The Mind, Explained (2019) s02e05 Episode Script
Brainwashing
If you would have told me
that I would be in this situation,
I would have thought
you were absolutely nuts.
An Arizona woman who identified herself
as a QAnon conspiracy theorist
was labeled a QAnon Karen
after going on a profanity-laced tirade,
ripping face masks
off of the shelves at a local Target.
[woman] Target,
I'm not playing any more of your games.
This shit's fucking over.
I'm not doing it. We don't want
any of this anymore. This is over.
No. Uh-uh.
I had absolutely hit rock bottom.
I had destroyed my own life
going down the rabbit hole.
[narrator] Melissa was
one of millions of Americans,
15% of them according to a 2021 survey,
who believe in QAnon,
a sweeping conspiracy theory
that began in the US
and then spread around the world,
prompting the re-emergence
of an old concept.
I think it's time for us to start thinking
about some of the base being brainwashed.
- Brainwashed.
- Brainwashed.
Brainwashed by QAnon.
[narrator] It's a word people have used
to try to explain the unexplainable.
You must not fall for the tricks!
[narrator] That was true
during the Cold War,
when some American soldiers
seemed to choose communism.
As one of their mothers put it
My estimation of this situation
is that he's a victim of brainwashing.
[narrator] Or when heiress Patty Hearst
was kidnapped
and then appeared
to convert to her captor's cause.
[reporter] She tells the jury
of the horrors of kidnapping.
Of being terrified, brainwashed,
her lawyer says.
[narrator] And when hundreds of people,
following the orders of their cult leader,
killed themselves at Jonestown,
even those closest to them
thought they'd been brainwashed.
They was tough little ladies,
you know, and I
I thought they had enough sense
not to be brainwashed by nobody.
[narrator] And the word
has resurfaced again
to describe people like Melissa.
But even though the idea has persisted,
there's no consensus that it's real
or what it even means.
I instead use the term "thought reform."
My preference
is to call things "brain hacking."
It's belief change. It's persuasion.
Those who say it doesn't exist
or those who say
it's absolutely invincible are wrong.
[narrator] Can we really be brainwashed?
And if so, are we all at risk?
The, uh, unethical possibilities
are immense.
[man 1] It was here that the CIA
funded a series of experiments.
Severe experiments.
[man 2] A world where machines
manipulate living beings like robot toys.
[woman] Mind control
seems to be implemented
through intimidation, coercion,
force, and sometimes
aberrant sexual conduct.
[man 3] We see a violent variation
in the pattern.
Can the human mind be controlled
and remain human?
[guitar gently playing]
[narrator] In 1971, Led Zeppelin released
"Stairway to Heaven,"
their most popular song.
It tells a story of materialism and greed.
But in the '80s,
someone played the song backwards
and heard a very different message.
Here's to my sweet Satan ♪
The one whose little path
Would make me sad ♪
Whose power is Satan ♪
He'll give you, he'll give you ♪
Six, six, six ♪
[narrator] And a panic ensued.
This backward masking
is being foisted upon us by Satan.
[man 1] A lot of people hear the phrase,
"My sweet Satan."
Their power is Satan.
They live with Satan.
That's who empowers them.
[narrator] Church groups
smashed records in protest.
[man 2] which they felt
contained the message of Satan.
[narrator] And politicians drafted laws
to require warning labels on records.
And this fed into a larger mass hysteria
that Satan worship was sweeping America.
The ideal sacrifice, we are told,
apparently requires babies.
They are nowhere to be found.
There is no bones.
[reporter] Do you find missing children
sometimes fall prey to these people?
I believe that they do.
I can't We can't prove that they do.
[narrator] But none of the Satanic
abuse claims were ever substantiated.
Nor was Led Zeppelin's backmasking,
and the band looks back
on the whole episode as a bit of a joke.
Somebody said,
"Oh, it says, 'My sweet Satan'."
And I thought, "Oh, gosh."
It's hard enough writing the music
one way around, rather than backwards.
[laughter]
[narrator] You can't secretly
influence people with backwards lyrics.
Our brains can't process them.
But people were influenced in another way.
Just like you were.
[tape playing backwards]
[narrator] Led to hear lyrics
that weren't really there.
Our minds instinctively
grab onto patterns.
And once we see them,
they're hard to unsee.
It's a quirk of our minds
that helped our ancestors survive.
Our brains evolved in the savanna.
And in that world,
the world was pretty simple.
[narrator] We just needed to detect
basic patterns to keep us safe.
Rustling leaves meant danger.
So did paw prints in the dirt.
- [growling]
- The consequences were far greater
if we didn't detect that pattern.
[Moran] Fire together, wire together.
[narrator] When two neurons
fire at the same time,
they form a connection, or a memory,
that helps us make sense of the world.
And those connections can be manipulated.
In one study, Moran had a group of smokers
spend one night sleeping in his lab.
I sprayed the smell of nicotine
into your nose,
which makes your brain immediately
think about memories to do with smoking,
and then I spray into your nose
the smell of rotten eggs.
It makes your brain
look at the memory of smoking negatively.
[narrator] The following week,
the participants in that study
smoked fewer cigarettes.
But you can't change
someone's fundamental beliefs in a lab.
- The US government learned that firsthand.
- [rapid gunfire]
Back in the 1950s,
American soldiers who had been captured
in the Korean war came home.
Americans were shocked
to hearthesereturning POWs
sometimes mouthing
Chinese communist slogans.
[narrator] And 21 of them
refused to return at all.
[Robert] I was able to interview
returning POWs,
and it became clear they had been
subjected to some kind of process.
[narrator] The CIA saw this
as a new kind of war
for people's minds
that required new kinds of weapons.
So they created MKUltra,
a program to test out
brainwashing techniques
on more than 1,000 volunteers,
as well as unsuspecting patients
and prisoners.
[Robert] They used
a lot of sleep deprivation and isolation.
[narrator] Electric shocks,
sensory overload.
- [Robert] Various drugs.
- [narrator] And in the end
MKUltra achieved very little.
[narrator] Some of the LSD volunteers
became cultural heroes.
But most of the subjects
were just traumatized.
People in there were like babies.
They cried and they were very disoriented.
[narrator] The US government eventually
paid over $1 million to victims.
They'd gotten brainwashing wrong.
The term comes from communist China,
where the government ran
a nationwide re-education program
called "thought reform,"
or sometimes "wash brain."
People were forced to consume propaganda
and criticize their own identities,
and the Chinese applied a cruder version
of this to those American POWs,
breaking down their group structure
and rewarding them for penning
pro-communist essays
as they endured brutal conditions.
[Robert] It's a pressure
to re-educate yourself
in a way that will change
your sense of inner identity.
They were deeply confused
by what they had been through.
[narrator] Almost all of the 21 men
who defected eventually came home.
And as America's fear of communism faded,
so did the fear of brainwashing.
But then, a couple of decades ago,
- another terror gripped the world.
- [rapid gunfire]
Radical conversions that didn't appear
to require force at all.
And for researchers,
it presented a new opportunity
to understand
how this kind of belief change happens
in the brain itself.
There's this concept called sacred values.
[narrator] Your sacred values
are your most deeply held principles,
like the love you have for your family,
your religious faith,
or your loyalty to your country.
They often connect us
to a group bigger than ourselves.
You wouldn't compromise on these values.
If you ever saw these values threatened,
you'd be willing to give your life
or definitely fight for these values.
[narrator] And our brain
processes them differently.
A region involved
in self-control and deliberation
that's usually active
when we make decisions goes offline,
while a part that incorporates
our emotions and social judgment
into our decisions stays on.
And a few studies suggest
another region may become active too.
One that's involved in rule retrieval.
[Nafees] Our stubbornness.
Our inability to be influenced by
by reason, logic, and evidence.
These are not flaws of the system.
They're features of the system.
We don't want another group
to persuade us.
[narrator] But if we feel
disconnected from our own group,
we may be more open to persuasion.
I felt from my earliest memories
that I was like
the black sheep in my family,
that I didn't really belong anywhere.
I was really drawn to counterculture.
One of my very first favorite books
was the autobiography of Malcolm X.
Through that exploration
into counterculture,
I ended up winding my way
into the punk rock scene.
I was filled with rage
that I didn't understand.
The angriest people
on the periphery of the punk scene
were the white power skinheads.
I started listening to more of the music
that they were listening to.
I started reading some of the books.
It's unlikely that a person
on day one is a liberal
and that evening they are conservative.
This won't happen.
What needs to happen is baby steps.
[Shannon] This would be the only stuff
that I would begin to consume.
These would be the only people
that I would really interact with.
This was very much
the building of a physical echo chamber.
[narrator] And within five months,
Shannon was a full convert.
The more willing you were
to engage in violence,
the greater social standing that
that you had.
We put anti-Semitic graffiti
and put anti-Semitic flyers
under the windshields
of people at synagogues.
We graffitied
historically Black neighborhoods
with white supremacist materials.
There was a point in which
we threw tear gas into a gay nightclub
with the intention of beating people
as they came out.
My transformation was so complete
that I would have died for it.
The majority of literature
on political extremism,
it's mostly not people who have actually
gone out and talked to these people.
[narrator] So in 2014,
Nafees traveled to the Syrian border
to speak with some of the estimated
40,000 foreign fighters
who had been radicalized by ISIS.
[Nafees] When I first sat down
with these guys,
the first thought through my mind
was that most of them are pretty normal.
Many of them looked like me,
and some of them came from the same
sort of neighborhoods I came from.
And it became a bizarre experience of,
"How did I get on this side of the table?"
[narrator] So when he got back
to his home in Barcelona
[Nafees] We decided to go out there,
find radicalized people,
and convince them
to get their brains scanned.
[narrator] They recruited
38 people of Moroccan descent
at the early stages of radicalization.
Inside the scanner,
they were shown a series of Muslim values
and asked to rate how willing they were
to fight or die for them.
Afterwards, they played
a game of ball toss
with three virtual players
who appeared to be white and Spanish.
For some participants,
they just tossed the ball back and forth.
But for others
[Nafees] After a couple of tosses,
the three white Spanish players
just kept tossing the ball
back and forth between each other,
thus excluding the Moroccan origin player.
[narrator] Then they went back
to the scanner
and rated their values again.
There was just one notable shift.
After being excluded,
participants increased their willingness
to fight or die
for values that had been less important.
And there was a change
in their brains too.
That region associated with rules
started coming online.
It seemed as if their brains
were becoming more radicalized.
People feel socially excluded,
and then they probably double down
on this other identity
that sees itself as standing in opposition
to the group that just excluded them.
Social interactions, they actually act
like a stimulant to our brain.
As part of a group, the pleasure center
in our brain lights up.
Every time this doesn't happen,
we feel pain in our brain. Physical pain.
Beliefs are completely linked
to belonging.
You believe in something
because you want to belong to that group,
and you want to belong to that group
because it helps you survive.
[narrator] The research on what
makes people vulnerable to extremism
seems to support this.
The three themes
that show up again and again
are a sense of injustice,
a need for identity,
and a desire to belong.
I ended up being sexually assaulted
a couple of weeks shy of my 15th birthday.
I felt so, like, worthless
as an individual human
that this was a means where I could,
like, elevate my meaning somewhat
through my identity as part of this group.
[indistinct shouting]
[Nafees] Being part of extremist groups
gives these people a simple narrative
that breaks things down
to black and white.
[indistinct chanting]
[Nafees] And oftentimes these narratives,
they have a particular goal,
which is to cast
the powers of society or the world
into a negative light
and to cast you as a revolutionary
who can change it all.
It gives you power. It gives you agency.
It makes you the Luke Skywalker
of this hero's journey.
It went from sitting at home
being terrified
to "I'm going to use every resource I have
to fight back
against this global genocide,
uh, under the guise of a health crisis."
[narrator] Melissa grew up
in an upper-middle-class Jewish home.
It was a happy childhood
until middle school
when her mother died from an overdose
and she was sent to a harsh
boarding school for troubled teens,
which later shuttered
after abuse lawsuits.
But as an adult,
Melissa had built a glamorous life.
She owned her own publicity firm
and was a business leader
in her community.
Early in the pandemic,
she always wore a mask
and even wrote an op-ed
calling on her mayor
to do more to protect their city.
But then the impact hit home.
[Melissa] When the pandemic
really started to impact the economy,
I lost about 50% of my business overnight.
And it destroyed me.
All of a sudden, I was at home,
and it was just
an explosion of information.
I follow, you know,
plenty of wellness influencers.
A lot of the content
that was previously about juicing
shifted very quickly
to anti-vaccine sentiment.
People are sending me links.
They're getting more and more disturbing.
[narrator]
Like this slickly-produced documentary
centered on a discredited scientist
with a wild theory.
And they'll kill millions,
as they already have with their vaccines.
[narrator] It was completely debunked,
but more than eight million people saw it.
The world is particularly complex
in the digital age
because we have an information overload.
[narrator] So we outsource
most of what we know
to the people we trust.
And in the US,
people's trust in the mainstream media
has declined
over the last couple of decades.
And not equally.
For Democrats, trust has actually gone up,
while among Republicans,
it's basically collapsed.
Meaning it isn't just people's opinions
that are polarized, but their facts.
When President Trump speculated
the virus had come out of a Chinese lab
Immediately, the right supported it
and the left hated it.
[narrator] But then
the new Democratic president
launched a formal inquiry into the theory.
And while most scientists
were still skeptical,
many on the left
now looked at it differently.
There's a chance this was created
in a lab. There's an investigation.
A chance?
It likely was the emergence
from an animal reservoir
that then infected individuals,
but it could have been something else.
Now they've opened up the possibility of,
"Oops, it might be man-made."
So it's hard to know
who to trust and who to believe.
And when that trust in each other,
in media, in scientific institutions,
and politicians, and government
starts to break down,
extremist groups,
or even conspiracist groups,
are particularly persuasive.
QAnon gets you to believe
that everything and everyone around you
is not to be trusted.
[narrator] On the surface, QAnon was
about saving children from trafficking,
but if you went down the rabbit hole,
it was actually
a sweeping conspiracy theory
that Satan worshipers
high up in the Democratic party
were ritually abusing children
and Trump was a savior figure
who was going to purify the nation
in a kind of rapture.
Some of that might ring a bell.
Foisted upon us by Satan.
Apparently requires babies.
I believe that they do.
We can't prove that they do.
Do you believe that there is
a Satanic worshiping group of people
who are trafficking children?
Yeah. It definitely could be possible.
They sacrifice these children.
It's part of Satanism.
It's a doomsday cult.
One thing the Internet did is it scaled up
a lot of things and made them faster.
[narrator] Back in the '80s,
fear-mongering TV reports
helped spread the hysteria,
like this two-hour prime-time special.
[announcer] Devil worship.
[narrator] It was beamed
into almost 20 million homes.
But online, QAnon supporters,
many of whom signaled their allegiance
with the slogan,
"Where we go one, we go all,"
could get retweeted by Trump
to an audience four times that size.
And QAnon followers were encouraged
to see patterns everywhere,
sharing their discoveries of hidden
symbols and elaborate connections.
Every time I was like, "No, there's no way
any of that's true. That's wild,"
something would happen
that would draw me back in again.
[Nafees] These social media companies
are playing upon our confirmation bias
to get us to engage
and to be active on their platforms.
[narrator] And they make it easier
to find community.
Melissa's online posts won
a modest following of the QAnon faithful.
I was getting this sort of false sense
that everyone was thinking this
and everyone was believing this.
I became radicalized
very quickly
without ever leaving my house.
[narrator] She proclaimed herself
the QAnon spokesperson
and pushed other
far-right political views,
including a rant about racism
where she defended the use of the N-word.
I started talking about
how we're canceling racism.
My husband sort of gave me an ultimatum.
"Either you choose this family
or you choose QAnon."
I said, "This is the most important thing
that I have ever done. I'm sorry."
[narrator] And a couple of days later
[Melissa, through phone]
No. Uh-uh. No. Do what?
Why? You let everybody else do it. I can't
do it because I'm a blonde, white woman?
- [man 1] Turn around, put your phone down.
- [Melissa] What?
- Oh my God.
- [man 2] I'm sorry.
[tense music playing]
My husband filed for divorce.
You know, my friends were gone.
I had hundreds of texts,
death threats, voice mails.
[man] You QAnon .
You Jew .
Get your back to Israel
where it belongs.
Like, I was I was alone.
The hard thing about conspiracies
is that information doesn't change them.
[narrator] Remember,
once our beliefs are sacred,
our brain stops treating them
as up for debate.
When it comes to people we know,
our loved ones, our friends and family,
it's tempting when you start seeing them
expressing extremist ideas
to want to argue with them
or just stop talking to them altogether.
This is only going
to make the problem worse.
[narrator] But Nafees conducted
another experiment.
[Nafees] This time,
they could press a button
and then they could see
what the general community said.
[narrator] In response, they lowered
their willingness to fight and die.
And even more striking
[Nafees] That part of the brain
that was associated with deliberation
and self-reflection
came back online.
So what this basically says
is that peer influence can work.
[Shannon] I was dating another
white supremacist who was in the army.
I couldn't go live on base with him.
Very luckily for me, his mom said
that I could go, um, live with her.
You're not going to be able
to talk this person
out of their belief system.
But what you can do
is continue to make them also feel
like they're a part of your group.
When I walked in that door,
several things happened immediately.
The first one
is that my echo chamber broke up.
This woman and her family
began the process of rehumanizing me.
There's this cognitive opening
that begins to happen.
[Nafees] By understanding
what are the drivers and the reasons
for why this particular person
joined this particular group,
you can then help them find ways
to address some of those same needs.
I decided to opt for a treatment program
that specializes in trauma.
[narrator] In therapy sessions,
Melissa revisited
the painful parts of her childhood
and began to understand
where her biases came from.
I wanted to come to terms with why I was
so vulnerable to something like this
so I could start
to put back pieces of my life.
[narrator] Melissa is now using
her PR skills
in a campaign
to encourage people to get vaccinated
and has apologized
for her past racist comments.
I really tried to educate myself
about the unconscious biases
and systemic racism that exists,
and potentially how,
you know, I do contribute to it.
[narrator]
Though many aren't so forgiving.
My past and my traumatic experience
doesn't make any of this acceptable.
I was wrong
and I will spend the rest of my life
apologizing for it
and trying to make it right.
[piano gently playing]
[Shannon] I am so deeply filled
with remorse, um,
for the hurt and pain that I caused.
Saying I was brainwashed,
for me, feels like removing
the culpability and responsibility
that I have for the things that I did.
If you know anything at all
about Alice in Wonderland,
she actually jumps down the hole.
But was I influenced
by what I was hearing and seeing
and saying and doing
while I was in those spaces?
Yes, absolutely.
The last 26 years of my life
has been an ongoing commitment
to make meaningful amends.
[Nafees] We wanna pathologize people
who believe these things.
We see them
as being weak-willed in some way.
We might even think they're crazy.
But we all have this vulnerability.
We all have this potential
under the right circumstances.
[Moran] Our brains are very vulnerable.
Not because someone will hack
into our brain and change neurons.
Just because our brains like to have
patterns and answers and stories.
And if you inject one idea into a story,
our brain's gonna fill the gap
and make it our own.
We'll be the ones doing the brainwash.
Not someone else.
We have the capacity to open out
and to look toward truth.
Be more skeptical,
more critical, more inquisitive.
My oldest son will remind me
all of the time.
He's like, "Mom, embrace complexity."
"Simplicity is the enemy."
The need for the absolute.
For the perfect and single truth.
That's where we get into trouble.
[closing theme music playing]
that I would be in this situation,
I would have thought
you were absolutely nuts.
An Arizona woman who identified herself
as a QAnon conspiracy theorist
was labeled a QAnon Karen
after going on a profanity-laced tirade,
ripping face masks
off of the shelves at a local Target.
[woman] Target,
I'm not playing any more of your games.
This shit's fucking over.
I'm not doing it. We don't want
any of this anymore. This is over.
No. Uh-uh.
I had absolutely hit rock bottom.
I had destroyed my own life
going down the rabbit hole.
[narrator] Melissa was
one of millions of Americans,
15% of them according to a 2021 survey,
who believe in QAnon,
a sweeping conspiracy theory
that began in the US
and then spread around the world,
prompting the re-emergence
of an old concept.
I think it's time for us to start thinking
about some of the base being brainwashed.
- Brainwashed.
- Brainwashed.
Brainwashed by QAnon.
[narrator] It's a word people have used
to try to explain the unexplainable.
You must not fall for the tricks!
[narrator] That was true
during the Cold War,
when some American soldiers
seemed to choose communism.
As one of their mothers put it
My estimation of this situation
is that he's a victim of brainwashing.
[narrator] Or when heiress Patty Hearst
was kidnapped
and then appeared
to convert to her captor's cause.
[reporter] She tells the jury
of the horrors of kidnapping.
Of being terrified, brainwashed,
her lawyer says.
[narrator] And when hundreds of people,
following the orders of their cult leader,
killed themselves at Jonestown,
even those closest to them
thought they'd been brainwashed.
They was tough little ladies,
you know, and I
I thought they had enough sense
not to be brainwashed by nobody.
[narrator] And the word
has resurfaced again
to describe people like Melissa.
But even though the idea has persisted,
there's no consensus that it's real
or what it even means.
I instead use the term "thought reform."
My preference
is to call things "brain hacking."
It's belief change. It's persuasion.
Those who say it doesn't exist
or those who say
it's absolutely invincible are wrong.
[narrator] Can we really be brainwashed?
And if so, are we all at risk?
The, uh, unethical possibilities
are immense.
[man 1] It was here that the CIA
funded a series of experiments.
Severe experiments.
[man 2] A world where machines
manipulate living beings like robot toys.
[woman] Mind control
seems to be implemented
through intimidation, coercion,
force, and sometimes
aberrant sexual conduct.
[man 3] We see a violent variation
in the pattern.
Can the human mind be controlled
and remain human?
[guitar gently playing]
[narrator] In 1971, Led Zeppelin released
"Stairway to Heaven,"
their most popular song.
It tells a story of materialism and greed.
But in the '80s,
someone played the song backwards
and heard a very different message.
Here's to my sweet Satan ♪
The one whose little path
Would make me sad ♪
Whose power is Satan ♪
He'll give you, he'll give you ♪
Six, six, six ♪
[narrator] And a panic ensued.
This backward masking
is being foisted upon us by Satan.
[man 1] A lot of people hear the phrase,
"My sweet Satan."
Their power is Satan.
They live with Satan.
That's who empowers them.
[narrator] Church groups
smashed records in protest.
[man 2] which they felt
contained the message of Satan.
[narrator] And politicians drafted laws
to require warning labels on records.
And this fed into a larger mass hysteria
that Satan worship was sweeping America.
The ideal sacrifice, we are told,
apparently requires babies.
They are nowhere to be found.
There is no bones.
[reporter] Do you find missing children
sometimes fall prey to these people?
I believe that they do.
I can't We can't prove that they do.
[narrator] But none of the Satanic
abuse claims were ever substantiated.
Nor was Led Zeppelin's backmasking,
and the band looks back
on the whole episode as a bit of a joke.
Somebody said,
"Oh, it says, 'My sweet Satan'."
And I thought, "Oh, gosh."
It's hard enough writing the music
one way around, rather than backwards.
[laughter]
[narrator] You can't secretly
influence people with backwards lyrics.
Our brains can't process them.
But people were influenced in another way.
Just like you were.
[tape playing backwards]
[narrator] Led to hear lyrics
that weren't really there.
Our minds instinctively
grab onto patterns.
And once we see them,
they're hard to unsee.
It's a quirk of our minds
that helped our ancestors survive.
Our brains evolved in the savanna.
And in that world,
the world was pretty simple.
[narrator] We just needed to detect
basic patterns to keep us safe.
Rustling leaves meant danger.
So did paw prints in the dirt.
- [growling]
- The consequences were far greater
if we didn't detect that pattern.
[Moran] Fire together, wire together.
[narrator] When two neurons
fire at the same time,
they form a connection, or a memory,
that helps us make sense of the world.
And those connections can be manipulated.
In one study, Moran had a group of smokers
spend one night sleeping in his lab.
I sprayed the smell of nicotine
into your nose,
which makes your brain immediately
think about memories to do with smoking,
and then I spray into your nose
the smell of rotten eggs.
It makes your brain
look at the memory of smoking negatively.
[narrator] The following week,
the participants in that study
smoked fewer cigarettes.
But you can't change
someone's fundamental beliefs in a lab.
- The US government learned that firsthand.
- [rapid gunfire]
Back in the 1950s,
American soldiers who had been captured
in the Korean war came home.
Americans were shocked
to hearthesereturning POWs
sometimes mouthing
Chinese communist slogans.
[narrator] And 21 of them
refused to return at all.
[Robert] I was able to interview
returning POWs,
and it became clear they had been
subjected to some kind of process.
[narrator] The CIA saw this
as a new kind of war
for people's minds
that required new kinds of weapons.
So they created MKUltra,
a program to test out
brainwashing techniques
on more than 1,000 volunteers,
as well as unsuspecting patients
and prisoners.
[Robert] They used
a lot of sleep deprivation and isolation.
[narrator] Electric shocks,
sensory overload.
- [Robert] Various drugs.
- [narrator] And in the end
MKUltra achieved very little.
[narrator] Some of the LSD volunteers
became cultural heroes.
But most of the subjects
were just traumatized.
People in there were like babies.
They cried and they were very disoriented.
[narrator] The US government eventually
paid over $1 million to victims.
They'd gotten brainwashing wrong.
The term comes from communist China,
where the government ran
a nationwide re-education program
called "thought reform,"
or sometimes "wash brain."
People were forced to consume propaganda
and criticize their own identities,
and the Chinese applied a cruder version
of this to those American POWs,
breaking down their group structure
and rewarding them for penning
pro-communist essays
as they endured brutal conditions.
[Robert] It's a pressure
to re-educate yourself
in a way that will change
your sense of inner identity.
They were deeply confused
by what they had been through.
[narrator] Almost all of the 21 men
who defected eventually came home.
And as America's fear of communism faded,
so did the fear of brainwashing.
But then, a couple of decades ago,
- another terror gripped the world.
- [rapid gunfire]
Radical conversions that didn't appear
to require force at all.
And for researchers,
it presented a new opportunity
to understand
how this kind of belief change happens
in the brain itself.
There's this concept called sacred values.
[narrator] Your sacred values
are your most deeply held principles,
like the love you have for your family,
your religious faith,
or your loyalty to your country.
They often connect us
to a group bigger than ourselves.
You wouldn't compromise on these values.
If you ever saw these values threatened,
you'd be willing to give your life
or definitely fight for these values.
[narrator] And our brain
processes them differently.
A region involved
in self-control and deliberation
that's usually active
when we make decisions goes offline,
while a part that incorporates
our emotions and social judgment
into our decisions stays on.
And a few studies suggest
another region may become active too.
One that's involved in rule retrieval.
[Nafees] Our stubbornness.
Our inability to be influenced by
by reason, logic, and evidence.
These are not flaws of the system.
They're features of the system.
We don't want another group
to persuade us.
[narrator] But if we feel
disconnected from our own group,
we may be more open to persuasion.
I felt from my earliest memories
that I was like
the black sheep in my family,
that I didn't really belong anywhere.
I was really drawn to counterculture.
One of my very first favorite books
was the autobiography of Malcolm X.
Through that exploration
into counterculture,
I ended up winding my way
into the punk rock scene.
I was filled with rage
that I didn't understand.
The angriest people
on the periphery of the punk scene
were the white power skinheads.
I started listening to more of the music
that they were listening to.
I started reading some of the books.
It's unlikely that a person
on day one is a liberal
and that evening they are conservative.
This won't happen.
What needs to happen is baby steps.
[Shannon] This would be the only stuff
that I would begin to consume.
These would be the only people
that I would really interact with.
This was very much
the building of a physical echo chamber.
[narrator] And within five months,
Shannon was a full convert.
The more willing you were
to engage in violence,
the greater social standing that
that you had.
We put anti-Semitic graffiti
and put anti-Semitic flyers
under the windshields
of people at synagogues.
We graffitied
historically Black neighborhoods
with white supremacist materials.
There was a point in which
we threw tear gas into a gay nightclub
with the intention of beating people
as they came out.
My transformation was so complete
that I would have died for it.
The majority of literature
on political extremism,
it's mostly not people who have actually
gone out and talked to these people.
[narrator] So in 2014,
Nafees traveled to the Syrian border
to speak with some of the estimated
40,000 foreign fighters
who had been radicalized by ISIS.
[Nafees] When I first sat down
with these guys,
the first thought through my mind
was that most of them are pretty normal.
Many of them looked like me,
and some of them came from the same
sort of neighborhoods I came from.
And it became a bizarre experience of,
"How did I get on this side of the table?"
[narrator] So when he got back
to his home in Barcelona
[Nafees] We decided to go out there,
find radicalized people,
and convince them
to get their brains scanned.
[narrator] They recruited
38 people of Moroccan descent
at the early stages of radicalization.
Inside the scanner,
they were shown a series of Muslim values
and asked to rate how willing they were
to fight or die for them.
Afterwards, they played
a game of ball toss
with three virtual players
who appeared to be white and Spanish.
For some participants,
they just tossed the ball back and forth.
But for others
[Nafees] After a couple of tosses,
the three white Spanish players
just kept tossing the ball
back and forth between each other,
thus excluding the Moroccan origin player.
[narrator] Then they went back
to the scanner
and rated their values again.
There was just one notable shift.
After being excluded,
participants increased their willingness
to fight or die
for values that had been less important.
And there was a change
in their brains too.
That region associated with rules
started coming online.
It seemed as if their brains
were becoming more radicalized.
People feel socially excluded,
and then they probably double down
on this other identity
that sees itself as standing in opposition
to the group that just excluded them.
Social interactions, they actually act
like a stimulant to our brain.
As part of a group, the pleasure center
in our brain lights up.
Every time this doesn't happen,
we feel pain in our brain. Physical pain.
Beliefs are completely linked
to belonging.
You believe in something
because you want to belong to that group,
and you want to belong to that group
because it helps you survive.
[narrator] The research on what
makes people vulnerable to extremism
seems to support this.
The three themes
that show up again and again
are a sense of injustice,
a need for identity,
and a desire to belong.
I ended up being sexually assaulted
a couple of weeks shy of my 15th birthday.
I felt so, like, worthless
as an individual human
that this was a means where I could,
like, elevate my meaning somewhat
through my identity as part of this group.
[indistinct shouting]
[Nafees] Being part of extremist groups
gives these people a simple narrative
that breaks things down
to black and white.
[indistinct chanting]
[Nafees] And oftentimes these narratives,
they have a particular goal,
which is to cast
the powers of society or the world
into a negative light
and to cast you as a revolutionary
who can change it all.
It gives you power. It gives you agency.
It makes you the Luke Skywalker
of this hero's journey.
It went from sitting at home
being terrified
to "I'm going to use every resource I have
to fight back
against this global genocide,
uh, under the guise of a health crisis."
[narrator] Melissa grew up
in an upper-middle-class Jewish home.
It was a happy childhood
until middle school
when her mother died from an overdose
and she was sent to a harsh
boarding school for troubled teens,
which later shuttered
after abuse lawsuits.
But as an adult,
Melissa had built a glamorous life.
She owned her own publicity firm
and was a business leader
in her community.
Early in the pandemic,
she always wore a mask
and even wrote an op-ed
calling on her mayor
to do more to protect their city.
But then the impact hit home.
[Melissa] When the pandemic
really started to impact the economy,
I lost about 50% of my business overnight.
And it destroyed me.
All of a sudden, I was at home,
and it was just
an explosion of information.
I follow, you know,
plenty of wellness influencers.
A lot of the content
that was previously about juicing
shifted very quickly
to anti-vaccine sentiment.
People are sending me links.
They're getting more and more disturbing.
[narrator]
Like this slickly-produced documentary
centered on a discredited scientist
with a wild theory.
And they'll kill millions,
as they already have with their vaccines.
[narrator] It was completely debunked,
but more than eight million people saw it.
The world is particularly complex
in the digital age
because we have an information overload.
[narrator] So we outsource
most of what we know
to the people we trust.
And in the US,
people's trust in the mainstream media
has declined
over the last couple of decades.
And not equally.
For Democrats, trust has actually gone up,
while among Republicans,
it's basically collapsed.
Meaning it isn't just people's opinions
that are polarized, but their facts.
When President Trump speculated
the virus had come out of a Chinese lab
Immediately, the right supported it
and the left hated it.
[narrator] But then
the new Democratic president
launched a formal inquiry into the theory.
And while most scientists
were still skeptical,
many on the left
now looked at it differently.
There's a chance this was created
in a lab. There's an investigation.
A chance?
It likely was the emergence
from an animal reservoir
that then infected individuals,
but it could have been something else.
Now they've opened up the possibility of,
"Oops, it might be man-made."
So it's hard to know
who to trust and who to believe.
And when that trust in each other,
in media, in scientific institutions,
and politicians, and government
starts to break down,
extremist groups,
or even conspiracist groups,
are particularly persuasive.
QAnon gets you to believe
that everything and everyone around you
is not to be trusted.
[narrator] On the surface, QAnon was
about saving children from trafficking,
but if you went down the rabbit hole,
it was actually
a sweeping conspiracy theory
that Satan worshipers
high up in the Democratic party
were ritually abusing children
and Trump was a savior figure
who was going to purify the nation
in a kind of rapture.
Some of that might ring a bell.
Foisted upon us by Satan.
Apparently requires babies.
I believe that they do.
We can't prove that they do.
Do you believe that there is
a Satanic worshiping group of people
who are trafficking children?
Yeah. It definitely could be possible.
They sacrifice these children.
It's part of Satanism.
It's a doomsday cult.
One thing the Internet did is it scaled up
a lot of things and made them faster.
[narrator] Back in the '80s,
fear-mongering TV reports
helped spread the hysteria,
like this two-hour prime-time special.
[announcer] Devil worship.
[narrator] It was beamed
into almost 20 million homes.
But online, QAnon supporters,
many of whom signaled their allegiance
with the slogan,
"Where we go one, we go all,"
could get retweeted by Trump
to an audience four times that size.
And QAnon followers were encouraged
to see patterns everywhere,
sharing their discoveries of hidden
symbols and elaborate connections.
Every time I was like, "No, there's no way
any of that's true. That's wild,"
something would happen
that would draw me back in again.
[Nafees] These social media companies
are playing upon our confirmation bias
to get us to engage
and to be active on their platforms.
[narrator] And they make it easier
to find community.
Melissa's online posts won
a modest following of the QAnon faithful.
I was getting this sort of false sense
that everyone was thinking this
and everyone was believing this.
I became radicalized
very quickly
without ever leaving my house.
[narrator] She proclaimed herself
the QAnon spokesperson
and pushed other
far-right political views,
including a rant about racism
where she defended the use of the N-word.
I started talking about
how we're canceling racism.
My husband sort of gave me an ultimatum.
"Either you choose this family
or you choose QAnon."
I said, "This is the most important thing
that I have ever done. I'm sorry."
[narrator] And a couple of days later
[Melissa, through phone]
No. Uh-uh. No. Do what?
Why? You let everybody else do it. I can't
do it because I'm a blonde, white woman?
- [man 1] Turn around, put your phone down.
- [Melissa] What?
- Oh my God.
- [man 2] I'm sorry.
[tense music playing]
My husband filed for divorce.
You know, my friends were gone.
I had hundreds of texts,
death threats, voice mails.
[man] You QAnon .
You Jew .
Get your back to Israel
where it belongs.
Like, I was I was alone.
The hard thing about conspiracies
is that information doesn't change them.
[narrator] Remember,
once our beliefs are sacred,
our brain stops treating them
as up for debate.
When it comes to people we know,
our loved ones, our friends and family,
it's tempting when you start seeing them
expressing extremist ideas
to want to argue with them
or just stop talking to them altogether.
This is only going
to make the problem worse.
[narrator] But Nafees conducted
another experiment.
[Nafees] This time,
they could press a button
and then they could see
what the general community said.
[narrator] In response, they lowered
their willingness to fight and die.
And even more striking
[Nafees] That part of the brain
that was associated with deliberation
and self-reflection
came back online.
So what this basically says
is that peer influence can work.
[Shannon] I was dating another
white supremacist who was in the army.
I couldn't go live on base with him.
Very luckily for me, his mom said
that I could go, um, live with her.
You're not going to be able
to talk this person
out of their belief system.
But what you can do
is continue to make them also feel
like they're a part of your group.
When I walked in that door,
several things happened immediately.
The first one
is that my echo chamber broke up.
This woman and her family
began the process of rehumanizing me.
There's this cognitive opening
that begins to happen.
[Nafees] By understanding
what are the drivers and the reasons
for why this particular person
joined this particular group,
you can then help them find ways
to address some of those same needs.
I decided to opt for a treatment program
that specializes in trauma.
[narrator] In therapy sessions,
Melissa revisited
the painful parts of her childhood
and began to understand
where her biases came from.
I wanted to come to terms with why I was
so vulnerable to something like this
so I could start
to put back pieces of my life.
[narrator] Melissa is now using
her PR skills
in a campaign
to encourage people to get vaccinated
and has apologized
for her past racist comments.
I really tried to educate myself
about the unconscious biases
and systemic racism that exists,
and potentially how,
you know, I do contribute to it.
[narrator]
Though many aren't so forgiving.
My past and my traumatic experience
doesn't make any of this acceptable.
I was wrong
and I will spend the rest of my life
apologizing for it
and trying to make it right.
[piano gently playing]
[Shannon] I am so deeply filled
with remorse, um,
for the hurt and pain that I caused.
Saying I was brainwashed,
for me, feels like removing
the culpability and responsibility
that I have for the things that I did.
If you know anything at all
about Alice in Wonderland,
she actually jumps down the hole.
But was I influenced
by what I was hearing and seeing
and saying and doing
while I was in those spaces?
Yes, absolutely.
The last 26 years of my life
has been an ongoing commitment
to make meaningful amends.
[Nafees] We wanna pathologize people
who believe these things.
We see them
as being weak-willed in some way.
We might even think they're crazy.
But we all have this vulnerability.
We all have this potential
under the right circumstances.
[Moran] Our brains are very vulnerable.
Not because someone will hack
into our brain and change neurons.
Just because our brains like to have
patterns and answers and stories.
And if you inject one idea into a story,
our brain's gonna fill the gap
and make it our own.
We'll be the ones doing the brainwash.
Not someone else.
We have the capacity to open out
and to look toward truth.
Be more skeptical,
more critical, more inquisitive.
My oldest son will remind me
all of the time.
He's like, "Mom, embrace complexity."
"Simplicity is the enemy."
The need for the absolute.
For the perfect and single truth.
That's where we get into trouble.
[closing theme music playing]