps, but there's solid anecdotal evidence that drug or alcohol abuse is a tool in "dissociating" from strongly painful memories, and later ending of it can be a tool in regaining them. I'm not sure how much Loftus, or other deniers of recovered memories have looked at that one at all. Sociological surveys, after all, point out the much higher than average rate of substance abuse by "survivors."

Her defenders will dismiss this as anecdotal, but I know people who have recovered memories — traumatic memories — from well in their pasts, without therapeutic intervention that would be considered manipulative by any reasonable person. In fact, in some cases, it was without any initial therapeutic or counseling intervention at all.

And, one of those people was me.

I'm not providing details, but one of those people was me. That's why it's important, to me, as well as for issues of skepticism and ethics.

And, given the fact that Loftus' ardent defenders, not just the two above, but others, don't seem to want to engage the middle ground, there's reason I'm not providing details.

I don't trust them. And, yes, if they see this, that too is their problem, not mine.

==

Idiot, or liar?

Update, March 1, 2020: And, although Loftus is referenced in this Nautilus piece? Overall, it would seem to partially refute her. Pre-5-year-old memories may be scrambled or hidden, and thus not totally reliable. But, they're not totally lost, and not totally unreliable, either.

And, per Note 2, bigger update, April 12, 2021:

I recently read an Aeon piece, linked in a new Patreon piece by friend Massimo Pigliucci, that led me to this.

The Aeon author, a professor of philosophy, claims that no self exists, and cites Hume and the Buddha in support. Massimo says Hume is wrong (I agree) and that, according to people he’s asked, Gautama may be being misinterpreted. (I don’t necessarily agree; after all, Buddhism has splits over things like whether a personal soul exists or not, and I think Theravada trends “no” on that, which is why karma is more offensive than original sin.) 

But, I digress. 

About halfway in, Steven Hales says:

The memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus compares our memories to Wikipedia: we can go back and edit the entries, but so can other people.

Is Elizabeth Loftus more an idiot about the workings of memory, despite her professional pedigree, or more a liar for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in "expert witness" legal fees she has probably made, when she claims that?

My money is on "liar."

I've long held her in fairly low regard; this only increases it. (And, given that I think she's lying for grift, I put the "no follow" tag on her Ted Talk.)

On Twitter, I asked Massimo "where do you go" with something like that? And, he noted back: "You go nowhere."

Re Hume, at my philosophy blog, I referred a bit to his "bundle theory" and related matters. I didn't even mention genetics. Yes, I know genetic mental development, genetic neuroscience, whatever, has been oversold. But, genetics — AND epigenetics — indicate we do have heritable, and somewhat fixed, tendencies on things like conscientiousness, anxiety, introversion "vs" extraversion, etc.

Back to Loftus. This is another case of where the analogy of "mind as computer" goes astray. We don't "edit" memories. To the degree our memories do change, or are yes, in some cases, manipulated, they're still not "edited." Our minds aren't a computer program, and her thinking this way only increases my belief that yeah, maybe she HAS guzzled too much Clockwork Orange Kool-Aid.

Update 3, also April 12: I forgot that I had Tweeted about Loftus being an "expert witness" in Harvey Weinstein's trial. As with Scooter Libby's, she failed. The New Yorker looks at the background of this, and hints at what's been noted more elsewhere: further damage (too bad) to Loftus' reputation. The LA Times piece I referenced above was from the trial; fortunately, the reporter got other psychologists to talk, in general, and gave us this:

Some psychologists who study memory and trauma disagree with how Loftus frames her award-winning research in court, contending that her testimony in cases of alleged sexual misconduct tends to be one-sided and incomplete and has the potential to mislead jurors.

A review of research finds that 2% to 10% of sexual assault accusations are false, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Many such studies are unreliable, though, because of inconsistencies in methods used to evaluate data. 

All memories are fragmentary and incomplete and tend to fade over time. A trauma victim may incorrectly recall certain details of the event, such as the color of an attacker’s eyes, or how he or she got home that night. 

But people almost always remember the general outline, or the “gist” of what happened, according to psychologists.

Boom. The story goes on to show that the assistant DA who was part of the prosecution gave Loftus some grilling.

Next, per this Guardian piece, and following on the LAT piece which notes that only ONCE has Loftus worked for the prosecution, yes, memory fades over time. But, it fades not just for accusers but for your "porr widdle victims" like you claim Harvey Weinstein was.

Per the New Yorker piece, her own ex and her one brother are both, at a minimum, less than enamored of her decisions on who to help defend. Given the way she "bracketed" her framing of her mom's apparent suicide, and other things, I guess I'm not surprised. And, per her own psychological research on how the use of particular words can affect the interpretation of events, she has a big blind spot toward herself. The blind spot appears even more emotional than intellectual, given that she's a "survivor" herself.

No, really and holy shit:

For decades, during cross-examinations, lawyers have accused Loftus, a childless scientist, of being unable to comprehend the pain of victims. “You really don’t know anything about five-year-old children who have been sexually abused, do you?” a prosecutor asked her, in 1985, at the trial of a camp counsellor accused of molesting his campers. 

“Well, yes, I do,” Loftus responded. “I do know something about this subject because I was abused when I was six,” by a babysitter. At that moment, she later wrote, “the memory flew out at me, out of the blackness of the past, hitting me full force.” 

The defense attorney at the trial, Marc Kurzman, recalled a “stunned silence.” He said, “That was supposed to be the big finale of the cross-examination, and it pretty much shut the whole thing down.” 

Some scholars have proposed that Loftus has her own repressed memories. “She has not been able to integrate her own experience into her research,” two literary critics wrote, in 2001. “There is something split off in Loftus,” the psychologist Lauren Slater asserted in her book “Opening Skinner’s Box,” from 2004. “She is the survivor who questions the validity of survivorship. That’s one way out of a bind.”

Per above, and my dialogue with Massimo, where does one go with that?

Well, you go here, if you're a woman who sued Loftus for defamation in claiming that she had false memories (and worse, with no criminal or civil case involving Loftus immediately at hand):

Head-shaking.

Nicole was silent for a few seconds. “You know, I realized something,” she said. A few weeks earlier, she had exchanged e-mails with a woman whose memories of abuse Loftus had cast doubt on at a civil trial. “We kind of realized together that we are survivors of Elizabeth Loftus,” Nicole said. For years, she’d had intrusive thoughts. “I’m not sure if there is a greater sense of ¬outrage than that of having your own memories challenged,” she said. She had felt terror at the idea of seeing Loftus at psychology conferences. Recently, though, “I stopped wanting to hide under a chair every time I thought she might be at a conference and decided, No, I’m going to stand here and let her see me,” she said.

In addition, how Loftus conducted her research, then invaded Nicole's privacy, was highly unethical. Though Loftus, with the emotional severing she seems to have, probably would reject that claim. She's probably also reject the claim of Nicole (now a psychologist herself) that Loftus has engaged in transference, but that sounds pretty insightful.

Bottom line? Elizabeth Loftus sounds pretty sad, and now that I know that, I don't have to pull at threads of her life any more.

False memories, or conflated memories? Let's not totally lean on Loftus

Very interesting. A new story in the New York Times says that false memories have been created in mice.

But, is that exactly true?

What I see from the story is that we should distinguish between a de novo false memory and the conflation of two true memories into a mashed-up false memory, which I argue is actually what happened in the mouse.

And, yes, this is important for understanding how humans understand and create either version of false memory.

Second, while Elizabeth Lofftus has been a pioneer in this field, she's not infallible, folks. Patrick Fitzgerald took her down a notch or two in the Scooter Libby trial.

Fitzgerald got Loftus to acknowledge that the methodology she had used at times in her long academic career was not that scientific, that her conclusions about memory were conflicting, and that she had exaggerated a figure and a statement from her survey of D.C. jurors that favored the defense.

As I blogged about this, the issue of false vs. true memory is more grayscale than either touters of eyewitness veracity OR Loftus types would present.

Indeed, in April, Discover magazine, talking about a similar experiment, uses the phrase "artificial blended memory." And, has some thoughts on what this means:

Old memories become active while we process new information. “You don’t learn something new without incorporating it into old information,” he says. With this new technique, Mayford will explore the basic code of memory, investigating how many neurons are required to store a memory and how cells change as memories are formed. 

It talks about the "malleability" of memory. That's also something to remember, as about no memory is likely either 100 percent true or 100 percent false.

And, that too is important to remember with this new report.

And, back to Loftus.

In the Scooter Libby trial hearing, she was, ironically, both her own best and worst expert witness. More from Fitzgerald's takedown:

When Fitzgerald found a line in one of her books that raised doubts about research she had cited on the stand as proof that Libby needs an expert to educate jurors, Loftus said, "I don't know how I let that line slip by." 

"I'd need to see that again," Loftus said when Fitzgerald cited a line in her book that overstated her research by saying that "most jurors" consider memory to be equivalent to playing a videotape. Her research, however, found that to be true for traumatic events, and even then, only 46 percent of potential jurors thought memory could be similar to a videotape. 

There were several moments when Loftus was completely caught off guard by Fitzgerald, creating some very awkward silences in the courtroom. 

One of those moments came when Loftus insisted that she had never met Fitzgerald. He then reminded her that he had cross-examined her before, when she was an expert defense witness and he was a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in New York. 

The last graf is funny as hell.

The previous three are a bit more serious.

And, if we want to talk about how "repressed" memories aren't real, well, that too needs to be "nuanced."

Memories that have slid into unconsciousness still affect our brains.

(Update, March 1, 2020: And, although Loftus is referenced in this Nautilus piece? Overall, it would seem to partially refute her. Pre-5-year-old memories may be scrambled or hidden, and thus not totally reliable. But, they're not totally lost, and not totally unreliable, either)


So, while the finding with mice is interesting, let's not put it on the wrong pedestal, nor Loftus.

Next, let's remember that a mouse's level of consciousness is far short of a human's, and specific issues, like not having second- or third-level awareness, also have effects.

Memory is malleable, yes, and per people from David Hume to Dan Dennett, it's told in a script. But a script, to the degree it's a novel, is neither true nor false in the sense of nonfiction.

Finally, I very much support the work Loftus did in undercutting ideas about repressed memories that fed into claims of ritual Satanic abuse, a rise in claims of multiple personality disorders, and related concerns. But, let's not overstate things, and claim that memories from the past can't leave telltale signs in the brain.

To analogize from computers, deleting a Word document doesn't delete all the info related to it from your computer, as forensics experts know. Or, to analogize from Photoshop, old memories still leave EXIF tags in the brain.

And, as the lowly planarium shows us, on memory in particular and neuroscience in general, at best we're just in the Bronze Age of understanding.

Now, this all said, I'll confess I have personal reasons, anecdotal yet quite empirical, to say what I do about Loftus overreaching in her efforts.