Talk:Body memory

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Yeah, I know, it needs citations, references, links, etc. I'll get there. MaxMangel 02:06, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I suggest that you might rethink this article... I recently saw a video taken by the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute which showed an ex-Vietnam veteran being de-traumatised. His own experience was a series of very clear physical sensations and reactions in his body which occurred when he accessed memories of specific traumatic incidents. The body sensations/movements occured simultaneously with the memory, and if they are NOT allowed, then the trauma remains unresolved, because (presumably) the somatic components are an integral part of the memory. Of course, lots of this body memory stuff is based on personal experience - as are most of the other consciousness-related subjects. There are pretty good models of trauma by Pierre Janet (and more recent workers), and models of how to successfully work with the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) imbalance caused by a retained trauma.

The issue with this - ultimately - is do you really trust your own body and your own memory? If you dont do that, and think that it's all cerebral, then of course, your world view will be pretty impervious to this kind of phenomenon. This also has repercussions for "False Memory Syndrome" (do you really remember what you had for breakfast yeaterday, and if you ate alone, how could anyone corroborate that?)

The traumatic events which are recalled in so-called "false-memory syndrome" are essentially somatic (body) memories. If memory is partly somatic, then everything our body has progressed through may produce some degree of somatic memory - including prenatal events. These wouldn't be experienced in the normal memory sense, because they occur at a pre-verbal (and possibly pre-visual) period on our formation, but some sensory information may be preserved.

I agree fully that a) it is possible to fantasise, b) if we imagine being attacked, then our bodies respond more or less with increased adrenaline, c) memories can be distorted and mixed up with other memories (and in these days of film and television, that is quite complex). However, you can't get post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD by imagining a bomb or fantasising a rape. And recent research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the more severe DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) shows that there are very clear physiological responses to memories which are abnormal, and cannot be reproduced by actors or by fantasising. These include blood pressure, heart rate, heart rate variability and cortical activity (including L-R incoherence to prevent access to somatic memories). There is very little doubt that anyone who has PTSD or DID has experienced very severe trauma - and that (if you were to work with these people you would observe that) some form of memory emerges somatically. Body memory. Dictostelium 14:33, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure who you are arguing with. Please keep your posts here confined to discussion of how to improve this article. You have made significant changes that do not match the look and feel of how wikipedia articles are presented. Please take the time to peruse more articles on the wiki to see what I mean and fix the problem. Also, the article cannot have sentences that contradict each other. Also, please remember the wiki rules for verifiability - so source any of your statements that might be consindered controversial. I don't want to have to come back to this article and remove all your edits because your statements were biased and unsourced. MaxMangel 03:28, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

You failed to improve your changes so I reverted most of them. Please read the rules on how to edit articles properly before trying again. MaxMangel 00:15, 15 July 2006 (UTC)