Interesting article - mind fiction

[kokyu]

I was just wondering if anyone had any opinion on this article that came up in the New Scientist, especially the comments on hypnosis (quoted below) which came up near the end?

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19225720.100-mind-fiction-why-your-brain-tells-tall-tales.html


Another controversial forensic technique is hypnosis. Its reliability was tested experimentally in the 1980s by psychologist Jane Dywan of Brock University in Ontario, Canada, at a time when hypnosis was increasingly being used, with little opposition, to "refresh" eyewitness memory. She showed people pictures and then tested their recall over the following days. After a week, she hypnotised the same people and asked them again what they could remember. They all "recalled" more, but almost all the newly volunteered information was wrong.
Dywan says that hypnosis increases the focus of our attention and so increases the vividness and the ease with which information comes to mind. This may give us the sense of confident familiarity for false memories that we would normally only get with true ones. Hypnosis seems to interfere with our ability to judge what is real and what is not. Combine this confidence with increased recall, and you have set up a very dangerous situation, she says.

[Merlin]

Hypnosis, in and of itself, does not interfere with recall.
However, our minds do filter data with or without hypnosis.

[Don]

Hypnotists have known of this phenomenon for many decades. It's called "confabulation."

That's why people who specialize in using hypnosis to help people remember past events (forensic hypnotists) study a long time and get lots of training so they don't get memories that are confabulations. In fact, poorly training (or untrained in hypnosis!) doctors, nurses, psychologists, and psychiatrists are far more likely to get confabulations, and such people were responsible for the "Satanic Panic" of the last quarter of the 20th century and are responsible for ruining the lives of thousands of people.

[kokyu]

So by the sounds of it, although the article implied that the study showed hypnosis interfered with accurate recall, it could well have been flawed.

That is in the sense the hypnotist who conducted the study may not have been properly trained to eliminate the possiblity of confabulation.

[Don]

The information in the article concerning the exact protocols of the research was so skimpy it was impossible to say.

Is it possible that the hypnotist was not trained in forensic hypnosis? Yes.

Is it possible the researcher was just showing what might happen if someone didn't know what they were doing? Yes.

Is it possible the research was paid for by psychologists who don't like hypnotherapists because hypnotherapy achieves the same results in much shorter time and they're embarrassed about it? Yes.

There's just not enough information to accurately respond.

[Poodle]

There is a very particular way of doing recall and one has to be very, very careful in asking questions so as to not lead. You must remember that our subconscious minds are also the creative part of our minds. For example: You could not ask: Did the subject wear a hat? as that would be leading the subconscious to possibly create a hat when indeed there was none. The questions are very general and very vague to let the subconscious recall the events as they happened. Otherwise, it is thrown out of Court.

Guess I'll have to call your signature line to the attention of the Moderators -- Black Ops indeed! Pood

[kokyu]

Thanks to all for your thoughts so far. As always very helpful :)