What's your favorite weird story in the history of psychology?
Mine has to be the history of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)...
It all started one day when Francine Shapiro, an PhD-dropout in English literature, was walking through the park. As her eyes went back and forth looking at the beautiful scenery, she noticed her thoughts calm down and become more pleasant.
So what's her conclusion?
You may think it was "Oh, it's nice and calming to walk through a beautiful park."
Nope. She thought:
"Oh, it appears that moving one's eyes back and forth is a neurological intervention that connects the brain's hemispheres and will cure PTSD"
So she started treating patients (!!) by having them move their eyes back and forth while thinking about their traumatic memories. And as it turns out -- they loved it!
EMDR spread like a wildfire, and soon there was a veritable cult of true believing supporters.
Naturally, some psychologists and neuroscientists eventually took notice of the...questionable...empirical basis of the therapy. EMDR became the poster boy of quack psychotherapy.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11098395/
But the best twist is the next one.
Over time, the evidence from randomized trials gradually piled up.
EMDR...works!
journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
As an astute reader might have guessed, the main reason for this is incidental -- in EMDR, patients *recount their trauma memories in detail* while doing the eye movements.
This amounts to the same thing as imaginal exposure, an effective therapy for PTSD with a known mechanism
But while the "connect the brain's hemispheres" thing was obviously, uh, wrong, the craziest twist is that the eye movements don't seem to be inert either!
Iris Englehard and her experimental lab have recently shown that providing a mild visual distraction (taxing visual working memory) can boost the efficacy of imaginal exposure.
EMDR is vindicated (kinda)!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.512…
If there is a moral to this story, I don't know what it is.
Cults are good? Listen to the clearly-insane English student?
Or maybe..science is actually self-correcting sometimes? Follow the data, even when it seems odd?
I'm not sure, but it's one for the history books!
Addendum: the evidence for eye movements adding something extra (beyond exposure) is weaker than I thought. A nice meta-analysis here!
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