Free Republic

Virginia House of Delegates Member Patrick Hope (D) announced Friday he intends to introduce articles of impeachment for Justin Fairfax unless the Democratic lieutenant governor resigns by Monday following new allegations of sexual assault. “On Monday, I will be introducing articles of impeachment for Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax if he has not resigned before then,” Hope tweeted. Hope issued the declaration hours after a second woman came forward on Friday to publicly accuse Fairfax of sexual assault. A lawyer for Meredith Watson released a statement saying Fairfax raped her in 2000 when they were both students at Duke University, adding...

Published on Feb 8, 2016 It’s surprisingly easy to make someone believe they’ve committed a crime that never happened. NOVA Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NOVAonline NOVA Twitter: https://twitter.com/novapbs Dr Julia Shaw’s forthcoming book on the science of memory hacking, "The Memory Illusion," will be available starting June 2nd from Penguin Random House.

The human brain is an unreliable memory device. It can forget events that happened and remember events that didn't. I don't know if the allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior by Ray Moore 40 years ago are true or not. I do know that it is unlikely he would remember such casual affairs so many years in the past. Many men would forget such affairs in weeks, if not days. A young woman might consider an older man's attention significant, but to the older man the young woman is just another warm body who might be used and forgotten. It is...

Ever find yourself caught up in a vivid memory of an event that, you later realize with confusion, didn’t really happen the way you thought? According to new research by psychologists at the University of Warwick in the U.K., you are far from alone.  The study demonstrated that about half of individuals will come to believe a fictional event occurred if they are told about that event and then repeatedly imagine it happening.  More than 400 people participated in the study, led by professor Kimberley Wade

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study. The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place. Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives. Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of...

Researchers at Harvard University called on aliens from outer space to help them solve a problem that surfaces frequently in everything from therapeutic sessions to criminal trials, or even just chatting with a friend. How do you know if someone is telling the truth when he or she recalls memories of childhood abuse, or being raped by satanic cults, or some other traumatic insult? One clue that many of us rely on is the emotional reaction of the person telling the story. If the victim breaks out in sweat and becomes extremely emotional while recalling those memories, it's more difficult...

It is not considered good judgment to wade into the issue of recovered memories without skin as thick as permafrost and caller ID on the phone. Rare is the academic field in which colleagues on opposite sides of a debate -- people with international reputations -- dismiss the very foundations of one another's work, sometimes not so privately, with common barnyard epithets; in which two of the most prominent reference books are almost Jesuitically contradictory; in which more than a decade of fairly sound research has done little to settle a debate that has raged ever since Freud popularized the...