Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Amnesia

Episode Date: July 18, 2020

In what is perhaps the first and only example of the Fast and Furious franchise inspiring an episode of Sawbones, we're diving into amnesia. We'll see how media portrayals stack up to reality, look at modern therapy and explore the validity of the second bonk.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm I'm I'm I'm

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I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm for the mouth. Wow. Hey everybody, welcome to Saul Bones, Marital Tour of Miss Guy, and I'm your co-host Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. And folks, it's finally here. It's Max Fun Drive time. I don't know if you know this, but we are part of a listener supported network

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Yeah, but the more exciting thing for us is, and this is where we're exclusively revealing this information. Sydney and I are launching a secret Max Fun Donor only podcast are launching a secret Max Fun Donor only podcast. We're in Sydney and I watch and simultaneously review all of the Fast and Furious movies. It's called Justin and Sydney. No, Fast and Furious and Justin and Sydney. Yes.

And Justin's favorite part is the name of the podcast. The name is very good. If I do say something myself. It's not a track. It's not a listen along track. It's not like a track, it's not a listen-a-long track. It's not a commentary track. Thank you. It's very stream of consciousness. And that consciousness is diluted by alcohol.

There is just a warning a little bit of swearing because the films have swearing, so we figured that was fair. Light swearing. And we tried to limit it to just the best bits but I would suggest you see the movies or else they're going to seem very wild very wild or don't see the movies it's up to you. Well that's true. I guess you know whatever you're whatever kind of experience you're looking for. We're going to get beginning that link up with the next few days in the Max Fun donor bonus

page so check that out. But Sydney this actually this this new series led you to this week's topic. That's right. We were watching the Fast and Furious movies, and I don't want to spoil anything, in case you haven't seen them yet. The only way you could spoil them is if you took out all the car stunts. That was a lot of fun. If you took out all the car stunts, the movies would be three minutes long each. There is an amnesia plot line in one of the films. We'll just say that. Yes. And I personally, I never really like amnesia plot lines in movies and TV, in part because

and we'll talk about this. There's some fairly common, like unrealistic kind of myths that are reinforced usually. And also, I find that they're a way of saying, like, we don't really know how to deal with complicated emotions for this character because of these situations that they might feel different ways about things.

So we're just gonna make them forget everything in the past so they can be somebody else now. So that we can use them in a different way. And that always frustrates me. Yeah. But so today we're going to be talking about the reality of Amnesia versus the Hollywood illusions. In movies, Amnesia tends to be triggered like at a convenient moment. And it is very selective as to what the character can and can't remember. Right.

Like for instance, just a random example off the top of my head. Maybe the character can remember all of their fast, driving car skills, but has absolutely no memory of where they're from or another human that's known them literally their entire life. Or their extended family. Yes.

Because this series is about family, the fastest, the fastest family, the fastest and the fastest family, it doesn't exist. And then the way it resolves is always. You always get bumped into the head again. All of us always. And we're going to get into that. you either get bumped on the head again or someone loves you so deeply. Do you remember?

Remember. Yeah, that all of a sudden you you're looking at them and I will be fastated to hear how big times that has happened. So the term amnesia traces back to the Greek for forgetfulness or a Bolivian. There's a river of oblivion Greek mythology. It's called 20-20. Amnesty, intentional overlooking. This is all the word amnesia comes from all these things.

In the ancient writings from Galen and Apocrates, when we talk about amnesia, it's usually in the context of another disease. So it's not like amnesia as a disease in and of itself. They're really talking about memory loss associated with something that happened. This person has this condition and one feature of it is that they've lost some memory. But they're not usually talking about like, just amnesia as a distinct entity.

Somebody came in and forgot who they were. So they'll talk about the stroke or the illness or whatever, and that's it. It really wasn't until the 18th century where you get amnesia as its own thing to start to be like Investigated and broken down and classified as to why it might happen and that kind of thing with a physician and botanist from the 18th century name

wasa desa vaj Who his main interest was like taxonomy almost more, or no-sology. So he wanted to like classify diseases. He wrote a big book like Breaking Down. He was a botanist too. Breaking down diseases the same way we kind of break down plants, right? Kingdom filing, like this genus species. He wanted to like take diseases and create those same kind of trees out of them. For plants. Like we do with plants. You know, it's weird. I feel like you have a lot more

multi-disciplinary people in these time periods. When we only knew a little bit about stuff, it seemed like it was easy to learn all of the little bit about a lot of different things. Yes. Yeah, it's really interesting. I feel like on a slight diversion, especially for physicians, there was this period of time where they were so closely tied to the natural world and then to the humanities and to like all the different kind of academic disciplines that you were expected to pursue. It was a good time.

I mean, even though we didn't know anything, it's a good time for physicians. And then as it got more, it's own science, like it's distinct science that you had to pursue without ignoring everything else. It's been in my personal opinion, it's not been as great for medicine. We need to get back to that broader view.

Yeah, a wide lens. Because we know more now also though. Like we could do so much more than they could do then, which is just, I don't know, here's some amnesia, maybe bleed them. So we got. So he broke it down into like, why does the amnesia happen?

And he had all these different reasons. One could be venereal amnesia happen? And he had all these different reasons. One could be venereal amnesia. Venerial. Another venereal disease and it's an STD. Right. So this was probably syphilis. Syphilis. Probably what he was.

Cyphilis about the reaction. Without saying. Yeah. Well, I mean, tertiary syphilis, longstanding chronic, tertiary syphilis, longstanding chronic untreated syphilis can cause brain damage. And certainly amnesia, memory loss could be part of that, right? That would be... That would be... That would be bad too, because it's like, I don't remember how I got this, so I'm not going to change anything about my lifestyle.

And then every single time you get the amnesia again, then you get syphilis again. Well, no, but remember, it's like that episode of house where the older lady, they find out has syphilis and its maiter have the libido of youth. And so she keeps hitting on house and she doesn't want to get treated for syphilis because she wants to keep her sex drive. No, I don't remember that exact episode of house.

Sydney better take it for granted that that's not your fan fiction that you've written that there there's a real episode of the TV in your house. They made a lot of them. So statistically speaking, that probably is an episode of House. I've never written fan fiction about Hugh Laurie, but I'm not saying I wouldn't. Fair. There was also a C-Nile, which makes sense. Memory loss associated with age, traumatic, like you hit your head, plethora, which at that time, there was this belief that you could have too much blood, right? Too much blood that would fill up your blood vessels

and fill up your brain and make you hot. That one we could fix that one. We invented this condition because it's one we can fix. There was what he called pathomatic, which was like emotional. Some sort of, probably psychological is the word we would use today, but Amnesia triggered by some sort of strong emotional response

to an event, something like that. There was suffalgic, which was following a headache, so you get a really bad headache, and then you forget everything. I don't know. In toxication, you can figure that one out. And then febrile, which probably mean like a meningitis or an encephalitis or something like that.

So this is a really good, like complete picture. I mean, he's still is leaving some stuff out and there's some stuff to understand, but that's pretty good for the time period of all the different reasons why somebody might forget everything. And this kind of breaking it down would lead to a lot more academic interest in general. Once he kind of published this and he didn't just do amnesia, by the way, he did like all disease laid out

into like defined and named and classified and all that. But this would really get people to study amnesia more and like broaden it to also strokes could cause forgetfulness. And also there was like this thought that hunger, if you got really hungry, you would forget things. I don't find I forget things. I just get really angry.

You forget to not be nice to me. That's true. That's fair. You forget to be nice to me, sorry. For anybody or basically you just forget sort of basic humanity. You become like unto a monster, I guess I'm saying. To put it generally, I can stop now. I don't know why I'm still talking. That's a problem.

There was also some interest in, is it permanent or temporary? It seemed like that depending on the cause, amnesia could sometimes be reversed. So like, febrile amnesia, which they probably, that means amnesia with a fever. So they're probably talking about some sort of infection seem to go away. Okay. Because with the fever, right? Because I mean, think about, and you're probably seeing some delirium in here that wasn't like teased out yet. I mean, think about it with a really high fever, People can get confused and not seem to remember what's going on around them. And then after it goes away, they get better. Right. And then they notice that other kinds of amnesia

seem to just persist. So it's less amnesia and more just like having trouble connecting Yes. To the real world. Yes. That's where we also get Corsicauff who described a very particular amnesia that came with the long-term use of alcohol, which we know is Corsicauff syndrome, which, well, that's memories tended to stay. And that's one of the things that I always think is interesting with cinematic depictions of amnesia, is that people tend to forget like, I mean, like I said, where they're from, who their parents were, all the like... Name their life.

Yes, all the stuff that would be the oldest, most deeply ingrained memories tend to vanish as well. And those actually tend to stay, not always. I mean, there's different kinds of amnesia. We'll get into that. But generally speaking, you tend to remember the older stuff. And it's the more recent memories that you forget. And you actually get them back in the reverse order if you do get your memory back that you lost them, which is kind of weird. It's 10. That's what they tended to observe the brain.

The brain's weird. And again, this is all now our understanding is way more complex and it would depend on what kind of amnesia and why it happened and all that kind of thing. But the basic ideas that like the way that you would lose information. And if you think about older memories versus more recent one, this will kind of make sense. So recent events that just happened, you're going to lose first because they're the, they just happen. Then you're going to lose some ideas, concepts and ideas, because those are not as ingrained as sensory experiences and memories that you've had, ideas. Then you can start to lose emotions next, and then you start to lose the habits and the routines, like the stuff that you will kind of think about as

muscle memory, that would be further. I guess you could make the argument that like, you would forget how you got in the car crash that caused your memory, but you would not forget how to drive the car really fast. Okay. You know what I mean? Right. And then finally, the oldest memories,

the stuff that is the most organized, the most fixed, that you have sensory experiences associated with those fixed memories, and that you probably also have reinforced the repetition and through looking at photos. Do you know what I mean? I mean, because we do that to our own memory. We talk about that trip to Disney that we took,

a decade ago. we talk about that trip to Disney that we took, a decade ago. I know that we're only, we can only, I saw this on that show, quiz, remember we watched that three part, many series of quiz, starring Matthew McFadden of Succession Fame. Yes.

And they talked about how you can't, every time you remember something, you're remembering the last time you remembered it. So you remember, it's a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory. So there's a lot of of digression there. It's really interesting the way that the brain can mess stuff up like that. It does, it messes stuff up and it reinforces whatever that idea is the more you recount that memory. Whereas something that happened 10 minutes ago, I haven't had enough time to continue to reinforce that memory. That's why older memories tend to stay. Again, this is all generally speaking.

And then there is the distinction between antrograde and retrograde memory loss. Antrograde is like memento. Or what's the other movie? Blank slate. Yes. Okay, or what's the other movie blank slate? Yes, starting finding Dory. Okay. There's this for like finding Dory blank slate starting day in a carvy and 51states 51states. Yes. Yes. So you can't make new memories. Can't make new memory. So stuff just keeps happening like you're like the present is constant. On there. I'm there now. I'm living that dream. It is actually, we are not suffering

from collective amnesia, antrograte or otherwise, but it is actually harder to make new memories when the days become difficult to distinguish. The passage of time starts to become... That's why...

Nebulous. That's why you have so many more memories or right things seem to go faster as you get older, is because your brain reacts to novelty. It saves novelty. So when something happens to you for the first time, something new, your brain's like, oh, this is cool, I'm gonna remember this.

I'm gonna hold onto this. But as you get older, or as you get locked in your house for months on end, the lack of stimulus becomes such that, like you aren't forming the memories. The time seems to get even more messed up because without novelty, your brain isn't activating and saving those memories.

Because it's like, yeah, I've done this. I don't need to save. This is, I don't need to remember any of this. I've seen this before. This is fine. Just do your thing. Which again, a slight diversion. One thing that you can do to help combat that is

if you can come up with anything new to do, anything new to experience, that's really good for your brain right now. I mean, what are, what are sitting in I doing? We're gardening. We're composting. We're woodworking. Yes. We're recycling. we're composting, we're woodworking,

we're recycling, we're trying to become more sustainable. I've started knitting again. Knitting. He's back on the knitting tip. Yeah, and anything, especially if it's like a new, if this is the moment to like, I'm finally gonna learn to play the piano or whatever, you know, something.

But anyway. Anyway, the other. No plasticity folks folks the other part about Amnesia that you've got to kind of understand to understand why it's happening and if you can fix it how to fix it is What part of the memory process has been disrupted? Because it's a system. There's there's where you like take in the information to make the memory die with illness. Well, no, but my point is is it the making the memory or is it the retrieving the memory? Okay, right so to use kind of an Inside out is it I

Don't remember you remember the little guys that go get the memory. Yeah, so it them that's broken or is it the little console that they use to save the memories up in the where or the emojis live or has stuff been dumped into? Remember when she forgets things and like the like the um, boing, like, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, Oh, it's a guy. The imaginary friend. Anyway, the point is, when we talk about amnesia, and this idea that like you can retrieve memories, it's important to know if the memories are still there

to retreat, like what part of the brain has been damaged? Richard Kahn. Thank you. Yes. Sorry. It's important to know like, because if you're talking, there's, I think, and we're going to get into this some, there's this idea with amnesia that it's all in there, right? You just have to like, find it.

And that assumption is that the retrieval is the problem, accessing the memory is the problem, but a belief that the memory has to be there. That's not necessarily always true with different kinds of amnesia, because if you think about it, it really depends on what caused it and what's been damaged. But sometimes the memories are gone. And then the other thing is where the memories made to begin with, which again, I'm going to get into a little bit more in the back half of the show with the idea of retrieving childhood memories. You don't make memories in the same way with a child, like when you have your child brain, your early, early, early baby brain does not, cannot make memories the same way that your grown-up brain can.

So, is the memory, was it ever there? All of this is part of the process, and if you're gonna fix it, you have to really know what went wrong, which is why there's not a one, there's not one pill for amnesia that makes it go away. But before I get to that, let's talk a little bit more about the Max Fund drive. Absolutely. Sydney maximumfund.org foretaste join. We are asking you, we come to you once a year and ask you to join our family. And that is really what it is. Max Fund is an extended podcasting family. And we're asking you asking you to become a member of it and join with us

Whatever you can pledge is a huge help $5 a month. You're gonna get a massive amount of bonus content over 200 hours Of bonus episodes including Fast-furious and Justin and Sydney. I don't listen to it all back to back. Like take some breaks, drink water in between. That's right. It's very, it's 200 hours. That's a long time. Oh, I thought you were talking about fast, furious and just listening. This is very intense listening.

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You just that you enjoy when you sign up and then you just, you just, the money's straight to them. Yeah, when you sign up, you just click whichever shows you listen to. So if you're listening to this show, we could be one of them. Yes, that would, that would mean a lot. If you can give more than 10 bucks, there are other gifts.

If you can pledge, let's see, at 20 bucks, you get a game pack, which is all the stuff from before plus some max fund dice in a dice bag and max fund playing cards and hidden max fund symbolism all over. It looks really cool. And 35 bucks a month, there's a camp mug with the max fund rocket logo on it and all the other stuff. But the real thing you're doing is you're making it possible for me to make us to make these shows. And we're so grateful. If you are a member, if you're already part of our family and donating,

thank you. Thank you so much. If you're considering doing it, thank you. If you can't right now, but you share our show and tell somebody about it and share a link and tell people, that's great to thank you for helping us continue to do this. Yes, we very much appreciate you. Okay, so we're, where, where are we? Now, the really interesting stuff, and I'm just going to get into it a little bit first is how do you, uh, when you get into things like, um, people forgetting because they, you know, something has happened

and they've forgotten, or as we've seen in like, you see this used in movies and the question from a legal perspective has been, is the memory loss for secondary gain? And that's where you get into some really interesting like concepts about amnesia, if you think about like a murder trial. Have you, did you really forget what happened or are you saying you forgot what happened? That kind of thing. In addition, in the early studies of memory loss and amnesia, we started to also study dissociative identity disorder along with that, to try to understand how does that happen

that you forget, so to speak, who you were and what you were doing and all that kind of stuff. If you're unfamiliar with that, you will have seen it so tastefully and accurately depicted in the movie Split. That is a perfect, it's perfect. No. It's perfect. As you said, I remember you saying, as we watched the film, you said, this is perfectly

accurate and scientific. No. No. No, I never said that. That's a memory though, isn't it? Isn't that inner? as we watched the film, he said, this is perfectly accurate and scientific. No, no, I never said that. That's a memory though, isn't it? Isn't that inner? I don't know. I have that memory you don't. No one can say. Plus, if we began to understand if trauma could induce

memory loss as like a protective mechanism, if you could have some sort of traumatic event and you lose all memory of it because it's too much for your brain to experience, right? And that was the early understanding of it. We're doing this, your brain's protecting you. I'm gonna forget all this because it's too much for us to handle. Then some started to argue like,

well, this is physiology. This is physiology. This is good. Our brain is doing what it should do. We should encourage that kind of amnesia, which is like homecoming, right? Right. Remember the podcast?

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like, what if we could take away all your memory of all the bad stuff that ever happened to you and then send you back out into the world. Not back out in the world. In that case, it was, get you pumped to do a war again. Well, yeah, that was bad, but not great. But anyway, and then others started to write about true traumatic memory loss could leave

you in a constant state of not knowing the present from the past. And you could just re-experience that trauma constantly because it's like trapped in your mind's present, because it has not been made into a memory. Anyway, all this became very interesting to the alienists, especially the French alienists. Do you know what an alienist is? Well, we did talk about it in the art yesterday.

That's true. You can go ahead if you'd like. I don't remember, but that's memory is, I mean. There's a show now. So I think it's more popular because there's a show called the Alienus, which is based on a book called the Alienus. So Alienus have nothing to do with like extraterrestrials. Not that they would tell us. Alienus used to be the name for a psychologist or a psychiatrist. And it comes from the French alien for insane. And it was basically alienists help people

who have become alienated from reality or from themselves, from their true selves that they cannot access because of their mental illness, that kind of thing. And early alienists really approached all this in a biological way. Psychiatric disease is a medical problem, just like all other medical problems. There's anatomical and biological roots, and so those must be the treatments.

The alianists of the 20th century took it into depth, psychoanalysis, depth psychology, like Freud, sit on the couch, and let's get into your deepest, most repressed thoughts. It's interesting to see how I feel like we've come back the other direction again. And then from there they started to get into ways to treat amnesia based on all this that they understood now. One of the first early treatments was from a French doctor and psychologist, Paul Soyer, who practiced back in the late 1800s and early 1900s and said, basically you could help with amnesia if you could find like a memory.

And the way you find it is through their sensory memories of it. You could retrieve some of the memory based on like, what did you smell, what did you hear, what did, let's describe the surroundings and and then fixate on it, and then continue to reestablish it, continue to discuss it, to stabilize it, that you could slowly recount memories from the past. And he thought this was particularly good with trauma, like if something was dramatically induced, you could recover memories that way,

but he found with things like dementia that didn't work quite as well. Yeah. So those were some of the earliest ways to try to treat it. Now, of course, things have gotten better, and I want to talk about that and some of the myths, but before we do that. No, I don't know.

Well, let's go to the billing department. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you lift my car before the mouth. I don't know. Let's go to the billing department. Let's go. Okay, so before I get into one of the most often cited treatments in, I think, in TV and popular culture, I want to talk about one specific problem, which is, as you mentioned, in a lot of depictions of Amnesia, it happens because you hit on the head and it resolves when you get hit on the head again, right? Yes, which even the... When you brought that up, I was like, oh, well, yeah, what happens with Amnesia is you get hit on the head reading it is you hit on the head and then you get a hit on the head

and then you get to make some memories come back. And I was like, as I said it to you, I was like, wait a minute, that can't be right. That can't be the way it works. So I'm assuming that is inaccurate. Now, as I mentioned, there was a time when as we, the study of the brain was like neurology, psychology. It was all kind of combined for a long time.

Like all of it was acting together, which again, I'm not saying as a criticism, like the more combined, you know, all these things are the better understanding we have of them. But when we first saw the anatomy of the human brain that it has two hemispheres, one of the theories that began to develop around it is that they almost did the same things just like a backup system sort of like it just in case I guess one half goes bad you got to backup half which I mean again isn't a wild idea when you consider that like your kidneys kind of work that way if you only have one you can still be fine you've got like a backup. way, if you only have one, you can still be fine. You've got like a backup. So because of this idea, the thought was that if they get out of like if they become unsynchronized, then you'll have problems,

then you get like malfunctions. So our main thing with the brain is keeping the two hemispheres in sync. And there was, at the turn of the 19th century, there was a French scientist, Francois Bichard, who said that, you know, he believed in this, that the two hemispheres just mirror each other. And so if there is an injury on one side, like if you hit your head on the left and that side of the brain gets like knocked out of sink, then it only makes sense that the way to fix it is to hit your head again on that side to knock it back in. No, no, Francois, no, that doesn't make sense.

The girl what you're saying. So that way then they're back in balance. You just need to balance out the two him. Do you imagine going to the sky and you're like, anyway, hey, so sorry, I'm late. I miss my appointment because well, amnija, and I'm hoping you can fix this for me. What's your solution? And this guy's like, well, well, what's we shall do is Z-Bunk on the head. Like, what, sorry? Yes, Z-Bunk, like the last bunk on the head. Z-Bunk on the head. Imagine.

Well, here's what's wild. Unspeakable. This is where, like, certainty, self-assuredness goes so far in this world. I'm gonna imagine he was a white dude. It's like only option, right? Has to be. So he said, he wrote about it, but he never wrote like,

it wasn't like a list of, let me give you all the evidence. Here are all the times where this worked, or here's the studies I did. He just said, this happens so much that we know it's true. See, because I see Bongo as he had. No, I mean, he stated it as a fact, like as if everybody would be like, well, of course, yeah, that happened to me.

The second bomb, obviously. Everybody knows that, everything. But he didn't have TV, which is wild, right? Like, he didn't have like, he's in four, if it's all 13, he knows he's a bright, he's a bunch. You can see the like, he's in season four, episode 13 of the Brady Bunch. You can see the gen because he's with the football and it makes there like he, what is he basing us on? He just said obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously. He's in the bank. So despite the fact that he tragically died of a head injury in 1802.

Stop it. His work out lived him because the idea that brain asymmetry is the main problem in a range of you know psychological neurological disorders that persisted for a long time, basha's law of symmetry. And this idea that the second bonk would fix amnesia also persisted. And it really wasn't until, I mean, like a hundred years later, that people began to say, you know, I actually think that getting hit on the head again will just cause more damage. But head injury can cause brain damage and another head injury could cause more brain damage and we should probably not do that. But even today, you see it depicted, which is, I mean, we know that, right?

Like please don't, if someone has lost their memory, please do not hit them on the head. Yeah. Actually, even if they haven't lost their memory, don not hit them on the head. Yeah. Actually, even if they haven't lost their memory, don't hit people on the head. Yeah. But generally speaking, head trauma does not restore memory, despite, you know, all of cartoons.

Which is why that's like a weird, it's like, it's almost like the genetics of culture, right? It's like a cultural osmosis, where it's just like for generations, like that's not coming from science. It's just generations of media, freaking like comic strips and novels and stuff, popularizing this idea,

and then that concept just gets passed down and down and down until everybody's like, well, yay, yay, the second month, obviously. Which underlines, by the way, a theme on our show, which is just because something persists for thousands of years does not mean it's true. No. This did not persist for thousands,

but still you get the idea. I call it appeal to ancient wisdom. It's a logical fousing. No. We've tried to puncture it as much as possible with our podcast. The other big thing I wanted to talk about before we finish is in a lot of popular culture,

you'll see hypnosis used as the way to retrieve memories. Yes. Have you seen that usually on like a crime series? Yes, they'll take them deep. Yes. They'll recall. The idea that you could fix amnesia with hypnosis is a pretty old one.

Freud would use hypnosis to try to retrieve old memories. The idea that if somebody has lost their memory, you could fix it with hypnosis. It dates back quite a while. Now again, this rests on the idea that the memories are there, that you made them fine, and they're still stored fine. And they've been organized fine and repeated fine and all that, but the retrieval is the problem. And that has to be the truth if hypnosis is going to work, which in my head, I thought,

it's sort of like saying, you're trying to land at an airport with no landing strip by buying bigger, better planes every time. So anyway, as long as that's the problem, then in theory, hypnosis could work in theory. Obviously, it would have to also be proven to work. And these are usually used for some sort of emotional trauma, not physical trauma like head trauma, but emotional trauma. You'll see hypnosis used to like, you've repressed a memory because it was too upsetting.

And so we're going to use hypnosis to find it or to like tell you something about your childhood that you don't remember very well or to help you remember details of like a crime scene. Yeah. Um, or a past life, perhaps. Or a past life, I guess. I wasn't gonna go there. Yeah, but- That's way outside my expertise.

Yeah, but if someone says I can help you remember that you were homies with a bone apart and then you're like, well, maybe, you know, and then later they're like, I can help you remember a crime scene. Maybe we don't believe the second part so much because we do still remember the part where you said that I knew Napoleon in life. Right. Exactly. And well, and all of these things, people who I don't want to paint too broad of brush, you can be, you can, they're, they're hypnotherapists and they can specialize in just one area. And I'm certain there are hypnotherapists who would say, well, age regression doesn't

work, forensic hypnosis doesn't work, I don't do past lives, but I do this for weight loss. That is out there. There are hypnotherapists that specialize in lots of different areas. Let's do an episode about hypnosis at some point. We need to talk about this. Hypnosis is a wide ranging thing. I just want to, and it's so big,

I just want to focus on the memory retrieval aspect of it. And in addition, I'm just mentioning forensic hypnosis is a big area of interest, the idea that you could use it to solve a crime. So does any of this work? Hypnosis for any of these memory reasons, amnesia reasons. Well, first of all, hypnotic age regression, which is like, I can't remember something that happened to me as a

child. So I am, and this is usually done in like a therapy realm. I'm going to hypnotize you to take you back to when you were six or whatever. Make you six again. I'm going to, like, you are going to be six years old sitting here today. And then you will be able to recount, relive, experience, remember, whatever happened, right? Yes. Okay. So what we have found with that is that even though people will subjectively say, like

they will describe feeling like a child afterwards, they felt like a child, they acted like a child. We have seen this on, like, in these interviews. You cannot change the brain back to the stage of development, of cognitive development, to make you think like a child. We cannot do that. We have no objective proof that we're actually doing that with hypnosis.

And that's what you would have to do to make you. This is the problem with hypnosis. I don't wanna keep talking about hypnosis, cause I do wanna do an upset on it, but like what I think does work about it in my limited understanding is making you very open to suggestion. They, it does make you very open to suggestion.

So the, if I were to suggest that you were six now, I think that is well within the bounds of the power of hypnosis. Yes. Well, I think what they've said is like if you accept the idea that like putting someone in sort of the, it's like taking somebody to the right room of the house to help them remember how they felt about something like recreating the circumstances, could it help you remember how they felt about something, like recreating the circumstances, could it help you remember something? I don't know, maybe, maybe. I like smells, do that.

We know a smell can trigger a memory. So like putting somebody in the mindset of acting like a child could it, yes. But we have no proof that you're actually remembering things you didn't remember before. You know, that you're actually, and again, part of this goes back to like, if you're trying to take somebody back to like the really wild stuff, or like, you're reborn. If you're trying to take somebody back to a memory that happened when they were like one or two, well, you don't store memories. Do you remember

anything from when you were one? No. It's not because you can't, it's not because your memory won't go back that far. It's because when you were one, you weren't making memories the way your brain does now at 39. It just, your brain doesn't do that. Right, I was busy, my brain was busy learning how to like walk. Yes, your brain wasn't recording information the same way. So it's just not possible. The other thing is the idea of hypnotic hypermnesia,

as opposed to amnesia, hypermnesia. Like remembering, super memory. Okay, right. Like extra memory. Like Mary Lou Henner. Like front of the family, Mary Lou Henner. Can you induce that with hypnosis? Which I think of more like when you see on TV,

like the memory palace? Sure, yes. That, it's like that idea. Like, maybe we could make you have a super memory if we hypnotize you. That happens on the show we were just watching dispatches from elsewhere. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, if you hypnotize somebody, you could make them like go back into a memory and see things that they didn't see before. And what we have found in studies of that is that no, you are no more accurate after hypnosis make them like go back into a memory and see things that they didn't see before. And what we have found in studies of that is that no, you are no more accurate after hypnosis than you were before. You are just more certain of whatever you're saying. We turn you into a surgeon.

I'm sorry, surgeon. Just a little joke. Something every bug, a joke, everybody can enjoy. Just a little joke for my surgeon pals. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. And then of course there's forensic hypnosis, which is how do we get a witness to a crime to help us solve the crime by hypnotizing them.

And so we get more details from their witness statement so that they remember the incident more clearly, whether it be the description of the attacker or a license plate number or whatever, right? And this has been used, I mean, I may still be used to this day. In TV and movies are in life. Like in life, like there were, I mean, this, I have found early 2000s cases where this has been used. I believe this may still be tried.

I couldn't, it was hard to discover if like there are still forensic investigators who are doing hypnosis because it's like a specific branch of hypnotherapy to do this. And there isn't a lot of data for this either. There are like anecdotes. I found this specific kidnapping case, Couchilla from the 70s, where like a bus driver with a bunch of kids, where they were all kidnapped and kept somewhere underground and the bus driver like dug their way out to get them out. But anyway, supposedly the bus driver was hypnotized to remember part of the license plate and like remember it's such a big chunk of it that he couldn't remember before but then once he

was hypnotized you remember the big chunk. So like they're these anecdotes, right? But then there are other anecdotes I found where like in Boston there was this brinks armored car robbery and they hypnotized the witness for the license plate number of the getaway car and he recounted a license plate number perfectly under hypnosis. And it turned out to be the license plate of the president of Harvard. It's car, not because the president of Harvard robbed the armored car, but because the witness worked at Harvard and just saw that license plate a lot.

So all of this or there's a far more compelling possibility Sydney. The person you least suspect the president of Harvard is the pink panther. No, none of that. Now, but the thing is, and there have been other studies where like, they've had like simulated crimes. I know the panther is the diamond get off Twitter close the app. Anyway, they're these wild studies in which like they have simulated crimes in front of witness like

they like they don't tell them that they're about to be part of a study and then they like do a fake crime and follow. Yeah, I mean like you'll read these older studies that probably wouldn't be approved today where and then they'll like interview people and then interview them under hypnosis and then they've done this with real crimes

Like ride along to try to like actually see can we get and it just there's no evidence that it ever works It really it improves your certainty about memories But it does but it's really easy to suggest things to implant things With this process. It's, it's very difficult to tease out because our brain wants to fill in gaps. And so hypnosis encourages us to fill in those gaps by thinking like, well, this helped me. So whatever I think makes sense there probably is the memory and not just what

my brain is confabulating to fill in that gap. and not just what my brain is confabulating to fill in that gap. So, I wondered if it is still admissible in court was my big question. And from what I found, and I am not a lawyer, but I did reach out to my uncle Michael, Michael Meadows of court appointed, they do a legal history podcast similar to what we do, him and my dad. I reached out to him and I've talked to him about it. And from what I can tell, if it meets something called the dober standard, which has to do with like an expert witness testimony, fulfilling like basically, this is basically accepted as like, this is what an expert would say or like, yes, this is basically accepted as like,

this is what an expert would say, or like, yes, this is real kind of thing, like how you judge whether expert testimony can be, you know, admissible and court or not. If it meets that, then it can be. And from what I found, there are times where like hypnosis has been found very clearly not to, because it is not widely accepted

by the scientific community. But then I found that other times where it was, like admissible in different trials. So it was hard for me to tell, I think it varies. I think it varies state by state, and I think it varies probably judged by judge. So I really think it might be up to the specific trial in some cases.

But it's weird for me because it doesn't, it seems like we have no evidence that it actually does help with memory retrieval in any way. Just anecdote. The only thing that I will say is that there've been some therapists who have spoken out in favor of hypnosis specifically for dissociative memory loss. So if it is associated with dissociative identity disorder,

hypnosis as part of therapy, as part of a whole therapeutic range of treatments, not in isolation, but has been used with some easing of anxiety around the memory retrieval, around the process of like re-remembering those things you've forgotten. They have found sometimes hypnosis can help with that anxiety that can be associated with that. Because I imagine that can be very anxiety-provoking to start remembering this whole identity

that you had forgotten. Yeah. But the idea that it's this dramatic, we hypnotize you and then you wake up and go, I'm Sydney, like that's not, that's not real, that doesn't, that doesn't work. And the only other thing about amnesia and hypnosis, you know how after hypnosis, you're supposed to have amnesia, like they induce amnesia, right? They don't want you to remember anything that just happened. Yeah.

I tried to read why. Why do you want people to forget at all? Uh, I don't know. The answer I basically got was that it was stressful and we don't want you to think about it too much. Which leads me as a scientist to say, is that because it didn't work and we don't want you to think about it too much because then you'd figure it out. Anyway, how do we treat amnesia?

Well, it depends on the cause. With things like Corsicauff, amnesia, we found specifically like thiamine can help, but not for a lot of other things. There isn't one pill. You'll find like memory loss associated with dementia. You'll hear a lot about medicines on TV that can help. But what they're talking about is slowing the rate of like the progression of dementia is slowing down how fast that progresses.

They don't turn back time. They can't go back and fix what has already happened. And I think that's really important to understand about those meds. And there are a lot of things like working with an occupational therapist, learning strategies to help keep memories and improve the repetition and retrieval of what is still there, and digital aids to organize information as you're learning new things to help you keep and make new memories in a more organized fashion. There are all kinds of ways occupational therapists can really help with that. And then preventing memory loss. Like the easiest thing, you're managing chronic illnesses, like diabetes or heart disease or cerebral vascular disease that could lead to strokes, that kind of thing.

Cardiovascular exercise is good for your brain. That's, I know, that sounds weird. Deer crossword puzzles, that's great, but also do something that gets your blood pumping, that gets your heart pumping. Well, sitting, there's nothing that gets my blood pumping and heart racing like a good crossword puzzle. When I get an eight letter word with no clues to be seen, I feel like I just like the original movie crank. No. It's strange. I just can't're seeing movie crank No It's strange Jason safe him it is it about crossword puzzles. No, but it's like that's it's like adrenaline

That's like what I feel okay if his heart slows it slows down he dies Oh, he has the game. It's like speed before the human heart for the heart. Yeah, we just not sound this is an episode Now that's an episode right there. Crank. I don't want to see this. Oh, there's a crank too. Don't worry. Exercise healthy diet. And I would recommend that you try to avoid head trauma whenever possible. You might also say don't hold your head. Well, that's too. Thank you so much for listening to our episode. We

want to ask one more time. It's max fun drive too. Thank you so much for listening to our episode. We want to ask one more time. It's Max Fun Drive Time. If you could donate, we would really, really appreciate it. To people who have already gotten on board, thank you so, so, so much. MaxMumFun.org-forge-lash. Join is the place to, is the place to do it. If you haven't been able to become a member now

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We, this brings us joy and we hope we can bring you joy. Yeah, did you have something you wanted to say? I wanted to say that if you're more interested in forensic hypnosis, Cora pointed is going to do an episode to delve into more of the legal side of it. Since I didn't understand all that, when can you use it in court? When is it okay? I did this with your next. Cora pointed wherever a fine podcast or soul. Yeah, with my dad and my uncle. Thank you, the taxpayers for the use of their sound

medicines as the intern algebra program. And thanks to you so much for listening and supporting us. We very much appreciated. But until next time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Cindy McRoy. As always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfun.org Comedy and Culture

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