Julia Shaw

And it's not that therapy doesn't necessarily, like therapy can bring out more details for sure.

But the problem is that certain kinds of therapy mirror what we do in false memory research in terms of implanting false memories.

And it just makes it really messy.

And you just, it makes the quality of the evidence really low because we can no longer tell what is because of the therapy and what's actually remembered.

Receipts.

That's all you got.

You have to look at your original versions.

If you only have your version now, the only thing you can look for is evidence that confirms or shows that it didn't happen.

If you can't access that, then it ultimately is a matter of, especially if you've got two people saying completely different things, it ends up being a battle of confidence ultimately.

It depends on the kind of therapy.

So there's a lot of therapy that is evidence-based and that is very much focused on tackling sort of feelings and reactions that you have right now.

Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including psychoanalysis, which...

are very focused on trying to find retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past.

And I am very critical of the kinds of, well, both from an explanatory perspective, but also from a false memory perspective.

I don't think that we are the way we are because of individual incidents that happen to us.

I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain.

To be like, you are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time is like, I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day?

And so I think that there's sometimes an oversimplified searching for answers or sources of problems that we have that I don't like.

I don't think it's true.

And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is...