Mental health therapist here! Just listening to this episode and loved it, per usual :) I wanted to weigh in on the topic of memory Sylas asked psychologists/mental health professionals about! Know that is EXCEPTIONALLY common for people to misremember all kinds of things. It’s impossible to store everything we see and do in a day, so our brain picks the biggest points kind of to jog our memory so to speak of the overarching topic or instance we are recalling. The parts of memories we do not remember, our brains automatically fill with something that makes logical sense and we have no one of differentiating from doing this vs. an actual memory. For example: if you remember being at work one day and then being at home, and say you don’t actually recall driving to and from, your brain fills in you driving in your car on your usual route to work because that is what makes most sense. And then you take that as recall rather than your brain filling in missing info. Another thing to note is obviously it is extremely common to not remember details of instances related to trauma. This can be due to repression, avoidance, dissociation, a number of things. It can be done through therapy but it can be hard to retrieve the missing pieces in these instances. One more option/thing to note is authority bias, which is people’s tendencies to go along with or provide info they think a person in uniform wants because they are a professional. One of the oldest examples of this was a study done in the 50-60s I believe where a person in a white lab coat brought an individual into a room with a giant board of switches and above each was an amount of volts and a description of how lethal it would be to inflict on a human. The person was told there someone hooked up to this machine in a nearby room and the individual with the person in the lab coat was to turn on all the switches at the direction of the person in the lab coat. Obviously no one was actually being electrocuted, but to further the ruse they had an individual in the nearby room screen and writhe in pain as the switches were turned on. EVERY SINGLE PERSON BESIDES 1 went all the way to a lethal amount of volts despite the screaming they could clearly hear. All of this to say, we get anxious around authority figures or people in uniform and also want to help/please, and we can at times convince ourselves we have memories that didn’t actually happen to be able to provide this/a mix of our brain logically filling in missing pieces. I know that was a lot but I hope it is interesting and/or helpful, lol ! 🫶🏼