Semantic Meanings and their significance in Hypnotherapy

Elizabeth Loftus is one of the foremost researchers into language semantics and false memory. She has raised and debated some of the most important aspects in this field as it came under the spotlight of psychologists in the 1980's. She was interested to find out how memory works and in particular how and hwy it appears that people can harbour false memories and are unable to distinguish them from true past experience.

She ran many experiments to gather data to reach her conclusions. One test involved giving subjects a list of words, all of which were related to cars; wheels, tyres, and so on. Later, when she asked them to recall the list she would ask the subject at what point on the list did the word 'steering-wheel' occur. Most subjects would give a position even though the word did not occur on the list. Why was this? The theory is that the brain searches for meaning through language filters and chooses those words best suited to the experience. Exploiting this knowledge Elizabeth Loftus suggested through pre-supposition that a word that was semantically related to other words existed, the subjects brains assumed this was true due to the word 'steering-wheel' being semantically related to other componenets of cars.

Other experiments went on to show that not only could items be completely fabricated by the mind but also true memories be distorted in more subtle ways. Subjects were shown a video of a car hitting another car, afterwards they were asked at what speed they thought they collided; the question was asked using different verbs such as 'bump', 'hit', and 'smash'. It was found that depending on the strength of the descriptive verb used, the subject would estimate the collision to be lower or higher than the actual speed. From this she could conclude that language choice shapes and changes the perception of memory recall.

It is important to recognise that memory is not static, like a photgraph. Not only can it be influence at the time of its forming, distorted through the various bias' and values sytems a person may hold, but it can also be retroactively changed both in the circumstances of recall and the ongoing life experience of the individual.

#hypnotherapysemanticswordassociationfalsememory