Some years ago, several countries saw people who had been sentenced to prison terms being released after being identified by witnesses who, believe it or not, swore and perjured themselves to have seen the crime committed and who had done it. In these cases, the common ingredient was the following: the witnesses had identified the guilty parties after having gone through hypnosis sessions.

Although hypnosis is a tool that has been shown to be effective in treating certain psychological and health problems, its poor practice has caused some people to suffer greatly for years. The reason for this has to do with a myth: that a hypnotist can make the patient’s memories “free”, that facts that seemed to be forgotten are revealed. How do we know that this does not correspond to reality? You can read it below.

Memories and the Unconscious

The functioning of memory is one of the most fascinating fields of research in psychology and the cognitive sciences in general, but unfortunately there are still many myths about it. For example, the belief that by means of hypnosis it is possible to rescue from oblivion memories that had been “blocked” by the unconscious is still very popular, and no less erroneous, although with certain nuances.

First of all, it should be clear that for a long time the practice of hypnosis has been linked to Freudian psychoanalysis and its ideas about the unconscious (although its practice predates the appearance of the latter). From this perspective, there are certain components of the mind that conspire so that, whatever happens, certain memories are “erased” from consciousness and cannot return to it, since their content is so disturbing or anxious that they could generate crises.

Thus, the task of the hypnotists would be to open certain vulnerabilities in the psychological barrier that covers the unconscious part of the mind to make those repressed memories come to the surface of consciousness and can be reformulated.

This approach to the unconscious side of the human mind fails in many ways, and one of the main reasons for discarding it is that, in practice, it does not explain anything. Any hypothesis about the kind of memories a person is repressing is validated by its denial; there is simply no way to prove that it is false and that it does not reflect what is really happening.

If someone denies very strongly having witnessed a beating, for example, any significant nuance in their denial can be interpreted as evidence that there is an internal struggle in their psyche to continue blocking out the memories linked to that experience.

On the other hand, it is known that most people who have suffered traumatic moments such as the effects of a natural disaster or the Holocaust remember what happened, there is nothing similar to a phenomenon of repression. How then can it be explained that some people believe they have recovered parts of their memory after being hypnotized? The explanation for this has to do with the unconscious mind, but not with the psychoanalytic conception of it .

Memory is a dynamic thing

As in any area of science, the best explanations for a phenomenon are those which, being as simple as possible, best explain what is observed in nature; this is what is known as the principle of parsimony.For example, when a locust plague appears, an explanation based on recent weather changes will be parsimonious, while one that attributes the event to a curse will not. In the first case, there are few outstanding questions, while in the second case, only one question is resolved and an infinite number of explanatory gaps are created.

As for the memories that are apparently thrown into consciousness, the simplest explanation is that they are basically made up, as psychologist Elizabeth Loftus discovered several decades ago. But invented in an involuntary and unconscious way . There is an explanation as to how and why this happens.

The currently most accepted theory of how memory works does not describe this cognitive capacity as a process of what would technically be information storage, but as something very different: leaving a mark on the way in which neurons in certain parts of the brain “learn” to activate themselves in a coordinated way.

If, when you first see a cat, a network of nerve cells is activated, then when that memory is evoked a good deal of those cells will be activated again, but not all of them, and not in exactly the same way, because the state of the nervous system at that time will not be the same as when you saw the cat: other experiences will have left their imprints on the brain as well, and all of them will partly overlap each other. To these changes we must add the biological evolution of the brain as it matures over time.

Thus, even if we do nothing, our memories never remain the same , even if it seems so to us. They change slightly over time because no piece of information remains intact in the brain, any memory is affected by what happens to us in the present. And, just as memories usually change, it is also possible to generate false memories without realizing it, by mixing evaluations about the past with those of the present. In the case of hypnosis, the tool to achieve this effect is suggestion.

How to “release” memories through hypnosis

Let’s look at an example of the generation of false memories.

In this tradition of psychoanalytic influence of hypnosis it is very common to resort to something called “regression” which is, more or less, the process of reliving past experiences in a very intense way, as if one were travelling back in time to observe again what happened at certain moments. The aim of provoking a regression is usually to experience again certain moments of childhood in which the characteristic thought structures of adulthood have not yet been established.

In practice, the role of the person versed in hypnosis is to create a climate in which the patient is able to believe in the authenticity of all experiences that can be seen as regression in progress. If, in the context of hypnosis sessions, someone talks about the possibility that the problem is due to certain types of traumatic experiences that have been “blocked”, it is very likely that the simple act of imagining an experience similar to that one will be mistaken for a memory.

Once this has happened, it is very easy for more and more details to spontaneously appear about this supposed experience that is “emerging”. As this happens, the molecular traces that this experience leaves in the brain (and which will make it possible for a similar version of this memory to be evoked later) are fixed in the neuronal tissue not as moments of fantasy, but as if they were memories. The result is a person convinced that what he has seen, heard and touched is a real representation of what happened to him long ago.

Caution in sessions with hypnotist

This type of practice is capable of resulting in cases that in themselves are proof against the power of hypnosis to bring up forgotten memories, such as patients who think they remember what happened to them in their zygote stage when their nervous system had not yet appeared, or people who remember facts that are known not to have happened.

These are problems that arise from not knowing how to manage the suggestive power of this therapeutic resource and that, with what we know about the flexibility of memory, can be prevented.