Seeing Cryptids: The Problems

[Jodie]

I just told you, you point out all of the facts, then when those facts are rejected you point out that it's either illogical/irrational.

 

[Jodie]

Remember, you're supposed to paint the corners first.

What is this remark supposed to mean? It's incredibly condescending, and since you can't understand what I meant after I explained it to you I'm going to assume you are picking an argument. When you can talk to me like a human being I'll answer your questions.

 

[The Shrike]

Rejection of my sighting isn't the problem, it's the grounds upon which any of you choose to reject my sighting, and the disrespectful approach that is the problem.

The respectful approach is to point out that thousands of people have claimed things just like you have, but they were wrong. As you are also people, you are most likely wrong as well. You know this because you've been a participant here and at the JREF for quite some time now. This was pointed out; you doubled down.

In your doubling-down, you served up classic examples of someone making up a story on the fly, apparently in concert with claiming past-life memories in another thread. Then you did that thing again in which you claim I've posted things that I haven't, even after being shown that I hadn't made the statements that you claim.

Thus, you claimed something extraordinary, claimed you couldn't have been mistaken, and then engaged in behaviors that drag your credibility to murky depths. That's how we got here in this thread.

 

[Jodie]

The respectful approach is to point out that thousands of people have claimed things just like you have, but they were wrong. As you are also people, you are most likely wrong as well. You know this because you've been a participant here and at the JREF for quite some time now. This was pointed out; you doubled down.

It's my sighting, and not an anonymous poster's sighting that I'm judging. I had other people with me. The SC DNR employee my friend spoke to didn't think we were mistaken so why would I consider anything that any of you in other states and continents would have to say about my visual perception, much less calling me a liar.

In your doubling-down, you served up classic examples of someone making up a story on the fly, apparently in concert with claiming past-life memories in another thread. Then you did that thing again in which you claim I've posted things that I haven't, even after being shown that I hadn't made the statements that you claim.

You are an ornithologist/biologist, not an online psychologist. You have no expertise in deciding if someone is lying or telling the truth, all you have is an opinion. As for misquoting you, that didn't happen. You can choose to see it that way, but once again, it's your perception, not my intention.

Thus, you claimed something extraordinary, claimed you couldn't have been mistaken, and then engaged in behaviors that drag your credibility to murky depths. That's how we got here in this thread.

No, rather than address it respectfully it went straight to insults, many were from you. If any of you who have no expertise in brain research, specifically how memories are laid down, try to diagnose what you believe to be my perceptual shortcomings of course I'm going to call you out on it. Pretending expertise where you have none hurts your credibility, not mine.

That is how we always end up here.

 

[Resume]

Here's a neuroscientist on the shortcomings/fallibility of memory:
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/more-evidence-our-memory-stinks/

It may be distressing to fully realize this, but it is also liberating – human memory is incredibly flawed. Not only can our memories change over time, we can generate entirely false memories. You cannot trust what you remember.

That is partly why scientists do not trust in anecdotes and stories. They are simply not reliable evidence.

 

[The Shrike]

. . . you point out all of the facts, then when those facts are rejected . . .

Maybe this is the problem, Jodie. Stop rejecting facts for a bit and see if you have any better luck around here.

 

[William Parcher]

Maybe this is the problem, Jodie. Stop rejecting facts for a bit and see if you have any better luck around here.

I don't think that she would regard her "luck around here" as being less than good. All Jodie posts are bullseyes.

 

[Drewbot]

I don't think that she would regard her "luck around here" as being less than good. All Jodie posts are bullseyes.

She gets the desired response every time she posts, don't for one second think she expects us to accept her claims.

 

[Drewbot]

. Rejection of my sighting isn't the problem, it's the grounds upon which any of you choose to reject my sighting, and the disrespectful approach that is the problem.

Jodie, is it more disrespectful for us to discount your sighting (Of a South Carolina Cryptid), or for you to keep misrepresenting other poster's position, long after your repeated mistakes have been pointed out to you time and again?

 

[William Parcher]

Well that's up to you, I'm pretty sure everyone made up their mind before I even posted my sighting.

What I had to say about your cougar sighting would have been no different if it was someone else making the claim. It would have been no different even if I knew absolutely nothing about the claimant.

 

[Jodie]

Maybe this is the problem, Jodie. Stop rejecting facts for a bit and see if you have any better luck around here.

I haven't rejected any facts that I'm aware of, would you mind linking posts where that has occurred?

 

[Jodie]

Jodie, is it more disrespectful for us to discount your sighting (Of a South Carolina Cryptid), or for you to keep misrepresenting other poster's position, long after your repeated mistakes have been pointed out to you time and again?

I haven't misrepresented anything. I've simply pointed out how the limited understanding anyone here might have of the area, how memory actually works, and the repetitive bad manners that some of you demonstrate tend to undermine your own position. I haven't had any problem with posters that have had a genuine interest in my sighting. The only mistake I made was assuming that everyone would be interested in what happened since there was some doubt about Cliff's cougar sighting.

 

[Jodie]

What I had to say about your cougar sighting would have been no different if it was someone else making the claim. It would have been no different even if I knew absolutely nothing about the claimant.

Well I guess you should be thankful that the discussions are on a forum and not in person because if this is how you speak to people in the real world I'm surprised that you are still here to type.

 

[Jodie]

I don't think that she would regard her "luck around here" as being less than good. All Jodie posts are bullseyes.

That seems to be the standard fall back excuse when you can't find a reasonable counter to my argument.

 

[The Shrike]

Jodie, if I'm the one pointing out the facts then I'm not the one rejecting those facts. So who is rejecting these facts, if it isn't you?

 

[Jodie]

Obviously you didn't bother to look more deeply into how memory is laid down and I don't see a giant improvement in your manners. Now let's talk about the sin of omission, if you really wanted a serious discussion about this, and I'm assuming that you are familiar with SC, you might have included information about the state that would have supported a panther or cougar traveling through the area, but you didn't do that. Whatever your contributions are here, they definitely lack balance.

 

[Resume]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hidden-motives/201203/unreliable-memory

We tend to think that memories are stored in our brains just as they are in computers. Once registered, the data are put away for safe-keeping and eventual recall. The facts don’t change.

But neuroscientists have shown that each time we remember something, we are reconstructing the event, reassembling it from traces throughout the brain.

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=57592

How the Truth Gets Twisted

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has devoted her career to proving that memories don't just fade, they can also change . . . Loftus would know. Perhaps no modern academic has done more to advance our understanding of the malleability and fallibility of memory. Over an accolade-strewn 40-plus years of scholarship, Loftus, MA '67, PhD '70, has demonstrated repeatedly how unreliable memory is, going so far as to show that full-grown adults can have entire fake memories implanted in their psyches.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/

Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts
Eyewitness testimony is fickle and, all too often, shockingly inaccurate . . .

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-of-your-memories-are-fake/281558/

New research released this week has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories,” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happened-memory-recollection

T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/06/13/i-saw-it-with-my-own-eyes/
“I saw it with my own eyes”

Radford and Nickell recount several examples that make this point vividly. In 2004, one Dennis Plucknett and his 14-year-old son Alex were out hunting in north Florida. Alex was in a ditch some 225 yards away from his father when someone yelled “Hog!” Dennis grabbed his gun, pointed it at a distant moving object that looked like a hog to him and fired. Instead, he killed his son with a single shot to the head. Alex had been wearing a black toboggan cap, not a hog costume or anything else that would have made him look remotely hog-like. Yet at that distance, and with the suggestion that there was a wild hog nearby, his father mistook a toboggan cap for a wild boar, and a tragic result occurred.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4446

When someone looks at me and earnestly says, "I know what I saw," I am fond of replying, "No you don't." You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.

 

[HarryHenderson]

As I've said to other friends before, "not judging, just saying" that you guys are letting the instigator antagonist trawler troller run you ragged. She's even using the exact same rude tactics as our national park car camping guru ChrisBFRPKY. Admit to nothing, concede nothing, claim immutable righteousness and lie through your teeth as needed. Such a wise and wonderful way to intelligently communicate with other humans in a deliberately friendly non-stressful environment.

 

[Jodie]

It depends on what kind of memory it is, the circumstances surrounding the event, and the trigger for recalling the memory. What you posted doesn't apply wholesale to every situation, reconsolidation isn't a given.

http://www.human-memory.net/processes_encoding.html


"Human memory is fundamentally associative, meaning that a new piece of information is remembered better if it can be associated with previously acquired knowledge that is already firmly anchored in memory. The more personally meaningful the association, the more effective the encoding and consolidation. Elaborate processing that emphasizes meaning and associations that are familiar tends to leads to improved recall."

"Many studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events. One theory suggests that high levels of emotional arousal lead to attention narrowing, where the range of sensitive cues from the stimulus and its environment is decreased, so that information central to the source of the emotional arousal is strongly encoded while peripheral details are not (e.g. the so-called “weapon focus effect”, in which witnesses to a crime tend to remember the gun or knife in great detail, but not other more peripheral details such as the perpetrator’s clothing or vehicle)."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2265099/


"The potential for altering emotional memories during or immediately after retrieval is an intriguing possibility that has been explored extensively in animal models. The alteration of postretrieval emotional memory traces in humans, however, has not been conclusively demonstrated. The “first wave” of reconsolidation research led to conflicting reports as to whether electroconvulsive therapy produced amnesia for reactivated memory traces in humans . Although more recent human research has suggested that the memory trace for a motor sequence task can be disrupted through a reconsolidation-type mechanism , the learning of a motor sequence is quite distinct from emotional declarative memories. Although animal work has provided several demonstrations of reconsolidation of hippocampally mediated memories, it is not clear to what extent the same reconsolidation mechanisms affect human declarative memory traces, especially for emotional events. The similarities in brain mechanisms that underlie rodent and human emotional learning situations, such as fear conditioning, extinction, and reward learning, suggest that the labile state that is thought to be affected in animal reconsolidation paradigms should also be manipulable during memory retrieval in humans. However, evidence for reconsolidation of human emotional memory has thus far remained elusive."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26238574

"Memory reconsolidation is considered to be the process whereby stored memories become labile on recall, allowing updating. Blocking the restabilization of a memory during reconsolidation is held to result in a permanent amnesia. The targeted knockdown of either Zif268 or Arc levels in the brain, and inhibition of protein synthesis, after a brief recall results in a non-recoverable retrograde amnesia, known as reconsolidation blockade. These experimental manipulations are seen as key proof for the existence of reconsolidation. However, here we demonstrate that despite disrupting the molecular correlates of reconsolidation in the hippocampus, rodents are still able to recover contextual memories. Our results challenge the view that reconsolidation is a separate memory process and instead suggest that the molecular events activated initially at recall act to constrain premature extinction."

What you guys are basing your position on are from these kinds of studies that are based on learning and the treatment for disorders that affect memory. Without consolidation/reconsolidation we would never be able to update anything we've ever learned. That kind of memory is distinctly different from a memory that results from an emotional event.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3650827/

Three studies are of direct relevance to the hypothesis that reconsolidation mediates memory updating . Firstly, in human episodic memories, interference congruent with retrieval of a prior memory results in an incorrectly updated memory for a list of items . This finding is consistent with, though not directly demonstrative of, a role of reconsolidation in updating memories. Moreover, a prior study of inhibitory avoidance learning in rats did not provide evidence that reconsolidation is functionally involved in linking new information to a reactivated memory. Using the doubly dissociable mechanisms of inhibitory avoidance memory consolidation and reconsolidation, Tronel et al. showed that second-order conditioning recruited consolidation processes selectively .However, linking new information to an old memory can be viewed simply as new learning based upon evoked memories, which would be expected to necessitate consolidation mechanisms, rather than true memory updating."

"Therefore, memory reconsolidation may well prove to be the mechanism by which memories are updated through further experience, though it remains to be determined whether reconsolidation plays a similar functional role in other forms of memory updating, such as memory weakening or changes in memory content."

"Memory reconsolidation is a rapidly expanding field of research, which is becoming widely accepted as a fundamental process in long-term memory. While advances are continually being made in terms of the pharmacological and cellular mechanisms of reconsolidation, these do not address the fundamental question of the role of memory reconsolidation in memory persistence. In this review, I have proposed that the function of memory reconsolidation may be to mediate the updating of a memory in order to maintain its adaptive relevance. This memory updating hypothesis of reconsolidation has the potential to account for when reconsolidation does and does not take place. Indeed, I suggest both that reconsolidation is in fact a universal property of memories and that it is engaged specifically under conditions of memory updating. A major question that emerges is that of how memory reactivation is determined at the mechanistic level depending on whether a memory should be updated."

Further reading suggests that we'll have to rethink all of the above because they have discovered protein prions that play a role in the different kinds of memory processes.

http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2015/07/02/long-term-memories-and-prions/

"When long-term memories are created in the brain, new connections are made between neurons to store the memory. But those physical connections must be maintained for a memory to persist, or else they will disintegrate and the memory will disappear within days. Many researchers have searched for molecules that maintain long-term memory, but their identity has remained elusive."

"As long as these aggregates are present, Kandel says, long-term memories persist. Prion aggregates renew themselves by continually recruiting newly made soluble prions into the aggregates. “This ongoing maintenance is crucial,” said Dr. Kandel. “It’s how you remember, for example, your first love for the rest of your life.”

Well I guess that explains why statin drugs can sometimes affect memory. Without cholesterol, protein synthesis stops in the brain.

 

[rockinkt]

As I've said to other friends before, "not judging, just saying" that you guys are letting the instigator antagonist trawler troller run you ragged. She's even using the exact same rude tactics as our national park car camping guru ChrisBFRPKY. Admit to nothing, concede nothing, claim immutable righteousness and lie through your teeth as needed. Such a wise and wonderful way to intelligently communicate with other humans in a deliberately friendly non-stressful environment.

This.