Of the many questions resurfacing amid the so-called psychedelic renaissance, few are as scientifically and clinically complex as how these compounds interact with autobiographical memory; particularly when patients report the recovery of ‘repressed’ memories.

The issue isn’t uniquely psychedelic, to be sure. From mid-century LSD psychotherapy and sodium amytal “truth serum” interviews to the recovered-memory movement that helped spark the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ’90s, Western psychology has long wrestled with the reliability of recollection. But as psychedelics re-enter the clinical and cultural mainstream, psychedelics-specific questions related to autobiographical memory might also return to saliency. (Indeed, a recent New York Times feature catapulted such questions to the foreground once more.)

To help untangle the evidence, Psychedelic Alpha’s Josh Hardman spoke with Dr Samuli Kangaslampi, a licensed clinical psychologist and university lecturer in clinical psychology at Tampere University and senior researcher at INVEST, University of Turku. Kangaslampi also chairs the Finnish Psychotrauma Society, serves as vice chair of the Finnish Association for Psychedelic Research, and sits on the board of the Finnish Psychological Society. His work spans trauma research, stress and development, autobiographical memory, and psychedelics.

In this conversation, which took place at Borealis Psychedelic Science Summit in Stockholm last month, Kangaslampi shares the state of the science of psychedelics and memory, how “recovered” memories pose clinical and ethical challenges, and how therapists and researchers might navigate this ‘very messy’ territory.

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Josh Hardman, Psychedelic Alpha: So, what do we know about how psychedelics affect autobiographical memory and memory recall?

Samuli Kangaslampi: Well, the first answer is: very little!

We wrote a little paper on this with Morten Lietz. I already had the impression that we don’t really know much, but writing that paper sort of strengthened my conviction that we really don’t, and we should.

This idea of memories being recalled under psychedelics has been around since the ‘50s. When the very first papers on LSD appeared, there’s all this talk about people recalling their past and their early childhood memories and traumas and so on

There are a few studies here and there but they have, in some sense, conflicting findings. On one hand, clearly, people do have a lot of strong memory experiences on psychedelics, they do recall important memories of their lives, including traumatic ones. It seems to be a very major part of the experience for some people.

But at the same time, we have one study which showed that there was less mental time travel under LSD. We know, too, that people tend to do worse on almost any cognitive task while under the acute effects of psychedelics; that also applies to standard memory tests. But that’s not necessarily because of a memory effect, it could be just a more general effect on cognitive abilities, motivation to focus on tasks, and so on.

We don’t really have any data on whether it’s easier for people to recall autobiographical memories on psychedelics. From anecdotes, we know that there are situations where people have amnesia, they don’t remember anything about their lives while on psychedelics. But then we have these anecdotes about how people feel like they either remember something that they couldn’t remember otherwise, or they remember in more detail or more vividly, or with more sense of reliving.

There are very few experimental studies. There is one from 2012 where they had people recall positive autobiographical memories under psilocybin, and participants reported them to be more vivid and emotionally intense, at least than under placebo. They also found some differences in brain activation in that sort of direction, suggesting a stronger memory experience in terms of brain activity.

Hardman: Are you doing any experimental or lab-based studies?

Kangaslampi: Yes, absolutely. I was a postdoc at Maastricht and we have some studies running there. One current study includes a cue word based autobiographical recall task. If we give people positive or negative cue words and ask them to recall a memory, we can see whether it happens faster or slower on different doses of psilocybin, and whether there are differences in terms of emotional valence.

Another study is about to start, which aims to see what it does to memories when people recall and think about them under psychedelics. Whenever we retrieve a memory it enters this period of reconsolidation, where it can change in different ways. There’s some slight evidence that psychedelics could enhance this process, in animals anyway.

Hardman: Is there a way to empirically test whether someone’s autobiographical memories are false or entirely fabricated?

Kangaslampi: It’s hard, but there are ways to do that. There’s the typical sort of false memory paradigms, which involve things like looking at a picture and then, later on, answering questions about that picture. You can have false memories about details of that picture, or about a word list, or something like that.

VR scenarios have also been used, where subjects are given a VR scenario under the influence of psychedelics, or you give it to them prior to giving them psychedelics, then ask them about it. But this is not entirely ecologically valid, because those aren’t actual important memories of their lives.

I have plans to test memories of people’s actual lives. It takes quite a lot of time and effort to do that, you have to somehow record events of their lives for a long time.

Hardman: If we assume that there are false memories that appear under the influence of psychedelics, or recovered memories that don’t really match what happened in reality, what extent of that phenomenon should we expect is neurobiological vs. psychological. i.e., is it something that can spontaneously happen to an individual, or is it more likely driven by, say, a probing therapist or facilitator?

Kangaslampi: Outside psychedelics, we know that it can happen in all kinds of contexts, including completely spontaneously.

But it can also happen in therapy, and it certainly does happen more and more easily if it is in the context of a therapy where the therapist also believes in that sort of thing, or encourages you to try and do that or actively.

The whole recovered memory therapy used to be a thing. Some people still do it, even though they probably shouldn’t. But it used to be more of a major thing, which people used to do under hypnosis or age regression, and sodium amytal interviews as well. So people did use other drugs to do this as well, back in the day, and try to make people remember their trauma…

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