Aliens..

Logically that isn't the most likely motive for an an alien race to travel through space to here. Live long and prosper.

 

Dude. We are probably the most known planet in the universe to other races. There could be a million reason why they visit us. As recent sessions in hypnosis show, they want us to change our ways. Plain and simple.

 

Why? This is what I want to know. You guys keep saying 'humanity needs to get its head out of its ass,' etc., etc., but then you're the ones to assert that aliens have such a great interest in our development as a species or whatever. Why would they give a shit about us?

Umm, no, it's anything but 'plain and simple.' You have to consider the people performing the hypnosis and the subjects they're performing it on, as well as the viability of hypnosis as a method of obtaining reliable information. The subject may have false memories or simply be lying; the hypnotist may already know what he wants to find and lead the subject to that conclusion; and hypnosis may itself be a flawed or completely useless means of obtaining anything reliable. All of these questions must be asked in any instance where information has been obtained through hypnosis.

There are definitely different schools of thought about alien abduction. Some hypnotists give these stories credit, some don't. The ones that do, I find, tend to have an air of promoting the idea in a less than objective way; i.e. they want to recover memories of alien abduction, and anyone who knows anything about hypnosis (and what I know is not a lot) can tell you that even subtle verbal cues from the hypnotist can drastically alter the results. The mind is very susceptible to suggestion when in a trance-like state, so it is hardly a stretch to think that the person performing the hypnotism can alter the results, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by the way they go about it.

And of course, this does not even address the questions about the reliability of information obtained this way, which is obviously a serious issue. It is so easy to mislead the subject and create false memories and impressions, even accidentally, that it is impossible to trust memories 'unlocked' by it without outside corroboration. Being that we don't even really understand how hypnosis works or how reliable it is, this casts a lot of doubt on the practise itself.

 

a theory i heard from a movie [it was like a lame low budget movie] was that Aliens came to earth and "planted" humans to become the perfect weapon.

i was like "Hmmm that an interesting spin on life"

 

There are a lot of theories stating that the human race was created by extraterrestrials. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them before.

 

I'm going to go with my faith, and say God created us.

But, As for your previous statement, Are you a hypnosis expert? Do you perform it on a daily basis? No. I think i'll believe those people before I believe someone who hasn't even had any experience with it. This is something these people do on a daily basis. And the only way you could have false memories was if you DEEPLY believed something happen and you convinced yourself that its true. Making up scenerios that didn't happen. But it would basically have been burned into your memory to even come out through hypnosis. Moments like this. You can just say, "Hey, Me and Hippiexchild didn't get into a debate. It was all in my head" Because you would be lying to yourself and deep inside you would know it. So in hypnosis, it would come out. You would reveal yourself as a lie and that you tried to falsify your memories. Hypnosis unlocks the deeper inner concious of the human mind. It would be near impossible to fake a memory. Especially a memory that you can't remember. ;]

Example, Reincarnation for example. Thousands claim to have memories of their past life. Like being in the Revolutionary war. But when they are under going hypnosis, they almost all the time say things that really did happen. This is simliar to the abductee's stories. Think about it man.

 

Yeah. The problem is that not all hypnotists give credit to this stuff. Just those who perform it and, as I said, a lot of them have an agenda.

Hypnosis is always portrayed as giving direct access to suppressed memories and all that stuff, but it doesn't. It takes a very skilled hypnotist to come up with anything that's somewhat reliable, because the subject is in a trance, and therefore extremely suggestible. I said all this already. You obviously believe these people; I'm sceptical. Let it be.

 

lol. I've been under hypnosis before. And I barely remember anything till a couple of days later. I start remembering things I forgot, like some of my drug trips. Ha. You under go hypnosis and when you wake up, it'll be like "WTF JUST HAPPENED?!"

 

But you have no way of knowing how accurate those memories are.

 

They are accurate. I can verify by asking the people who were with me during these trips. And one particular trip, under DXM, I asked my best friend if that stuff really happened and he said it did. Now I doubt 2 people created a false memory.

 

Now see if you can prove that all memories recovered under hypnosis are reliable.

 

who said they were?

 

Wow. Did I ever say all memories? I was refering to 90% of the memories recovered really did happen. Google this. Hypnosis on a person with amnesia. See what you find. ;] That will say it all my friend. And you will have nothing to argue back with, that I can promise you.

 

Sure. Your memories. That's one instance out of millions. We have no idea how these people are conducting these sessions, or what their agendas are. I'm sure some of them are honest, but a lot aren't. If you can't see what a big fucking game all this UFO shit is, I'm sorry. For every legitimate experience, there are a thousand bullshit stories; for every credible researcher, there are a thousand pseudo-experts who can convince people because they want to believe it.

I know memories can sometimes be recovered through hypnosis. They can also be falsified. To me, it seems like a pretty flimsy basis for belief in the presence of extraterrestrials on Earth. Maybe to you it doesn't. That's your problem. But I will say that you should be concerned if you ever are so convinced by something that you think no one could argue against it. There are all kinds of arguments against the reliability of hypnosis. If I only read arguments in favour of it and don't critically examine them, then yeah, maybe it would be convincing. But I don't, and it's not.

 

I took this from a article I found on google. In no way in any shape or form did I write this.
"In introductory psychology class, we learned about memory. As always, I found the topic of discussion rather interesting, especially because we placed it into the context of recovering repressed memories. In 1991, a man was convicted of raping and murdering his daughter’s friend back in 1969. The conviction was largely based off of the daughter’s recovery of a repressed memory (1). Though, recovered memories are not always beneficial or even real. After erroneously thinking that she had abused her children, Patricia Burgus claimed that psychiatrists had placed memories into head. Burgus’ therapist convinced her that she had been a Satan-worshiping cannibal. Needless to say, Burgus won a hefty sum of money in the end (1). With such controversy it’s is important to investigate both the legitimacy and illegitimacy of repressed memories and the ability to recover them.

Anna Tomasulo wrote an interesting paper on the validity of repressed memory with the focus on latent memories of sexual abuse. After researching both arguments, she seemed partial to the side accepting the notion of recovering repressed memories as valid phenomenon. However, she warned that recovered memories as court evidence should be approached with healthy skepticism. Tomasulo interested me when she talked about psychotherapists assisting in the invention of false memories. She mentioned that our memories could easily be manipulated (2). I am interested in how easily our memories can be influence from outside sources. Elucidating this issue can influence policy makers in deciding whether memories recovered by hypnotic treatment and other psychotherapeutic techniques should be considered as valid court evidence.

Let’s briefly revisit arguments for and against the notion of repressed and recovered memories. Although ‘repressed memory’ is not a mainstream clinical term, dissociative amnesia is a DSM-IV recognized disorder. Dissociative amnesia is “characterized by an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness” (3). Two prominent psychiatric researchers from Harvard, Pope and Hudson, further contribute to the argument, saying that dissociative amnesia prevents one from voluntarily access to memories for a substantial amount of time. After that time, however, recovered memories may be rather accurate (3). In essence, the ability to recover a repressed memory is acknowledged a possible by prominent psychiatric researchers.

Though, one must be skeptical – what were their observations? One story that supports Pope and Hudson’s side of the debate involves Jeffery Haine. Later in his life, Haine recovered painful memories of molestation by his reverend. He recovered these memories during visits to his therapists. His memories were corroborated by a man, who vividly remembered sexual abuse from the reverend, and he won his case in court (4). This observation supports the possibility that recovered memories are valid. However, I don’t consider this observation absolute because we still do not know for sure whether Haine was actually abused. A concrete observation occurred in the trial, Lund vs. Giesen. After the court ruled that Lund’s recovered memory would be considered evidence, Giesen admitted to his acts, which the recovered memory described (4). Hence, one can see that recovered memories from psychotherapy may be valid.

Nevertheless, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) vehemently argues that recovered memories should not be considered actual evidence in court. FMSF argues that recovered memories are most likely fabricated memories. They argue against the validity of memory repression. They observed sixteen children who witnessed the murder of a parent. Not one of the sixteen children forgot the trauma (4). This observation supports the argument that traumatic memories cannot be repressed, and therefore recovered memories are invented ones.

I do not validate this observation because the sixteen children were constantly reminded of their experience when they were put into contact with the police, social workers, etc. (4). Nevertheless, more convincing observations against recovered memories exist. In the trial case, Ramona vs. Ramona, the court awarded the Ramona father half a million dollars from the therapist because the therapy falsely convinced the Ramona daughter that the father had sexually abused her. Substantial evidence proved contrary to the recovered memory, but the father still lost his job and good reputation (5). Such observations suggest that recovered memories are more detrimental than helpful.

With concrete observations supporting both sides of the unresolved argument, one must look at the nervous system. Is it biologically plausible to be able to recover a repressed memory? Or is it more biologically plausible to convince oneself of a false memory? Essentially, one must ask what comprises the biological basis of memory. Memory is associated with the hippocampus structure in the brain. Within the hippocampus, long term potentiation (LTP) occurs. LTP is the wiring of neurons that ‘fire together’. LTP in the hippocampus is associated with memory and learning. Alzheimer, a detrimental disease that causes the loss of memory, has been seen to affect the LTP in the hippocampus (6). The observation that patients with Alzheimer suffer from a loss of LTP in the hippocampus links hippocampal LTP with memory.

As we are constantly leanrning and aquiring new memories, one would think that the hippocampus is constantly changing. The truth is that the hippocampus is always changing. Neurons are constantly forming and breaking synaptic connections. This notion is referred to as neural plasticity, and the hippocampus is subject to much neural plasticity (7). Since the hippocampus memory box in the brain is always changing, can it be manipulated into remembering something false? The answer is... yes and no.

Observations already mentioned have shown that psychotherapy can coerce falsified memories in some people. However, observations also show that memory remains steadfast in some people. Evolution most likely favors a steadfast memory. Hence, mundane observations, which happen everyday, contradict the assertion that our memory can be easily manipulated. For example, my memory remained unchanged when my older brother told me that I owed him ten dollars after I vividly remember that I had already paid him. Such instances support the notion that memory cannot be easily manipulated occur very frequently. Nevertheless, manipulations can occur.

So I have written almost nine hundred words, and the best answer that I can give is that observations support both points of view. What should be the policy for how to treat recover memories in court? My suggestion is to treat each case differently. As we have seen, there are observations that support the validity of recovered memories and there are observations with invalidate recovered memories. Certain professionals have a tendency to coerce their patients into inventing memories while others are able to simply guide their patients in recovering memories, which were repressed. Likewise, the memory of certain patients can be easily manipulated while others’ repressed memories cannot be altered.

I think this leads us to an interesting question for further research: what factors make one vulnerable to memory manipulation? Perhaps there is a factor that could predict how easily one’s memory can be manipulated. I would hypothesize that people who are more confident are less likely to be coerced into false memories than people with low self confidence. Unfortunately, patients who undergo hypnotic treatment tend to have lower self-esteem. Under my proposed model, the ones most vulnerable to memory alteration are the ones undergoing such therapy.

This also raises a question regarding repressed memories. Are people with lower self-esteem more likely to repress painful memories? I would again hypothesize that in the case of sexual abuse, one who is strong minded may be able to verbally and mentally say that a sexual predator has wronged him/her and would not repress their memory. On the other hand, one who has low self-esteem may not have the ability to mentally tell himself/herself (in the form of a memory) that s/he had been wronged."

[My point being, Most people who have encounters with UFOs or ET, are normally people that have a normal life and tend to be more confident than someone who has been sexually assaulted or something to that nature, thereforth not being able to remember such an event can't be traumatic to the person in question if they aren't able to recall such an event.]

 

I don't really know what you're trying to say here or how it relates to our argument. I agree with most of that the article said.

 

Did you read the part that said, "People who this happen to, tend to be people with low self confidence."

Well thats not the case with Abductees. They are normal people just like you and I, my friend.

 

If you think that proves anything, you're insane.

 

It does. You have to understand that these people didn't plan for this shit to happen to them. They had a routine life and it was interrupted by something greater than we can imagine. And now they have problems because of it. The mind is a powerful thing. But its only on a rare occasion that memories are falsified. Most people who falsify memories have a long case of mental history and most of them have some sort of mental disorder. Most UFO cases that involve abductions, the people turn out to be healthy and in good physical and mental condition. These people are talked to by a psycologist most of the time to rule out the possibility of a mental disorder. You don't actually think they would just hypnotize them without looking at there mental background and making sure they are not insane. Correct?

 

Right. What I meant was that you're basing your argument on a normative statement ('people... tend to have low self-confidence') made by someone who, from what it says in the article (not sure where it came from) has no more expertise than you can get in an introductory psych class. That aside, the quote you mentioned said 'low self-confidence,' not 'mentally deranged,' as you seem to imply it did. It is also, as I said, a normative statement -- that is, it makes a statement about the way things generally are, but it's certainly not true in every case. I'm also curious why you assume that these people generally do not any mental problems, and why you assume that the hypnotists in question do not have an agenda of their own. It would obviously be much easier to falsify memories if it were done intentionally by a hypnotist.