On wednesdays I've been going to a group after school that is working on re doing "Snowball", this camp-like program revolving around health, etc. Last wednesday we had a hypnotist come to our group sort of as a fun thing and to teach us some valuble lessons.
One thing she taught us was EFT. EFT stands for "Emotional Freedom Technique". This is a type of therapy hypnosis where you have a huge problem in your life and you can calm yourself down about it, allowing your emotions to center around other things, not just that (hence the freedom part). She went through the process with us and I was following until she came to one point. The purpose of this one point was to "search" for a memory. Here she had us roll our eyes around and up and down, left and right. Her reasoning was that somewhere in your brain you have a memory that you need to bring up (and looking around you are "looking" for this memory )in order to complete the technique.
As she was talking about this I automatically referred back to the many conversations we've had in class about "memory is a construction". We talked over and over again about how you don't just have a file with your memory on it. You re-create it everytime you think it. So I sat there conflicted. Here I was supposedly "looking" for my memory, just "pulling it out of my brain" yet I re-create it everytime? This women (I sadly can not remember her name) was hypnotist of the year. She has used this technique for very serious problems and swears by it. Seeing all the progress she'd made I believe her. But I still wonder about the idea of memory.
Memory in the eyes of the hypnotist is treated as something to look back on. To help you forget, help you problem solve. By here in school we thought of it as a contruction. Are these two ideas completely different Is it possible it can be both??
That's interesting, I've heard some stuff about snowball-- what is it basically?
ReplyDeleteI think the hypnotist might have been talking about is the conscious mind vs. subconscious mind's way of processing information. There's a limited amount of information your brain can process at one time, hence why your brain filters for important information (for example, looking at a computer screen, you are not focusing on the wall behind the computer, but it is within your vision). Meanwhile, the part of your brain out of your conscious control is taking information in about your surroundings that are more detailed and analyzing it without your knowledge (for example, you probably don't feel your heartbeat or your feet in your shoes unless you pay attention to those areas).
Similarly, if something happens to someone that's a traumatic experience, one can only process so much of it at one time without overloading(you should google 'perceptual defenses'), leading you to internalize it or remove it from your immediate focus, sort of "storing" it away (the unconscious mind is where memories are "stored"). Your unconscious mind would hold on to that information still and it may affect your behavior/thoughts for years and years-- people with PTSD, for example, often have dreams or experience a reliving of their memories. I think the benefit of doing hypnosis might be that a patient is searching for the memory that's been "stored" and if it is recalled, the patient can find out why they behave some of the ways they do and relax, and hypnosis can be used to reconstruct peoples' feelings about a traumatic memory rather than getting rid of the memory.
So yes, hypnotists want to reconstruct memories or reconstruct peoples' associations with memories, while at the same time it is a method of problem solving. Memory may be a construction, but it is still powerful-- in the radio lab, for example, the mice flinched to certain noises because they associated it with the electric shock. Humans do similar things.
Jeez this is long, I'm sorry.
I'm leaning toward the idea that memory is a construction. I don't think it is mentally possible to remember every single detail of one single memory, so sometimes I think we make up things to the memory but because we actually thought that's what happened, so that's why the first time you tell the story can be completely different than the last time you tell the story. But I can see where the hypnotist may be right where "looking for a memory" can also solve difficult problems in your life. I think you can generally remember the main idea of the memory, and if it was terribly affecting your life, then bringing it back up to the surface, and forcing you to confront it can be very beneficial to a person. But I don't know, the whole memory concept is very difficult to understand.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both the above comments. There is a part of a memory that does not change; the basic idea will either never change or only change very slowly. The already existing nueral pathways in the brain are not destroyed by remembering (recreating the memory), rather, they are supplemented.
ReplyDeleteWhile the hypnotist's idea of a memory is probably something more solid and unchanging than what we discussed in class, the two ideas are not contradictory. Most memories, especially traumatic ones, will retain the original 'feeling', the pain associated with it will not go away. So bringing it up, even if the current memory is not an accurate protrayal of the event, and facing it can still have healing qualities.
Snowball is a bit confusing but it's basically a program that kids can sign up for that promotes healthy habits but in a fun summer-camp-type way.
ReplyDeleteMMarin, you make a good point about the subconscious versus conscious mind. The hypnotist made us really focus on the fact that it was the subconscious mind indeed, and how different it is. What she's doing is what both you and Zoe are saying, (bringing up the memory for confrontation and to help problem solve), but what I was confused on was her "searching for the memory" as if we could just pull a nice pristine memory out. But I can see now that that isn't maybe exactly what she's doing, but what we're doing subconsciously, hypothetically.
Seeing them as two different ideas and not contradicting ones is also helpful, thank you shirley.