have any of you guys ever left for like maybe a second that you remember something and it's like it's already happened before but it's just like a flashback kind of. But it's only for a second or so and then it goes way and you can't remember what has happened before except this time you're doing the same thing again and you're in the present. If any one knows anything about this matter i'd really apreciate some info! Thanks!! and here's an intersting on article on memory!! enjoy (wink,wink):-) Flights of Memory Discover Magazine, May 1994)by Eric Kandel Jennifer H., a professional musician, was 23 when she sought help because she was having problems with sexual intimacy. While in therapy, she also began exploring the unexplained feelings of panic that had haunted her daily since early childhood. Gradually, she says, she traced her feelings of terror to their source, recalling memories she'd repressed since leaving home. She remembered her father first molesting her and then raping her from the time she was 4 until she moved out at 17. She recalled that he had throttled her, threatening to kill her if she told anyone. As these memories resurfaced, her panic attacks and other symptoms receded. But when she confronted her father, a mechanical engineer at a prominent northeastern university, he flatly denied abusing her. Other family members remembered Jennifer's father grabbing her breasts. Jennifer herself had a memory--never forgotten--of his staring at her chest and making crude sexual remarks. Concerned that her father would abuse other children unless he acknowledged his problem, Jennifer turned to the courts, hoping a lawsuit might prod her father into treatment. The statute of limitations on filing criminal charges had expired, but in 1988 Jennifer brought a personal-injury suit against her father. In addition to her own testimony, the court heard her mother--by then divorced--testify to having seen Jennifer's father lying on top of Jennifer's 14-year-old sister; she also said he'd fondled a baby-sitter in her early teens. Jennifer's father's sister recalled his making sexual passes at young girls. In 1993 a Massachusetts jury ordered him to pay Jennifer $500,000 in damages. (Civil juries can't order people into treatment as part of a judgment.) Although Jennifer's father admitted to fondling the baby-sitter, he maintains to this day that he never abused his daughter. Jennifer H.'s case is one of several recent cases at the heart of a fierce controversy over recovered memories--memories of sexual abuse that come back after a period of repression. It was only in the 1980s that adults who'd been molested as children began to press their claims in court, publicly confronting their abusers in the hope of forcing them to acknowledge their guilt. But as the number of cases has risen, a growing number of parents, researchers, and academics have begun to speak out about the dangers of false accusations. They question in particular whether it's psychologically possible to repress traumatic childhood memories and then recover them. And they suggest that some people, egged on by therapists or self-help books, are fabricating memories of incidents that never occurred. So far, people on both sides of the debate have relied on psychological, rather than biological, insights into how memory works to make their case. Can biology in fact shed any light on whether and how memories might be repressed and recovered? Perhaps--but to appreciate the debate fully, we first need to put it in its sociological context. Until the early 1970s the sexual abuse of children was largely ignored; their stories were doubted and minimized, or they were blamed for encouraging their molestation. But research within the past 15 years or so suggests that child molesting is far from rare. Depending on who is asked and how abuse is defined, studies find that between 8 and 38 percent of women say they were abused as children, while figures for men range from 3 to 16 percent. (The 38 percent figure is from a random survey in 1978 of 930 women in San Francisco that defined abuse as any unwanted sexual activity with a relative before age 18; fondling, rape, or attempted rape by a nonrelative of children under 14; and attempted or completed forcible rape by a nonrelative of children ages 14 to 17--descriptions consistent with criminal law definitions of child molestation.) Many adults who were abused as children clearly remember the experience all too well. But studies by Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman and others also suggest that temporarily repressing such memories may not be uncommon. In 1987 Herman found that of 53 women attending incest survivor groups, almost two-thirds reported partial or complete memory lapses at some point after the abuse occurred. These findings have since been echoed in a larger survey of men as well as women led by psychiatrist John Briere at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. The earlier the abuse occurred, and the more violent or persistent it was, the more likely victims were to block the memory for long periods--a finding that gels with the clinical studies of Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist at the University of California at San Francisco, who finds that children exposed to repeated traumas are more likely to repress them than children suffering a one-time traumatic event. One of the most systematic efforts to track memory repression was recently conducted by Linda Meyer Williams, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire. Williams interviewed 129 women who were treated for sexual abuse when they were young girls in the mid-1970s. More than one- third had no memory of, or chose not to report, the molestation documented in their medical records. Since over half of these women discussed other incidents of sexual abuse, selective amnesia is a more likely explanation for their response (or lack of it) than any unwillingness to discuss sex. Most clinical psychologists believe that children can learn to block memories as a survival mechanism: if physical escape from their tormentors is impossible, psychological escape may become crucial. When children can't avoid abuse and know it's going to be repeated, some cope by tuning out--mentally dissociating themselves from the abuse while it's occurring--or by repressing the memory afterward. But repression, according to this school of thought, may cease to be helpful in adult life. Away from the traumatic environment, adults may find their memories resurfacing, either gradually in fragments, or suddenly in vivid flashbacks. As in Jennifer H.'s case, these memories may return during therapy, but that's by no means always the case. Frank Fitzpatrick was 38, married, and securely employed as an insurance adjuster in Rhode Island when he spontaneously recalled being molested by Father James Porter 26 years earlier. Since being confronted by Fitzpatrick in 1990, the Roman Catholic priest has admitted to molesting dozens of boys and girls. When the news became public, 68 men and women said that they too had been assaulted by Father Porter. At least half a dozen recalled the abuse only after news reports triggered the return of their childhood memories. But people accused of abuse don't often confess--and their accusers' stories can't easily be corroborated. That leaves memory as the basis of many criminal and civil cases and makes determining the accuracy of people's memories of paramount importance. Because child molestation is so abhorrent, the mere taint of suspicion can ruin lives. Those accused risk losing their families, careers, and reputations; they face high legal costs and potentially prison if criminal charges are pressed. According to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, over 9,500 U.S. families now claim that their adult children have tarred them with abuses that never occurred. (The foundation was established in 1992 by Pamela and Peter Freyd after their daughter Jennifer, now a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, confronted them with accusations of abuse by her father--an allegation they have energetically disputed.) Many of these families blame zealous therapists and popular self-help books for encouraging their children's "false memories." Some researchers--among them psychologists Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington and Richard Ofshe of the University of California at Berkeley--have joined them in casting doubt on the believability of repressed memories. Publicity about child abuse, they argue, has fostered a climate in which it's all too tempting to believe that hidden abuse is the cause of many people's ill-defined symptoms of distress. Loftus and Ofshe think that, consciously or carelessly, some therapists are seeding ideas into vulnerable patients' minds. Fictitious memories, they point out, can be implanted with hypnosis--or even without. Loftus cites a study in which five people were told a false story by an older relative about how they'd gotten lost in a mall or apartment complex as children. When they were later asked to recall further details, they related elaborate memories of the fictitious incident. Is it as easy to implant something as traumatic as being repeatedly raped by someone in your family? There may indeed be powerful disincentives to admitting to false memories. Nevertheless it's still striking how very few cases come to light. As further evidence of the malleability of memory, Loftus and Ofshe cite the sensational case of Paul Ingram, a deputy sheriff in Washington State whose two daughters accused him of sexually abusing them as part of a Satanic cult. Ingram, a fundamentalist Christian, denied the charge. In jail, though, he was repeatedly questioned about the alleged incidents by the police and a minister, and was asked to visualize them by a psychologist--until he finally came up with lurid memories of the incidents. Ofshe was originally hired to interview Ingram by the prosecution, not the defense. To test Ingram's suggestibility, Ofshe asked him about a scene--entirely invented--in which Ingram forced his son and daughter to have sex. At first Ingram recalled nothing. Then Ofshe encouraged Ingram to imagine the scene and to "pray on the image," as Ingram had done before. Ingram subsequently developed detailed memories about the invented scenario, casting doubt on all of his previous confessions.