See also The Skeptic's Dictionary. I read around this area a week or so ago. Pretty frightening, really.

This is a very interesting phenomenon. I tend to have the opposite problem, which is my negative memories of people fade the further I get from them and the positive ones remain. (though that doesn't mean that someone couldn't use this device on me, because I don't remember a lot of my childhood)

The other issue is the kind of questions being asked. Those types of questions are very leading.

This is one of the reasons why I keep a journal, more accurate memory. (now if only it were searchable!)

I have a very good memory, to the point that if someone writes events down, and quizzes me long afterwards, if I was paying attention, I'll get pretty much all the significant details.

One problem I have is that I often remember dreams as having happened with that sort of clarity. By way of example, my memory of swimming underwater for 20 minutes when I was eight has the same picture in my mind as my first day at summer camp when I was 11. The only way I know the swimming incident was a dream is that I know it's impossible.

So I'm amazed that anyone ever took regression therapy seriously - but I happened to have the experience to make me naturally skeptical.

(On a very tangential note, if you get a chance to watch "A Brief History of Time" that is currently on the Science Channel, I'd recommend it. It is about Hawking's life more than his physics, but he makes the very interesting point that because he needed to develop very specialized tools for thinking about physics, since reading was hard and writing casually nearly impossible, he ended up with a set of tools that both only he was an expert at using, and that allowed him to solve a class of problems no one else in the world could.)

My brain's librarian plays tricks on me on a semi-regular basis when asked to pull stuff out of cold storage. We've got a kind of working relationship thrashed out now, but mostly that means I take things he says with a grain of salt in those circumstances.

I use LJ to document all the pain you cause me.