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Thread: Does Hypnotic Regression work?

  1. #1
    Administrator CatInASuit's avatar
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    Default Does Hypnotic Regression work?

    I'm not talking about hypnotism in general or regressing to past lives.

    Can hypnotism be used to help people remember past events in their lives or is it just the power of suggestion?

    Have any studies been done to show if does or does not work?
    In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.

  2. #2
    The Queen Zuul's avatar
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    It depends. This and this were the two articles that immediately jumped out at me when I went looking and they're both about hypnotically implanted false memories.

    Memory exists as a sort of internal narrative. We don't always remember events themselves, but we remember how we've described them to ourselves. It's really easy to mess with someone's memory, even without taking hypnosis into it.

    There was one experiment where a group of subjects who had all been to Disney Land were shown pictures incorporating Bugs Bunny in with the other costumed characters at the park. When they were asked about it later, the majority of them were convinced that they had seen Bugs Bunny there. Of course they didn't, since the character is Warner Brothers property, but now their memories of Disney Land had been altered to include him.

    If you can do that to someone who isn't in a highly-suggestible state, just imagine how much easier it is in the midst of hypnosis.

    However, there are therapists who claim to have had success with using hypnosis for memory recovery. I wouldn't trust claims about recovered memories of abuse or anything like that, but more concrete things like, "where did I leave my car keys?" are easy to test and in those instances hypnosis can apparently help sharpen recall.

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    Oliphaunt The Original An Gadaí's avatar
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    IIRC the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria of the 1980's and early 1990's was partly fueled by the presumption that hypnotic regression was entirely accurate. This is not to say that it completely doesn't work but it is a sign of what can go wrong when people put their full faith in what they recall under such conditions.

  4. #4
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    Age regression and enhanced memory are two different things, although they are sometimes combined.

    There have been tests that show that people regressed to their age as children do not have the same handwriting, and do make the same perceptual errors that adults do, while children do not. (i.e. Most optical illusions are learned)

    Memory enhancement, while shown to work on Mythbusters, has problems where you will take fragments of a memory and convert them into full ones. And/or the hypnotist subtly (and usually inadvertently) suggests things that didn't happen (which is what happened in the Satanic Ritual abuse story above.) What is dangerous about this is that hypnotized person often leaves the session nearly 100% sure that it really happened.

    So it might be a little more accurate than regular memory. But it's much easier to influence. It is disliked in court for this very reason.

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