You are lying naked on a metal table, your legs strapped into restraints. You can see luminescent alien beings with big, froglike eyes as they move about in the darkness. They begin to cut into your body, and you are afraid they might cut out your heart....
That description comes from a study of people who claim to be alien abductees, which was conducted at Harvard University and published in the journal Psychological Science. The transcript was distilled from a recorded interview with an “abductee” and was then played back to him while researchers measured signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Listening to his own story triggered physiological responses as pronounced as those seen in combat veterans. Similar physiological responses were measured in nine other abductees in the study subjects.
The halls of Harvard nestled amid the 19th-century clapboard houses and cobbled streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, seem an unlikely place to take extraterrestrials seriously. But the study was part of a six-year probe by Harvard psychologist Richard McNally and his colleagues into the minds of apparently sane people who believe they have memories of long-repressed events, including sexual abuse, alien abduction, and past lives. The study was an attempt to learn if humans can create memories unwittingly, memories so strong they may cause the debilitating symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
McNally thinks people can and do make up powerful memories. These false memories can take on a life of their own with profound legal, political, and social consequences. If juries find plaintiffs’ recovered memories credible, people go to jail. About 15 years ago, a wave of cases involving recovered memories of sexual abuse tore families apart, led to lurid court trials, and spawned a branch of therapy devoted to recovered memories. While many of those accusations were later discredited, the idea persists that recovered memories are widespread and commonplace.
McNally’s research suggests that all memories—even false ones—are more than just accessories of experience. Memory is experience, he says, a neurohormonal event that cascades through the brain and, when accompanied by powerful emotions, is burned into synapses. And he wonders how and why the human brain does this.
