completed+posted sunday, december 4, 2005: alien abduction?

needless to say, i'm lame for not being more frequently forthcoming, but i promise i have an excuse. however, i also think you should have better things to read than another lengthy explanation of others making my life more difficult than it need be, so i suggest that it sufficeth to say that i woulda been here if i coulda. life happens.
on to more interesting things:
i did a segment for the radio station this past week on a book by some harvard chick who researched false/recovered memory by interviewing people who believe they've been abducted by aliens.
now, i always figured believing in aliens and alien abductions is on par with believing in any deity and its respective miracles- the latter just managed to gain more popularity than the former over time, and the former is not necessarily an indicator of insanity, any more than the latter is.
so this chick figures the best way to study false/recovered memories is to interview people with recovered memories she's positive are false, because she tried once before with women with recovered memories of child abuse and had problems for all the obvious reasons, nobody could ever say for sure their recovered memories were false.
so she took out a newspaper ad asking if people had been abducted, got the slew of responses, weeded out the clinical crazies and recent immigrants who'd misunderstood and thought she was asking for responses from those taken by american border authorities (no lie), and interviewed the rest.
she doesn't believe in alien abductions because if there are aliens smart enough to get to earth, even if they'd been abducting humans, logically, they should be smart enough to not still need to take humans for the same sort of biological and/or sexual experiments all these years after the first reports. surely any species smart enough to successfully abduct members of another planet's species for experimentation would've figured out all they needed to know by now.
of course, that assumes that it's always the same aliens, as opposed to assuming that if there's another sentient species on another planet, there's prob'ly many other sentient species on many other planets, in varying stages of technological development.
anyway. she explains the abductees' suspicions/symptoms/memories with sleep paralysis, the tendency to create false memories, and the unreliability of recovered memories.
it's good to know about the sleep paralysis thing in general, because it'll happen to at least 20% of us at least once, and since nobody warns us, it freaks people the fuck out- sleep paralysis happens because the body goes into a natural semi-paralysis when it sleeps, to prevent sleepwalking and acting out dreams and shit, but sometimes the brain starts to wake up before the natural paralysis recedes, so that you think you're completely awake but somehow can't move, and may experience full-body electric currents, audio and visual hallucinations including the sense of a malign presence, and still have dream remnants playing with your mind's reality. it's fucked up, and i think it'd help to know this may happen.
she tested for the tendency to create false memories by giving subjects a list of words with an implicit theme (e.g. bitter, sour, sugar) to look over, then asking them to recall the list and checking who was most likely to also "recall" words associated with the unrepresented theme (e.g. sweet). anybody likely to create a false memory of reading unrepresented words is more likely to create false memory outside of the lab. she basically found that people who believed they'd been abducted by aliens were prone to creating false memories.
she points out that memories recovered via hypnosis (or guided imagery, etc.) are unreliable because they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, that those situations put the patient into a very suggestive state and possibly entail leading questions with the support of an authoritative figure, and that it's been proven that even detailed imagining of an event that didn't happen is enough to confuse the imaginer into thinking it may have happened to them.
but the most interesting she told me during the interview (i'm down with the aliens, and she was a little too dismissive for me, especially for someone who didn't identify herself as an atheist when i brought up the religion-alien similarities) was about recovered "repressed" memories, which she says don't exist.
i said to her that if she believed that false memories could be created, it should follow that real memories could be repressed. but she said that there's no proof that human beings have the ability/mechanism to repress memories. research shows that traumatic experiences are remembered in excruciating detail, even when the victim would rather forget, and there's no proof that the human brain is capable of repressing a memory. so i asked her about the fact that i once did something (that shall remain undisclosed to protect the innocent) that i knew nobody could ever know i did, to avoid trouble for others- so i told myself it never happened, pretended it never happened, and convinced myself enough that when somebody i never lie to asked me about it years later, i instantly denied, without realising i was lying. hours later, i had a flicker in the back of my brain that made me replay the conversation, and as soon i did, i realised i'd lied unintentionally. harvard chick says that's not a "repressed" memory, but a suppressed one- the difference being that "repressed memory" implies a sub- or unconscious reaction, whereas suppression is voluntary. i decided to forget.
just thought i'd throw that out there...
more later. this'll be a better week.
walk good.