Embracing the fallibility of human memory
The lesson I take away from the Amy Griffin story
I’ve already missed my goal of writing weekly, but as the saying goes, if you fail — try, try, and try again. So this week I offer up a stream of consciousness about memory, psychedelics, and scientific arrogance.
My starting point is a New York Times longer-read that caught my attention this week and has stayed with me. It is centrally targeted on themes I’ve been mulling over, working through and digesting for a couple years now. The article is about this year’s breakout psychedelic therapy memoir The Tell, by Amy Griffin. I bought the book as soon as it came out, and promptly put it down a little more than one chapter in. Something about the writing style didn’t land for me. I find that it is especially true with memoirs that some writing clicks and some doesn’t — so this one just wasn’t for me. I can’t claim to have read it.
The central storyline of the memoir seems to be this: a woman — Amy Griffin, who happens to be very rich and very well connected — decides to undergo therapy using MDMA, and while under the influence of the “medicine” she remembers sexual assault by a teacher during middle and high school. I’ve been following the psychedelics community closely for the past three years, and my sense is that for the most part, no one wants to publicly acknowledge that this happens, and it maybe happens a fair bit. People remember things while on psychedelics that they had previously, somehow and perhaps inexplicably, put out of their awareness or otherwise forgotten.
In almost all cases, I think we can be confident that the memories are imperfect — that is to say, human memory is likely imperfect far more often than it is perfect, which is why two people can have different recollections of the same event. We all pay attention to different things in life, and neurodiversity is probably the norm, so different elements of life register in our memories differently. An anecdote in the best seller The Body Keeps the Score illustrates this diversity well: van der Kolk tells the story of a couple who were in a car accident together, and not only had different experiential memories of the accident and its aftermath (one’s mind went blank so she felt nothing, while the other remembered how the event felt in excruciating sensory detail), but even their brain scans reflected this difference when later asked to recall the event. This example is about sensory memory, as opposed to narrative memory, but underscores a basic belief I’ve come to embrace in my own life: regardless of how a memory comes to mind, it is best to assume it is an imperfect one.
The diversity and uncertainty around how humans remember our lives is why someone like Rick Doblin would say these psychedelic-recovered memories are often “symbolic” — perhaps someone is remembering an emotional experience, perhaps their mind at the time registered certain details differently than another person would have, perhaps someone is remembering a fantasy or even a dream they had. That doesn’t mean their experience of the memory isn’t true — even if unprovable by documented facts, the experience of remembering something in and of itself can be notable.
A friend of a friend who underwent psychedelic therapy remembered being sexually abused by an uncle when she was two years old. I’ve got to be honest: this memory sounds preposterous to me on its face. Just to begin with, it’s well established by science that we don’t build autobiographical memories until we are roughly four. But I also … just don’t want to believe it could be true: could this now-very-well-to-do woman possibly have been abused by her uncle at such a young age? And never again? I admit that I find it hard to believe. Ultimately though, the reality of this memory is not for me to decide. This other person had this experience, and she has to make sense of what it means in her life in the absence of any validating documentation or evidence. Is it symbolic of how she felt being left alone with her uncle, or are there other ways she can make sense of it? I was told that this woman ultimately decided to embrace it as her whole truth, levied the accusation, and cut off contact with her family as a result. That’s a lot.
Most of us still want to believe there is a singular documented history to match our memories. We want to trust our memory is capable of recording the ultimate truth. Perhaps someday, when AIs ubiquitously record our lives, we will have a fully documented recording of our lives — but it’s not reality today. The NYT article about Amy Griffin illustrates the dilemma we’re all in as a result, at least when it comes to psychedelics. Someone remembers something while in a psychedelic therapy session, and everyone around them questions whether it was a “drug induced hallucination” or a real memory or, worse, something totally made up and fictional. I think there’s a reason most clinicians start from believing their clients — imagine how awful it must feel to be doubted and questioned about something significant that you remember as true. Griffin’s case is particularly public, by her choosing, and carries all the contours of privilege and wealth that a billionaire’s memoir could be expected to, combined with the horror of being sexually victimized by a person the public entrusted with her safety.
After reading the article, I wondered if Griffin really is actually a billionaire so I started typing her name into Google — the first auto-suggest search query was “is Amy Griffin telling the truth.” The NYT clearly wondered the same thing. The story is apparently so astonishing that the Old Gray Lady did a full investigation into the facts surrounding it — the publication was almost certainly motivated by the psychedelic angle. Here is someone who is financially associated with the movement to legalize psychedelic therapy, did she embellish a story to persuade the public to join the cause?
But I think this reflection of our society should stop us all cold: are we all so quick to mistrust the experience of another person? This question, of course, has application well beyond psychedelics, and is one I’ll revisit in future posts almost certainly. My take on this particular story is quite simple: of course Griffin is telling the truth — the truth of what she has experienced. She had the experience of remembering things that felt real, felt true, felt like hers, and that appears to have been a disquieting experience for her. Whether those things actually happened as she remembers, I can’t know, and I would postulate that (based on what’s reported in the article) no one can.
Where we all go wrong is trying to assign blame and responsibility for these experiences of memory when we don’t — and can’t — know what actually happened years and years later. This is the case with Griffin’s book, which apparently maligned the reputation of a well loved teacher in his hometown without hard evidence. It was also the case with the friend of a friend, who embraced her memory as the full truth and lost her family as a result. These types of accusations immediately provoke the often unanswerable questions of “who is right” and “what is true,” and far too often the response is to accuse the individual of dishonesty in turn.
I wish we could simply acknowledge that there was an experience of memory that was disorienting for the person involved. Unfortunately, in my experience neuroscientists add fuel to this fire by claiming the science doesn’t validate the experience. As Vox does a good job explaining, there is a long history of mistrust around the concept of “repressed memories” that is for better or worse closely tied to the horror of child sexual abuse. A scientist is quoted in the story saying “‘I think there’s a correct answer scientifically to what’s going on with memory,’ he said, ‘and the idea of repressed memories being reliable when they come back is not correct.’” My view is that until neuroscience can explain the experience of having these memories come back, I think those in the field ought to be careful about claiming correctness one way or the other. As it stands, the field is simply denying the validity of what appears to be a not uncommon human experience, which serves only (in my view) to undermine the field’s credibility.
This is an area where the right answer is probably to say: we don’t know as much as we wish we did, or probably even as much as we think we know. Some people seem to experience this phenomenon of recovering memories of their past that had been long-forgotten or pushed out of awareness. We don’t know why it happens, and we don’t know how to validate the “truth” of these memories one way or the other without contemporaneous recordings of what happened. There is a certain beauty in the resulting uncertainty, and an opportunity for individual meaning-making, if we can let go of the desire to have firm ground to stand on. I sometimes fear we’re going in the opposite direction, recording so much in our lives that we might lose sight of how to find the beautiful potential of human memory in all its imperfection. And sometimes even I think that ever-present recording devices could be the most amazing gift we could give ourselves.
