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Schacter, Daniel L (Editor) Memory Distortion,
1995
Schacter, Daniel L Searching for Memory, 1996
Shermer, Michael Why People Believe Weird
Things, 1997
Showalter, Elaine Hystories, 1997
Simpson, Dr. Paul Second Thoughts, 1996
Spanos, Nicholas P. Multiple
Identities and False Memories, 1996
Schacter, Daniel L (Editor)
Memory Distortion, 1995
How minds, brains and societies reconstruct the past
Reviews
Booknews, Inc. , April 1, 1996
A collection of 16 multidisciplinary essays exploring hypnosis,
confabulation, source amnesia, flashbulb memories, repression, and other
intriguing mental machinations. Contributors' fields range from cognitive
psychology, psychopathology, psychiatry, and neurobiology to sociology,
history, and religion. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc.,
The publisher,
Hypnosis, confabulation, source amnesia, flashbulb memories,
repression--these and numerous additional topics are explored in this
collection of essays by eminent scholars in a range of disciplines. This is the
first book on MEMORY DISTORTION to unite contributions from cognitive
psychology, psychopathology, psychiatry, neurobiology, sociology, history, and
religious studies. It brings the most relevant group of perspectives to bear on
some key contemporary issues, including the value of eyewitness testimony and
the accuracy of recovered memories of sexual abuse.
Daniel Schacter launches the collection with a history of psychological MEMORY
DISTORTION. Subsequent highlights include new empirical findings on memory
retrieval by a pioneer in the field, new findings on amnesia by a premier
neuroscientist, and reflections on the power of collective amnesia in
“Human memory [is not] like a photograph album, a collection of cassettes,
compact discs or videos or any other accumulative archive of the past. Rather,
memories are fragmentary, condensed, often distorted and inaccurate
representations of past experience. This point is made in impressive detail by
all the contributors to this excellent collection of essays on MEMORY
DISTORTION...MEMORY DISTORTION provides an outstanding multidisciplinary perspective
on memory accuracy, ranging from cognitive psychology through psychiatry,
neuropsychology and neurobiology, to sociocultural analyses.” --Martin A.
Conway, NATURE
Schacter, Daniel L
Searching for Memory, 1996
The brain, the mind, and the past
Reviews
Amazon.com
Daniel Schacter, a Harvard professor of psychology and researcher into the
workings of memory and the brain, authoritatively summarizes the most
up-to-date scientific knowledge in this controversial field. Many of the
advances have come from the study of brain-damaged patients: some remember past
events clearly, yet forget the basics of everyday knowledge; others have
precisely the reverse affliction. Putting this work together with brain scans
and experiments on normal people, a useful understanding has emerged of the
connections between the brain and the mind, and of the different types of
memory. Schacter also bravely refutes the notion of "recovered
memory," arguing persuasively that false memories can be easily created
The New York Times Book Review, Stuart
Sutherland
This is an excellent book on an important topic.
The New Yorker
This splendidly lucid book . . . approaches subjects that have been
sensationalized -- hypnosis, multiple personality, and 'recovered' memories of
sexual abuse -- calmly, rationally, and believably. --
From Booklist, June 1, 1996
Schacter describes what memory is and how it works, explaining with
admirable clarity such complicated subjects as the hippocampus and other
pertinent areas of the brain and how they function, and he reviews the major
advances in memory research that such techniques as positron-emission
tomography have recently made possible. Memory, he shows, does not resemble a
simple computer file; it is much more complicated and is influenced by many
physical and emotional elements. The subjective sense of pastness is also
important to it; claims for exact memory of conversations and other events, he
points out, are often misleading. Further, his consideration of the problems of
repressed memories is one of the best analyses of them in recent literature.
Detailed, readable, well documented, his effort is a useful addition to popular
and scholarly scientific collections alike. What's more, Schacter draws on his
personal art collection to strikingly illustrate his report. William Beatty
Copyright© 1996, American Library Association.
Shermer, Michael
Why People Believe Weird Things, 1997
Pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time
Reviews
Amazon.com
Few can talk with more personal authority about the range of human beliefs
than Michael Shermer. At various times in the past, Shermer has believed in
fundamentalist Christianity, alien abductions, Ayn Rand, megavitamin therapy,
and deep-tissue massage. Now he believes in skepticism, and his motto is
"Cognite tute--think for yourself." This updated edition of Why
People Believe Weird Things covers Holocaust denial and creationism in
considerable detail, and has chapters on abductions, Satanism, Afrocentrism,
near-death experiences, Randian positivism, and psychics. Shermer has five
basic answers to the implied question in his title: for consolation, for
immediate gratification, for simplicity, for moral meaning, and because hope
springs eternal. He shows the kinds of errors in thinking that lead people to
believe weird (that is, unsubstantiated) things, especially the built-in human
need to see patterns, even where there is no pattern to be seen. Throughout,
Shermer emphasizes that skepticism (in his sense) does not need to be cynicism:
"Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument
for good that our planet has ever known." --Mary Ellen Curtin
Martin Gardner, author of Science: Good,
Bad, and Bogus
Brilliant, informed, and incisive dissections of bogus science and history
are a major contribution to what one dares hope is a backlash against the still
rising tide of New Age nonsense and public gullibility.
Jared Diamond, author of The Third
Chimpanzee
This sparkling book romps over the range of science and anti-science.
Book Description
UFO abductions...television psychics...creationism...Holocaust denial.
Faced with the rapid changes and anxiety of modern life, many people are
turning to the alluring comforts of pseudoscience and the occult. In Why People
Believe Weird Things, science historian Michael Shermer, the publisher of
Skeptic magazine and director of the Skeptics Society, explores the very human
reasons we find supernatural phenomena, conspiracy theories, and cults so appealing.
Shermer also reveals the darker and more fearful side of wishful thinking,
including Holocaust denial, creationism, the recovered memory movement, alien
abduction experiences, the satanic ritual abuse scare and other modern witch
crazes, extreme Afrocentrism, and ideologies of racial superiority. A
compelling and often disturbing portrait of our immense capacity for
self-delusion, Why People Believe Weird Things celebrates the scientific spirit
and the joy to be found in rationally exploring the world's greatest mysteries
even if many of the questions remain unanswered. Foreword by Stephen Jay Gould.
20 illustrations.
Showalter, Elaine
Hystories, 1997
Hysterical epidemics and modern media
Reviews
Amazon.com
The press is full of stories: thousands suffer from chronic fatigue or Gulf
War Syndrome. There are claims of recovered memories of childhood abuse, or,
even more dramatic, alien abductions. Elaine Showalter, a
Health and Fitness Editor's Recommended
Book
Hysteria is tough to define, but Elaine Showalter knows it when she sees
it. She argues that a host of phenomena, both medical and fantastical--alien
abductions, recovered memories, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple
personalities--arise from a tripartite collaboration between physicians and
mental-health professionals, unhappy patients, and a voracious, gullible media.
Stories that should be metaphorical ("I feel that I've been taken
advantage of in some way.") become real: "I have a recovered memory
of ritual satanic abuse." She makes her case brilliantly, explaining the
history, causes, and reactions, but offers no pat solution. "The
hysterical syndromes of the 1990s clearly speak to the hidden needs and fears
of a culture," she writes. When these go away, new ones will surely crop
up to reflect the anxieties of a different era
The New York Times Book Review, Carol
Tavris
Elaine Showalter ... has written a spirited Freudo-literary analysis of
what she calls hysterical epidemics and what social scientists call emotional
contagions or mass psychogenic illnesses ... She knows full well that ... the
mix will "infuriate thousands of people who believe they are suffering
from unidentified organic disorders or the after-effects of trauma." She
braves not only their wrath, but also that of the feminist therapists and
writers whose "credulous endorsements of recovered memory and satanic
abuse" have contributed to these epidemics. This attitude alone is worth
the price of the book.
From Kirkus Reviews , February 1, 1997
Applied scholarship in the best interdisciplinary tradition, examining how
hysteria, the individual somaticization of anxiety, devolves to the
``hystories,'' or cultural narratives, of the title and how they in turn
escalate into psychogenic epidemics. Feminist literary critic and medical historian
Showalter (Humanities/Princeton Univ.) identifies six contemporary syndromes as
hysterical epidemics, which arise when influential professional gurus impact on
vulnerable populations in culturally supportive environments. Showalter
modifies her own endorsement (The Female Malady, 1985) of feminist
therapy/therapeutic feminism as she attacks the credulousness of ``the feminist
embrace of all abuse narratives and the treatment of all women as survivors.''
But psychotherapy is, Showalter claims, part of the solution to the problem
that she expands on fluently in the idioms of psychoanalysis, feminism, and
literature. When she moves to address chronic fatigue and Gulf War syndromes
(rather too absolutely) as psychological in origin, her zeal biases her rhetorical
and reportorial judgment; however, on the overlapping hystories of recovered
memory, multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse, and alien
abduction, the advocates convict themselves--of fascination with conspiracy, of
accommodating to guilt and fear by licensing the projecting of blame onto
others, and above all of resolute obliviousness to ``the way . . . suggestion
worked to produce confabulation.'' Showalter has fun with the compound-
bizarre, e.g., Harvard psychiatrist John Mack's speculation that remembered
sexual abuse actually screens repressed episodes of alien abduction. But she
honors the ``spiritual resonance'' lodged even in the narratives she makes
sport of: Her quarrel is not with the symptoms of hysteria; she affirms the they
are no less real (and no less treatable) than those of organic diseases. It is
with the ``social appropriations'' of hysteria (such as the ramifications of
incest accusations based on ``recovered'' memory) that she takes issue, and in
defense of emotional mystery and narrative truth that she risks the wrath of
the epidemics' suffering proponents by challenging them. Muscular, probably
inflammatory, and elegantly expressed. --
Simpson, Dr. Paul
Second Thoughts, 1996
Understanding the false memory crisis and how it could affect you,
Reviews
Synopsis
Once a leading practitioner of Recovered Memory Therapy, Dr. Paul Simpson
concludes that he had been "horrifically wrong", and that the
movement has contributed to untold suffering in families where there have been
false accusations of sexual abuse.
A reader from San Luis Obispo, California
, November 12, 1998,
An accurate, thoughtful account of false memory .
Dr. Paul Simpson presents an honest, most accurate account of the the effects
of Recovered Memory Therapy and its tragic aftermath. Falsely accused parents
and client/victims of RMT will find answers to the many questions related to
this phenomenom. As a "retractor" of false memories and a therapist
intern, I appreciated Dr. Simpson's courage to come forward as a therapist who
had once been involved with this most unethical treatment. I had the pleasure
of meeting Dr. Simpson at a recent conference. There, he apologized to all
parents and clients negatively effected by RMT. His apology, given in the name
of all RMT therapists, touched my heart. This book is a "must read"
for all therapists and those who have recovered memories of abuse. I encourage
all to read this book with an open mind. Take the time to have Second Thoughts.
Spanos, Nicholas P.
Multiple Identities and False Memories, 1996
A sociocognitive perspective
Reviews
Synopsis
Nicholas P. Spanos, one of the world's leading experts in the study of
hypnosis, delivers a blistering rebuttal to many long-held assumptions about
Multiple Personality Disorder, or MPD, now classified in the DSM-IV as
Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID. This book argues that MPD is not a
legitimate psychiatric disorder but a cultural construct with roots in earlier
beliefs about demonic possession.
Dr Robert M. Zacharko from
A MUST READ
Dr Nicholas P. Spanos was an excellent researcher, a prolific writer and an
incredible scientist. Dr Spanos provides a cogent, credible and a scientific
explanation for multiple personality disorders and false memory syndrome, among
others. His convincing, documented accounts return analyses to a scientific
realm rather than the halls of medical sooth sayers with special insights.