The Neuromantics – Episode 7

We’re entering on sensitive ground in Episode 7 of the Neuromantics, our monthly podcast at the intersection of neuroscience and literature. In the 1990s, the “Memory Wars”, waged between different scientists, clinicians and therapists (and their patients), tried to settle a difficult question: is it possible for the memory of a traumatic event to be a) completely repressed (or re-directed), and b) retrieved, usually in a therapeutic environment? What are the medico-legal implications? We review the evidence, as presented in “The Return of the Repressed: The Persistent and Problematic Claims of Long-Forgotten Trauma” ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691619862306,) by Henry Otgaar et al, looking at the circumstances of retrieval, the influence of questioning, the role of wanting, why experts find it hard to say “we don’t know”, and the reframing of repressed memory as “dissociative amnesia”.

Thinking back inside the box – or tank – Julio Cortazar‘s short story, Axolotl, shows what happens when wanting and fascination lead to material (and magical) transformation. Can a man be an amphibian? Is a larval stage salamander a person? What do humans and reptiles not have in common? Find out in the programme, and in the text itself: http://fullreads.com/literature/axolotl/