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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
In 1980, Michelle Smith and her therapist Dr. Lawrence Pazda published a book called Michelle Remembers. This best selling book documents how Dr. Pazda unearthed hidden memories stored deep within Michelle's brain. Using recorded memory therapy, Dr. Pazda helped Michelle recover her memories. These were memories of satanic rituals that she was forced to attend as a child. The book documents how Michelle was abused by the Church of Satan, a worldwide organisation pre dating the Christian Church. And it talks about how Michelle's first ritual occurred in 1954 when she was just five years old. Michelle remembers being tortured, locked in cages, sexually assaulted, witnessing human sacrifices and even being bathed in the blood of infants and adults. It's shocking, but is it true? Today, a world renowned memory expert explains how all of us can vividly remember things that never happened. Marketing in 2025 isn't getting any easier. Customers are more switched on, they're harder to reach, and they're quick to spot anything that isn't authentic. Most marketing teams are stretched thin. They're expected to do more with less, while proving that every pound spent is worth it. That's why HubSpot's 2025 Marketing Trends Report focuses on what actually works for marketing teams. There's no fluff, it's just practical advice from teams that get results. Inside, you'll find a straightforward guide to using AI without any complex jargon. You'll find ready made templates for videos and visuals. You'll learn about a smarter way to work with influencers and finding people you can actually trust. And you'll even learn clear ways to prove to your boss that your marketing is paying off. All of it is based on solid research, but more importantly, it's useful. It's something you can apply straight away if you're dealing with tight budgets or tough targets or just trying to keep up. This report should help. To download HubSpot's 2025 Marketing Trends Report. Head to HubSpot.com marketing to download it for free. The woman arose, picked up a knife, holding her long black hair with one hand and sawed at it with the knife, hacking until her hair was gone. Then she lay on the ground. She swung the knife over her head and then, smiling lovingly, she began to slash her face, mutilating it at random. That's an extract from page 257 of the Best selling book Michelle Remembers. The best seller was publicised with articles in the People and National Enquirer. It netted the authors $350,000 in rights and royalties. Oprah Winfrey even featured the co author Michelle Smith, on her show guest was.
- [02:50]
Oprah Winfrey
Used also in worshipping the devil, participated in human sacrifice rituals and cannibalism. She says her family has been involved in rituals for generations. She is currently in extensive therapy, suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning she's blocked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood. Meet Rachel.
- [03:09]
Phil Agnew
Oprah interviewed Michelle alongside a host of other satanic cult survivors. The show presented Michelle's memories as fact and did not question the authenticity of the book. But today's guest on Nudge does question the book's reliability. It's memory expert Charan Ranganath.
- [03:27]
Charan Ranganath
I'm Charan Ranganath. I'm a professor at the center for Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. I'm director of the Dynamic Memory Lab and I'm author of the book why We Remember, available worldwide.
- [03:45]
Phil Agnew
Now in his book Churan documents the story behind Michelle Remembers.
- [03:49]
Charan Ranganath
The story of Michelle Remembers is kind of a fascinating one. In the 1980s in the US we experienced something called the Satanic panic where basically there were just tons of news stories about people who claimed that they were part of these conspiracies where satanic cults were committing different kinds of abuse.
- [04:12]
Oprah Winfrey
Of people connected to devil worship. That's the focus tonight of Lonnie Lardner's special report on Satanism. But we want to warn you now that some things you're going to you're about to see and hear might be too graphic for children. Lonnie well, Terry, authorities tell us that the most serious or perhaps the most dangerous kind of devil worship comes in the form of underground cults. Most of them are very secretive, usually organizing clandestine rituals in the dark of night.
- [04:38]
Charan Ranganath
And Michelle Remembers was a book that came out that really played a formative role in triggering this satanic panic. And so in this book she talks about her experience which came out of psychotherapy. And in this book what happens is she describes how she was abused through these rituals that were done by a satanic cult.
- [05:03]
Phil Agnew
The book starts by explaining how the psychologist Pazda initially treated Michelle for depression following a miscarriage. Through repeat sessions, Michelle revealed she had something to tell Pazda but couldn't remember what. After dozens of follow up sessions, Michelle had a breakthrough where she purportedly screamed for 25 minutes non stop and eventually started speaking in the voice of a five year old child. During the next 14 months, Pazda spent more than 600 hours using hypnosis to help Smith recover memories of satanic ritual abuse that occurred when she was five years old. In 1954 and, and 1955. It's alarming and horrifying and it really did trigger something known as the satanic panic. This hour long documentary in 1989 only amplified the panic. The darkness of Satanism is spreading rapidly today, especially among young people.
- [05:59]
Charan Ranganath
We see the graffiti symbols everywhere, the evil influences bearing down on teenagers in the music and in their lifestyles. The dimensions of this phenomenon have become alarming in this metroplex. It's my estimate that there's approximately 40,000 practicing Satanists in the metroplex dabbling in the occult and its various aspects. In this metroplex would have to be over 100,000 individuals.
- [06:25]
Phil Agnew
There was a 60 minute law enforcement guide created to help the police deal with the satanic panic.
- [06:32]
Charan Ranganath
I'm Gordon Coulter. For many years I served as a law enforcement officer.
- [06:37]
Phil Agnew
Today it's my privilege to host this.
- [06:39]
Charan Ranganath
Program on a little known area in.
- [06:41]
Phil Agnew
Law enforcement, but important to every small.
- [06:44]
Charan Ranganath
Community and every large city across our vast country. It's the area of satanic cults and how they impact our families, our children and our communities.
- [06:56]
Phil Agnew
There was even an infomercial published to tell parents how to spot if their child was being lured into a satanic cult. Warning signs of satanic behavior may be.
- [07:05]
Charan Ranganath
Apparent, such as a sudden, bitterly antagonistic attitude towards family and religion, A drastic.
- [07:13]
Phil Agnew
Decline in academic performance, A reclusive behavior pattern, and listening exclusively to heavy metal.
- [07:19]
Charan Ranganath
Rock music almost to the point of addiction.
- [07:22]
Phil Agnew
And the panic spread worldwide, even reaching Queensland, Australia.
- [07:27]
Oprah Winfrey
Still, nothing could prepare him for what he saw in his shapeyards the morning after the massacre.
- [07:33]
Charan Ranganath
All these animals destroyed and they were.
- [07:36]
Oprah Winfrey
Hacked and butchered and stabbed and bludgeoned. I got a hell of a fright, really.
- [07:41]
Phil Agnew
A lot of this was inspired by the memories Michelle reported in her book. Memories wrenched out of 600 hours of therapy. Deeply repressed memories that she and her psychiatrist unearthed after years of questioning. But were any of these memories actually real?
- [07:59]
Charan Ranganath
But these memories that she had came out of a long series of sessions with her therapist who she later married. So it gives you an idea of the ethics of this psychiatrist at that time. But you can ask yourself the question of, you know, is this real? Well, by the end of the book, she's seeing Satan.
- [08:22]
Phil Agnew
On page 259, Michelle writes how she saw Satan. She writes how Satan picked up a large wooden crucifix during the course of the ceremony. He would whistle away at the carved statue of the crucified Christ until there was nothing left. He did this symbolically of the way he works in the World undercutting, he would start his whittling at the foot of the cross and proceed upwards.
- [08:46]
Charan Ranganath
It's very clear that this didn't happen, right? At least many of us would assume that it didn't happen the way that she's remembering it.
- [08:55]
Phil Agnew
And this is problematic not only because the book sparked the satanic panic, but because it inspired a generation of therapists to follow Pazda's techniques. Choran writes how this led hundreds, if not thousands of individuals to develop vivid memories of extreme satanic ritual abuse, of which they had no memory prior to entering therapy. It's reported that during the 80s and 90s, 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of alleged satanic ritual abuse were recorded in the United States alone. I asked Charan how Michelle and thousands of others managed to develop these false beliefs.
- [09:33]
Charan Ranganath
So how does she create this rich memory for something and have it be significantly inaccurate? And the answer is, it has to do with the way we all remember. So one of the discoveries in memory research that I haven't yet talked about is that memory isn't just regurgitating the information that we've experienced. It's actually an act of imagination. When we recall the past, we don't actually remember everything. And so you gave this beautiful example of memory being like a video, and in fact, that's not how it works. But we have this illusion that it's like a video because we already have these stories in our head and we have these details that we might remember from the past. And then we put that information together to imagine how the past could have been.
- [10:28]
Phil Agnew
Don't worry, that is not Satan's dog you are hearing in the background there. It is just charant. But this point that memory is more imagination than recollection is an important one. It's something Frederick Bartlett, a pioneering British memory researcher, first noted back in 1932. In his seminal study, he asked British university students to read a Native American folktale called the War of the Ghosts. Now, young Brits in the 1930s knew next to nothing about Native American culture. So the book was full of unfamiliar concepts and names, stuff the students would struggle to remember. Bartlett recorded their memory for the story in the immediate hours, days, weeks and months, and even years after first reading it. Noting how their memories changed over time. He found that participants forget and omit details. There's no surprises there. However, the young Brits also reimagined some of the story elements to make it fit with Western norms. Canoes, for example, became boats in the student's memory. Some elements of the stories were reimagined in strange ways. For instance, in the original story, a man is struck by something and later dies. One participant changed this to he was wounded by an arrow and killed. Each time the participants recalled the story, they introduced more distortions, showing that memory isn't fixed, but constantly reimagined. Now, no one in this study imagined a satanic cult, but the findings reveal how memories change every time we recollect.
- [11:59]
Charan Ranganath
In the kind of therapy that was described in Michelle remembers, and in many subsequent cases where people underwent a process called repressed memory therapy, the therapist would literally ask people to imagine how abuse events could have occurred. Now, the second part of the mystery here is that when people remember something or even try to remember something, that will result in a new memory, so that effectively the act of remembering changes how we remember that event. Right? So if you are in a therapy session with someone you trust and they're suggesting something that could have happened, and you imagine it, well, how are you going to imagine it? You're going to take bits and pieces of things that you have experienced and synthesize it into a scenario, a hypothetical scenario of what could have happened. Now, later on, you come back and you have a memory, but it's not a memory for something you experienced. You have a true memory, but it's something that you imagine.
- [13:11]
Phil Agnew
Frederick Bartlett summarized this nicely in his 1932 study. He states that remembering is not the re expectation of innumerable fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction.
- [13:26]
Charan Ranganath
And so then people recall that memory, and they imagine further, and they tack on more and more and more details each time they try to do this. And so what can happen is, is that people can have a very rich, vivid, emotionally intense memory for something that never happened. Now, in most cases, for most people, memory doesn't turn out to be that inaccurate, but it certainly can. And in fact, repressed memory therapy is the perfect formula for making that happen.
- [13:59]
Phil Agnew
We can prove how easy it is to alter memory with a little test. It's a test first conducted in 1955 with Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott of Washington University. I will read you a list of words, and all you have to do is remember as many of the words as possible. Are you ready? Okay, here we go. Fear. Temper. Hatred. Fury. Happy. Inrage. Emotion. Rage. Hate. Mean. Ire. Mad. Wrath. Calm. Fight. Now, without rewinding, what words do you recall hearing? Do you remember hearing the words fear and wrath? What about the word anger? If you remembered hearing the word anger, you'd be mistaken, but you wouldn't be the only one. Chiran writes how people who participated in Roedinger's and McDermott's study were just as likely to remember hearing anger as they were to remember words they had actually heard, such as fear and wrath. This finding is often used by scientists to describe how people are susceptible to false memories. However, incorrectly remembering one word is quite different from imagining you were abducted by a satanic cult. Michelle Smith didn't misremember one thing. She reimagined an entire history. To understand how this can happen, we have to explore the work of Elizabeth Loftus, starting with her notorious Lost in the Mall study.
- [15:27]
Charan Ranganath
Well, the classic study is one that is known in literature as Lost in the Mall. So she's at a party and somebody suggests, well, why don't you do an experiment to see if you can just create a memory from scratch? And so she has this aha moment. And so she comes up with this beautiful recipe. And so the recipe basically involves somebody that you, that a person trusts. So she would bring a kid into the or, you know, she'd bring a young adult into the lab and get a bunch of stories about their life from someone they trust. And so this person could read them and so forth. And most of these stories were true. But one of these stories about being lost in a shopping mall was made up. And so what she could show is, is that when they would get this information from someone they trusted and tried to remember it, they would sometimes pull up some things that were plausible that could have happened next. What can happen is they would ask them again later on, and they would ask them again later on. And every time, well, for some people, every time they tried to remember it, they would tack on more and more and more details. And so about 4 out of 10 of the people who she studied had these very rich memories for things that she could show that they made up. Over these successive sessions of having this event.
- [17:03]
Phil Agnew
Initially, participants recalled little to nothing about being lost in the mall. But after repeated interview sessions, some fake memories started to unmerge. At the end of the experiment, Loftus and her research assistant, Pickerel, revealed that one of the events was made up. When asked which event was made up, 5 out of the 24 picked a real event that actually happened to them as the made up event. They didn't pick the truly fictitious Lost in the Mall event. 20% of people believed the fake lost in the mall memory over a real memory.
- [17:38]
Charan Ranganath
And then afterwards, some of them couldn't even tell the difference. After they were told that they had remembered something falsely. Many of them couldn't even tell the difference between the things that had actually happened and the things that they've constructed in their head.
- [17:52]
Phil Agnew
Loftus's discovery goes some way to explaining how Michelle could remember something she hallucinated. But the story goes a little deeper. See, Elizabeth Loftus later realised that some of her own past was misremembered. Something as significant as her mother's freak death drowning in a pool was incorrectly remembered by her family. And that fabrication dramatically changed how Loftus remembered the death herself. Find out why and how this event ultimately changed the world of memory science after this short break. This podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals and the podcast I would like to recommend today is Content is Profit. It is hosted by my friends Luis and Fonzie. On the show, they showcase the secrets and strategies about how your business can achieve a frictionless sale. The duo talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics and even bring special guests on to provide you all the information you need to turn your content into profit. I think it's a fantastic show. There's loads of fantastic episodes they've created, including one episode with me. So go and listen to Content Is Profit wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Nudge with me Phil Agnew. Today we are exploring if normal, mentally coherent people can start to believe fake implanted memories. Elizabeth Loftus is arguably the scientist who's helped the scientific community understand more about this phenomenon than any other researcher. And yet she herself was a victim of a false memory. When Elizabeth was 14, her mother tragically died in a swimming pool. Decades later, during a family gathering for an uncle's 90th birthday, a relative brought up Elizabeth's mother's death. And this relative insisted that Elizabeth was the one who found the body. Now, this surprised Elizabeth as she remembered it. It was her aunt who found her mother floating in the pool. Yet this relative was 100% positive it was Elizabeth. Churan writes that in the days that followed, Elizabeth repeatedly travelled back to that day in her mind. And hazy images began hovering like ghosts at the edges of her memory. Her mother floating face down in the water. Firemen arriving on scene, pressing an oxygen mask to her face. Memories lining up with what the family member had told her began to bubble up. And Elizabeth started to think that maybe she was the one who found her mother after all. A week later, the relative called to apologise. Other family members had confirmed it was indeed Elizabeth's aunt who found the body. Loftus was shocked not because her brain conjured up vivid details of something she hadn't witnessed, but because she of all people should have known this could happen. To this day, she is arguably one of the most well known memory researchers working in the field. This event inspired Loftus to study this phenomenon and explore how easy it is to manipulate someone's memory.
- [20:51]
Charan Ranganath
Well, actually, just to give you an idea, Loftus had done a bunch of work showing that she could distort people's memory or tweak people's memories by suggesting things after the event took place, suggesting things that didn't happen. And people would often incorporate that into their memory.
- [21:09]
Phil Agnew
Let's cover two of Loftus's most well known studies. In the first, Loftus had people watching a series of slides showing a car stopping at an intersection with a stop sign. After sharing the slides, Loftus asked participants to complete a questionnaire. Some of the participants were asked, did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the Give Way sign? This was a trick question because what the participants saw on the slides was not a give way sign, it was a stop sign. Yet this tiny bit of misinformation transformed people's memory. One week later, the majority of participants remembered seeing the Give Way sign, not the stop sign. Over 50% of people misremembered the event because of Loftus misleading question. Now the second study here, Loftus studied how false memories could be used to spread misinformation. In collaboration with Slate, an online magazine that covers politics and current affairs, Loftus's team ran an experiment in 2010 to test people's susceptibility to forming memories of fabricated news. Churan writes how the study exposed over 5,000 volunteers to a series of accurate news stories accompanied by actual photographs and one fake news story accompanied by a doctored photograph. One of the fabricated stories read, President Obama greeting heads of state at the United nations conference. He shakes hands with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinezad. The story was accompanied by a photographed picture of Barack Obama shaking Mahmoud's hand. In real life, these two people never met in person. Nonetheless, almost half of the participants in Slate's informal experiment who were exposed to the photo said they remembered how, having seen that article in the news one year earlier. One Slate reader said he remembered how the Chicago Tribune had a big picture of this meeting. Another said, I remember the most political hay Republican bloggers made about that handshake. Overall, up to a third of the respondents incorrectly recalled the fake news incidents as real news stories that they had previously read about. And when forced to choose, many were unable to tell the real stories from the fabricated ones. Elizabeth Loftus proved how easy it is to manipulate memory with small, innocuous inputs. And since these seminal studies, researchers have discovered even more.
- [23:33]
Charan Ranganath
And so since then, people have done all sorts of experiments for things like where people got, you know, these really invasive medical procedures to remembering stealing something that and, you know, committing a crime. And so it's been studied in many, many contexts that people can in fact form very vivid memories, sometimes for quite bizarre experiences.
- [24:00]
Phil Agnew
That does sound bizarre, forming a memory for a crime you didn't commit. But studies suggest it can happen. Churan shares one study that investigated whether unwary participants could develop false memories of having committed a crime. Like the Lost in the Mall memory implantation study, the participants parents provided information about real events that happened to the participants and then the experimenters added one fictitious event. This time, the fictitious event was far more serious than getting lost. This event suggested that the subject had committed a serious crime that resulted in a police intervention. Surely if I told Ciran that he had committed a crime, he'd call me out as a liar, but that's not what happened in the study. Over multiple days, the participants were repeatedly asked to recall the event and they were instructed to imagine how that event could have happened if they didn't remember it. At the end of the experiment, 25% of the participants generated rich personal memories of committing a crime. And another 40% truly did believe that they had committed a crime, even if they couldn't completely remember it. Four out of 10 people believed they had committed a crime that never happened. They imagined themselves being arrested and form this as a memory. This study helps us understand how Michelle Smith's satanic memories were constructed. Loftus's ingredients for memory implantation are essentially the same as those used by Michelle's therapist, Pazda. Recovered memory therapy involves repeated suggestions from a trusted individual, which was the case for her therapist and future husband. It involved visualisations of how the traumatic event could have occurred and the occasional use of hypnosis or medication. Choran writes that recovered memory therapy is like Loftus memory implantation recipe on steroids. It's an extremely potent way of implanting a memory because at least in Michelle's case, it took over 600 hours with an individual she came to love. The satanic panic was a shocking period in American history. Millions were gripped by a genuine fear of the irrational. On reflection, it's easy to laugh at the believers. The law enforcement videos and the parental advice infomercials. It's easy to lament Oprah for not calling this out as fraud, but if this episode has taught me anything, it's that our memory isn't as foolproof as I'd hope. Fake memories can be implanted in well functioning, cognitively robust individuals, and the worrying thing is not that this can happen, it's that it can happen extremely quickly. Our memory is essentially imagination, and with the right amount of nudging, we can reimagine an entirely different past. For most, that's harmless. Perhaps we imagine doing more washing up than our partner. For others, it's life changing. For Michelle Smith, it obliterated her life. And perhaps one thing that we should all remember is that this can happen to anyone. I want to say a massive thank you to Joanne Ranganough for coming on. His book why We Remember was the main source material for today's show and it is undoubtedly the best book I've read on memory. There's a link to buy it in the show notes. All the other sources for today's show are listed in the show notes. If you want to learn more about this topic, I suggest reading Loftus book the Myth of Repressed Memories. If you've enjoyed today's show, please consider sharing it with a friend. And if you want more from Nudge, do go sign up to my weekly newsletter where I share one behavioural science tip each week. Go to nudgepodcast.com and click newsletter in the menu to sign up. If you're looking for books to read that aren't about satanic cults or oppressed memories, then consider checking out my reading list. I've documented 25 books you should read in 2025 to learn more about the brain and how us all make decisions. I've even added five books you should avoid as well. To download my free reading list, just click the link in the show notes. It takes just five seconds to download. That is all from me. Thank you for listening and I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge.