Question:
Hypnosis Used In the Courtroom? Is it legal of use information (not an admission of guilt) in a court case using hypnotism to help a witness remember/recall information of the case?
Answer:
I’m going to assume you are in the US as it didn’t specify a location on a global platform. I’m in the UK so don’t have first hand knowledge of American rules, but from what I understand it’s generally not permissible there, but exceptions can be made.
The problem is, memory isn’t what people think it is, it isn’t akin to retrieving a file from a hard-drive, with it sitting there, pristine, just waiting to be accessed. Human memories are much more messy and each time you access a memory, you change it. Not only that, using hypnosis to access forgotten memories or details of a memory, although possible is fraught with issues. It is FAR easier to create a false memory than uncover a real one. And once created, it’s impossible to tell the real from the fabricated. If hypnosis is used for memory recovery, it should always be done by somebody specifically trained to do so, never by a general hypnotist.
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