Do psychedelics create false memories? 5 Questions with psychologist Samuli Kangaslampi
Kangaslampi discusses the need to study autobiographical memories that may emerge during trips.
In the best-selling 2025 memoir, The Tell, Amy Griffin, a billionaire venture capitalist, wrote that after MDMA-assisted therapy, she recovered memories of rape by her middle school teacher. “I knew that these memories were real,” she wrote. “My body knew what had happened to me.”
After praise from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Gwenyth Paltrow, the New York Times published a story raising doubts about the memories that emerged during Griffin’s therapy. The Times interviewed one of Griffin’s classmates who said that she was the victim of abuse that sounded oddly similar to Griffin’s. The classmate went to sue Griffin for allegedly appropriating experiences from her own life for the book. This month, Griffin countersued her classmate for defamation, denying the claim.
At the heart of this controversy is a question about memory that has come up in psychology in decades past: can a traumatic incident be completely repressed, and then recovered again? During the so-called “memory wars,” in the 1980s and 1990s, some high-profile patients initially said they had retrieved memories, but then later recanted, such as a woman with “multiple personality disorder” known as Sybil, who remembered sexual abuse and torture by her mother, but was later found to have had false memories encouraged by a therapist. Researchers including the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed in experiments how it was possible to induce such false memories. The high profile and litigious story of Amy Griffin’s The Tell brought the memory wars to psychedelics-assisted therapy, and prompted people to ask how and if psychedelics might play a role in memory retrieval, both real and imagined.
Samuli Kangaslampi, a clinical psychologist and university lecturer in clinical psychology at Tampere University in Finland, became interested in psychedelics and memory while reading about LSD-assisted therapy from the 1950s. “It continuously caught my attention, how much memory experiences and recalling your past, especially your childhood and traumatic events, featured in all those papers,” he told me. He wondered how common recovered memories were in psychedelic-assisted therapy today, and how clinicians should regard those memories.
Kangaslampi recently received roughly $800,000 in funding from the Research Council of Finland to study just that: Can psychedelics bring back memories, and if so, can those memories be false? The Microdose talked to Kangaslampi about how to test what psychedelics do to memory, and why we should care about whether memories are “real.”
Why do you think the discussion of false memories and psychedelics hasn’t been at the forefront during the resurgence of psychedelic research?
One of the big reasons why I got interested in this is I was reading all this LSD research from the 1950s and 60s. It was considered one of the main effects of LSD— that it makes it possible to recall events, and that was one of the major categories of experiences that people have. There was a whole section of the clinical work that focused on the question of how does LSD make it possible to remember repressed memories, and how do people get therapeutic benefits out of that catharsis.
In contrast to that, people talk very little about effects on memory or memory experience in modern research. There’s the idea that these more personal experiences, autobiographical experiences, are an initial step that you go through in order to get to the really therapeutic and important part: transcendental or mystical experiences.
My interest initially was the therapeutic potential of these memory experiences, when people recall their life and process those memories. But the more and more I looked at it, the more I also realized the potential problems. It started to remind me of the memory wars of the past, and all this discussion in the trauma field about whether people can recover memories of abuse, and if they do, whether they’re false memories or not.
The “memory wars” are an important context here, can you explain what those were?
People who get more scientifically trained in the topic of trauma and trauma-focused treatment will generally be taught that the memory wars were settled, and we have all come to the conclusion that repression is not a valid scientific concept or a process that we should worry about. If people come up with memories that they didn’t have before, we should be very careful about that. We should definitely not try to actively get people to recover memories that they don’t currently have. But in reality, these memory wars are not over.
Clearly it happens that people have the experience that they now recall some important event of their past. In this context, it’s typically a traumatic event, and most commonly memories of childhood abuse. It happens spontaneously, but especially happens in therapy. The debate was: are these memories real, and if they are, what was the status of these memories before? Were they somehow repressed or dissociated? Was this person truly incapable of ever remembering this, and now suddenly they can? Or are these memories likely to be false, inaccurate?
Recovered memory cases are topics of scientific debate, they can be personally important to people, and they can also be legally important. Experts acted as witnesses in court cases, and their positions got polarized and sort of simplified. There was this perception that some people believe that all recovered memories are always true, and we should always trust them, others think that they’re always false, and it’s impossible to recover memories. Maybe some experts did hold these extreme views. Maybe it was a bit more nuanced, but that’s how it was represented in the court system.
Coming back to today, there’s the perception that this issue is settled, but when people do survey work, they realize that there’s actually still a very big chasm between practicing clinicians, especially in some areas of trauma therapy and memory researchers. A lot of clinicians who practice different types of trauma therapy still believe in this idea of repressed memories and the ability to recover those memories, whereas most memory researchers don’t.
Some psychedelic-therapists, including the Czech-born psychiatrist Stanislov Grof, explicitly mentioned recovered memories. In fact, Grof talks about re-living your birth. Other modalities that psychedelic therapists use, such as the form of therapy called Internal Family Systems, can refer to parts of childhood becoming uncovered or newly recognized. Given that, what exactly are you going to be tracking when it comes to memory and psychedelics?
There are two lines of inquiry that I’m concentrating on. First, how much does this even happen? Is it even a major problem? We don’t have basic numbers on this. There are a lot of anecdotes, and it seems to be going on more in certain circles—maybe outside the strict clinical context—but we don’t really know.
I would like to find out how many people have these kinds of experiences, and what do they think about them afterwards? Are they really convinced by these memories, and do they really struggle with whether they’re real or not?
And to get the clinician perspective, as you said, many people working with psychedelics may be working with therapeutic frameworks where they are more open or accepting of the possibility of recovering memories. They may explicitly endorse that as a part of their therapy. I’d be interested to see what clinicians and people running clinical trials think of the phenomenon? How do they deal with it?
The other side is: do psychedelics have some characteristics or qualities that make it more likely that people might have false memories, or that they might believe a memory like experience is true regardless of whether it is or not?
There are a lot of indirect reasons to suspect that that might be the case, but we don’t have any good research on whether that happens or not—whether susceptibility to false memories is increased or not in a person on a psychedelic. But especially as psychedelics increase or seem to increase suggestibility, and the feeling of realness or truth, we could imagine that this could lead to increased susceptibility to false memories.
Experimentally, how do you test these questions? It seems hard to test if a memory is true or not.
There are false memory paradigms that use word lists or pictures; you can show people pictures, and then see whether they develop a memory of having seen a picture that they actually did not. If they not only think that they saw it, but they feel like they remember seeing it, then you can think of that as a false memory.
Of course, paradigms like that are fairly far removed from our real lives and our autobiographical memory, which is specifically about important memories that happen to us, experienced from the first person. When we study autobiographical memory, the problem usually is that we can’t verify whether it’s real or not. If they feel like it happened, then how do we verify that?
One approach that has been used with other psychoactive substances, but not yet with psychedelics, are virtual reality scenarios. A person can have a first-person experience of a scenario, see something happen and interact with their surroundings, and then later on we interview them about that event. Then we can see whether they formed false memories. Because it’s a virtual reality scenario, we know exactly what happened.
Another option I hope to be using, which is a little bit more complicated, would be a diary-based method— having people record events of their lives, true and false, and then months later, seeing whether they feel like they remember some of the events that were not true. We would know from those diary entries whether they were actually true or false.
Why does it matter if a recovered memory is true or false?
You could say from a therapeutic perspective, that if a person has this experience of remembering something and it’s therapeutic for them, they feel better afterwards, they feel like they’ve dealt with something, then does it matter whether that memory was veridical, whether the event actually happened or not? From the perspective of “this person is feeling better,” maybe it doesn’t. A lot of the time, if a recovered memory is not about something as important and painful as abuse, then maybe it doesn’t matter.
But if it is about something very important that could have happened to that person, and even more so if there’s a perpetrator in that memory who did something, I think there are very large personal and even legal repercussions. So we do need to care, and we do need to be careful.
There’s also a question of whether it’s ethical to get someone to believe something that’s not true. In the context of psychedelics, we’ve often talked about this in relation to introducing metaphysical beliefs or spiritual beliefs. Is that an ethical problem? I think it is, and similarly, if psychedelic treatment gets someone to believe something about their life that’s not true, that did not happen, I think that is a pretty big ethical problem as well.
A lot of time, the person themselves can end up struggling with wanting to find out whether it’s true or not, and that seems to be a big part of their suffering. They are not able to accept that they don’t know, and become fixated on that.
There is clearly a very strong sort of cultural belief that we’ve developed, that there must be a source of my suffering, and it probably has to be located in my past. Something that’s happened. In my opinion, this is not often the case. Maybe there were some things that happened, or several things, but that’s not the only thing to figure out in most people’s cases—nice as it would be, in some sense, to find it. But if you go searching for it, you can find something. People sometimes joke that in therapy it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, but similarly, perhaps it’s never too late to have a traumatic childhood if you really go looking for it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
