Ask a witness how fast two cars were going when they smashed rather than hit, and their estimate climbs by nearly 10 miles per hour. That 1974 finding came from Elizabeth Loftus, born Elizabeth Fishman in California in 1944, who lost her mother to drowning at 14, studied math and psychology at UCLA and Stanford, and grew bored calibrating word problems before car crash research at the University of Washington. This episode explains the misinformation effect and reconsolidation, the idea that each recall puts a memory back on a workbench where it can be edited.

Her testimony in the 1990 George Franklin trial exposed a gap in her data, so she set out to plant entire false memories. With her student Jim Coan’s technique, about 25 percent of subjects came to remember being lost in a mall, and later studies had people recalling Pluto licking their ear at Disneyland. Her 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memory brought death threats and armed guards, and trauma researchers pushed back. The Jane Doe case led the University of Washington to investigate her for 21 months before she moved to UC Irvine.

• Source monitoring errors and how details from a fake news report blended into memories
• Kenneth Pope’s criticism and the dissociative amnesia argument from trauma specialists
• Testimony in more than 300 cases, including O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy, and Harvey Weinstein
• Her theory about financial incentives at the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and the studies she could not cite
• False memories of getting sick from strawberry ice cream that changed what people ate