How effectively can hypnosis retrieve lost memories?

It is much more likely to create false memories than to “recover” lost ones.

Yes, that’s my concern @ragingloli. Thank you.

It is unlikely to “create” anything, as @ragingloli suggests. Hypnotherapy can be an effective tool to retrieve information that is forgotten, unless that memory has been deeply put away for traumatic reasons, in order to protect the psyche.

Regression is said to help with taking you back to an earlier stage in your life and uncover childhood memories, but you need to be careful with such things, and you need to be ready within yourself to face whatever even if they are false recollections, not something you go into lightly.

Hypnosis puts you in a state of suggestibility. This makes it really easy for the hypnotist to implant ideas into your head, intentionally or not.
That is where all those alien abduction “memories” come from.

That presupposes a whole lot that isn’t necessarily a part of the process, @ragingloli. There are many reputable practitioners that don’t “implant” ideas.

Experts on memory estimate what all of our memories are fiction. Some are based on a true story, but the more we know about memory, the less we are likely to believe them. I will try to get you some links later.

Hypnosis had not been a proposed way of making our memories reflect reality more closely. As @ragingloli states, if anything, it introduces yet another pollutant.

:-) Well I hadn’t considered I could end up with alien abduction in my past @ragingloli. Would give me interesting stuff to talk about. I should say, apart from the death of my mother, I’m not aware of any reason for me to repress memories.

@hominid, yes, I’ve read research about how memories are constructed, filed and then amended by the brain.

@Earthbound_Misfit – It’s not a matter of having a reason to repress memories or not. The whole concept of repressed memories is at best controversial. According to the APA….

“at this point it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one.”

Add that to the fact that “non-repressed” memories are so fallible, and the quest for repressed memories appears to be akin to ghost hunting.

I’m a big believer hypnosis. A medical student once hypnotized me into believing I had superior strength in one of my arms and I was able to support the weight of another boy hanging from it for a short time.I don’t know about its ability to retrieve forgotten memories, but having gone through my experience, I Don’t doubt its likelihood.

I agree with @hominid, in that it’s probably not worth pursuing, because you will never know whether you have accessed or created a memory.

For what it’s worth, there’s a good Radiolab episode about Memory and Forgetting.

See above.
It’s all sort of bullshit.
If a memory is “lost”, how do you know it is real when it is “found”?
You don’t know.
And you can’t know what you don’t know.

Do you know why you have limited memories? An acquaintance from forty years ago had a traumatic and abusive childhood.

Tread carefully. She could not remember anything before her eleventh birthday. Her mom and dad divorced about that time.

I don’t. My mother died when I was quite young and I think that’s probably it. She would have been sick for quite a while so that would have had to affect the home environment. I don’t have any feelings or recollections of abuse beyond that. I had a fraught relationship with my step mother but I remember that!