The accidental invention of the Illuminati conspiracy

The story of how the myth exploded reveals how fake stories spread today and the secrets behind the psychology of their fiercest proponents.

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It’s the conspiracy theory to dwarf all conspiracy theories. A smorgasbord of every other intrigue under the sun, the Illuminati are the supposed overlords controlling the world’s affairs, operating secretly as they seek to establish a New World Order.

But this far-fetched paranoia all started with a playful work of fiction in the 1960s. What does this tell us about our readiness to believe what we read and hear – and what can the Illuminati myth reveal about the fake news and stories we continue to be influenced by today?

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When most people try to look into the secret society’s history, they find themselves in Germany with the Enlightenment-era Order of the Illuminati. It was a Bavarian secret society, founded in 1776, for intellectuals to privately group together and oppose the religious and elitist influence over daily life. It included several well-known progressives at the time but, along with the Freemasons, they found themselves gradually outlawed by conservative and Christian critics and the group faded out of existence.

That is, until the 1960s. The Illuminati that we’ve come to hear about today is hardly influenced by the Bavarians at all, as I learned from author and broadcaster David Bramwell, a man who has dedicated himself to documenting the origins of the myth. Instead, an era of counter-culture mania, LSD and interest in Eastern philosophy is largely responsible for the group’s (totally unsubstantiated) modern incarnation. It all began somewhere amid the Summer of Love and the hippie phenomenon, when a small, printed text emerged: Principia Discordia.

The book was, in a nutshell, a parody text for a parody faith – Discordianism – conjured up by enthusiastic anarchists and thinkers to bid its readers to worship Eris, goddess of chaos. The Discordian movement was ultimately a collective that wished to cause civil disobedience, practical jokes and hoaxes.

The text itself never amounted to anything more than a counter-culture curiosity, but one of the tenets of the faith – that such miscreant activities could bring about social change and force individuals to question the parameters of reality – was immortalised by one writer, Robert Anton Wilson.

According to Bramwell, Wilson and one of the authors of the Principia Discordia, Kerry Thornley, “decided that the world was becoming too authoritarian, too tight, too closed, too controlled”. They wanted to bring chaos back into society to shake things up, and “the way to do that was to spread disinformation. To disseminate misinformation through all portals – through counter culture, through the mainstream media, through whatever means. And they decided they would do that initially by telling stories about the Illuminati.”

At the time, Wilson worked for the men’s magazine Playboy. He and Thornley started sending in fake letters from readers talking about this secret, elite organisation called the Illuminati. Then they would send in more letters – to contradict the letters they had just written.

“So, the concept behind this was that if you give enough contrary points of view on a story, in theory – idealistically – the population at large start looking at these things and think, ‘hang on a minute’,” says Bramwell. “They ask themselves, ‘Can I trust how the information is presented to me?’ It’s an idealistic means of getting people to wake up to the suggested realities that they inhabit – which of course didn’t happen quite in the way they were hoping.”

The chaos of the Illuminati myth did indeed travel far and wide – Wilson and another Playboy writer wrote The Illuminatus! Trilogy which attributed the ‘cover-ups’ of our times – such as who shot John F Kennedy – to the Illuminati. The books became such a surprise cult success that they were made into a stage play in Liverpool, launching the careers of British actors Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent.

British electronic band The KLF also called themselves The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, named after the band of Discordians that infiltrate the Illuminati in Wilson’s trilogy as they were inspired by the religion’s anarchic ideology. Then, an Illuminati role-playing card game appeared in 1975 which imprinted its mystical world of secret societies onto a whole generation.

Today, it’s one of the world’s most widely punted conspiracy theories; even celebrities like Jay-Z and Beyoncé have taken on the symbolism of the group themselves, raising their hands into the Illuminati triangle at concerts. It’s hardly instigated the mind-blowing epiphany – the realisation that it’s all fake – which the proponents of Discordianism had originally intended.

The 60s culture of mini-publishers and zines seems terrifically distant now from today’s globalised, hyper-connected internet, and it has undeniably been the internet’s propensity to share and propagate Illuminati rumours on websites like 4chan and Reddit that has brought the idea the fame it has today.

But we live in a world that is full of conspiracy theories and, more importantly, conspiracy theory believers; in 2015, political scientists discovered that about half of the general public in the USA endorse at least one conspiracy theory. These include anything from the Illuminati to the Obama ‘birther’ conspiracy, or the widely held belief that 9/11 was an inside job carried out by US intelligence services.

“There’s no one profile of a conspiracy theorist,” says Viren Swami, professor of social psychology at Anglia Ruskin University. “There are different perspectives of why people believe in these theories, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive – so the simplest form of explanation is that people who believe in conspiracy theories are suffering from some sort of psychopathology.”

Another conclusion researchers have drawn to is that these theories could provide rational ways of understanding events that are confusing or threatening to self esteem. “They give you a very simple explanation,” adds Swami, who published research in 2016 that found believers in conspiracy theories are more likely to be suffering from stressful experiences than non-believers. Other psychologists also discovered last year that people with higher levels of education are less likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

The picture that this paints of modern America is a dark one, especially for Swami who has seen a change in who normally promotes conspiracy material. “Particularly in South Asia, conspiracy theories have been a mechanism for the government to control the people. In the West, it’s typically been the opposite; they’ve been the subject of people who lack agency, who lack power, and it’s their lacking of power that gives rise to conspiracy theories to challenge the government. Like with 9/11. If people lack power, conspiracy theories can sow the seeds of social protest and allow people to ask questions.

“The big change now is that politicians, particularly Donald Trump, are starting to use conspiracies to mobilise support.”

The 45th President of the United States was a notorious “birther”, regularly speaking to the media about how President Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii. He also accused various US states of voter fraud after the 2016 election and his campaign team were responsible for propagating now debunked fabricated stories such as Pizzagate and the Bowling Green Massacre.

I asked Swami if he thought that this shift in conspiracy theory usage could affect politics long term. “People could become disengaged with mainstream politics if they believe in conspiracy theories,” said Swami. “They’re much more likely to engage with fringe politics. They’re also much more likely to engage with racist, xenophobic and extremist views.”

The idea of an untouchable, secretive elite must resonate with people that feel left behind and powerless; Trump said he wanted to represent these people, especially the once-powerful industrial landscape of America’s Rust Belt. Yet instead of feeling better represented in the halls of power by a non-politician like themselves – and theoretically being less likely to feel powerless and vulnerable to conspiracies – it seems like some in America are more likely to believe in stories like the Illuminati more than ever before.

“If Wilson was alive today, he’d be part delighted, part shocked”, says David Bramwell. “As far as they thought in the 60s, culture was a little too tight. At present, it feels like things are loose. They’re unravelling.

“Perhaps more stability will come as people fight against ‘fake news’ and propaganda. We’re starting to understand how social media is feeding us ideas we want to believe. Echo chambers.”

Between internet forums, nods in popular culture and humankind’s generally uninhibited capacity for imagination, today’s truth-finders and fact checkers might debunk the Illuminati myth for good.

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It’s possible to forget your first language, even as an adult. But how, and why, this happens is complex and counter-intuitive.

I’m sitting in my kitchen in London, trying to figure out a text message from my brother. He lives in our home country of Germany. We speak German to each other, a language that’s rich in quirky words, but I’ve never heard this one before: fremdschämen. ‘Stranger-ashamed’?

I’m too proud to ask him what it means. I know that eventually, I’ll get it. Still, it’s slightly painful to realise that after years of living abroad, my mother tongue can sometimes feel foreign.

Most long-term migrants know what it’s like to be a slightly rusty native speaker. The process seems obvious: the longer you are away, the more your language suffers. But it’s not quite so straightforward.

In fact, the science of why, when and how we lose our own language is complex and often counter-intuitive. It turns out that how long you’ve been away doesn’t always matter. Socialising with other native speakers abroad can worsen your own native skills. And emotional factors like trauma can be the biggest factor of all.

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It’s also not just long-term migrants who are affected, but to some extent anyone who picks up a second language.

“The minute you start learning another language, the two systems start to compete with each other,” says Monika Schmid, a linguist at the University of Essex.

Schmid is a leading researcher of language attrition, a growing field of research that looks at what makes us lose our mother tongue. In children, the phenomenon is somewhat easier to explain since their brains are generally more flexible and adaptable. Until the age of about 12, a person’s language skills are relatively vulnerable to change. Studies on international adoptees have found that even nine-year-olds can almost completely forget their first language when they are removed from their country of birth.

But in adults, the first language is unlikely to disappear entirely except in extreme circumstances.

For example, Schmid analysed the German of elderly German-Jewish wartime refugees in the UK and the US. The main factor that influenced their language skills wasn’t how long they had been abroad or how old they were when they left. It was how much trauma they had experienced as victims of Nazi persecution. Those who left Germany in the early days of the regime, before the worst atrocities, tended to speak better German – despite having been abroad the longest. Those who left later, after the 1938 pogrom known as Reichskristallnacht, tended to speak German with difficulty or not at all.

“It seemed very clearly a result of this trauma,” says Schmid. Even though German was the language of childhood, home and family, it was also the language of painful memories. The most traumatised refugees had suppressed it. As one of them said: “I feel that Germany betrayed me. America is my country, and English is my language.”

Speech switch

Such dramatic loss is an exception. In most migrants, the native language more or less coexists with the new language. How well that first language is maintained has a lot to do with innate talent: people who are generally good at languages tend to be better at preserving their mother tongue, regardless of how long they have been away.

But native fluency is also strongly linked to how we manage the different languages in our brain. “The fundamental difference between a monolingual and bilingual brain is that when you become bilingual, you have to add some kind of control module that allows you to switch,” Schmid says.

She gives an example. When she looks at the object in front of her, her mind can choose between two words, the English ‘desk’ and the German ‘Schreibtisch’ (Schmid is German). In an English context, her brain suppresses ‘Schreibtisch’ and selects ‘desk’, and vice versa. If this control mechanism is weak, the speaker may struggle to find the right word or keep slipping into their second language.

Mingling with other native speakers actually can make things worse, since there’s little incentive to stick to one language if you know that both will be understood. The result is often a linguistic hybrid.

In London, one of the world’s most multilingual cities, this kind of hybrid is so common that it almost feels like an urban dialect. More than 300 languages are spoken here, and more than 20% of Londoners speak a main language other than English. On a Sunday stroll through the parks of North London, I catch about a dozen of them, from Polish to Korean, all mixed with English to varying degrees.

Stretched out on a picnic blanket, two lovers are chatting away in Italian. Suddenly, one of them gives a start and exclaims: “I forgot to close la finestra!”

Some of the Cuban immigrants to Miami have had their regional dialects changed by close proximity to Mexicans and Colombians (Credit: Getty Images)

In a playground, three women are sharing snacks and talking in Arabic. A little boy runs up to one of them, shouting: “Abdullah is being rude to me!” “Listen...” his mother begins in English, before switching back to Arabic.

Switching is of course not the same as forgetting. But Schmid argues that over time, this informal back-and-forth can make it harder for your brain to stay on a single linguistic track when required: “You find yourself in an accelerated spiral of language change.”

Speak out

Laura Dominguez, a linguist at the University of Southampton, found a similar effect when she compared two groups of long-term migrants: Spaniards in the UK and Cubans in the US. The Spaniards lived in different parts of the UK and mostly spoke English. The Cubans all lived in Miami, a city with a large Latin American community, and spoke Spanish all the time.

“Obviously, all of the Spanish speakers in the UK said, ‘Oh, I forget words.’ This is typically what people tell you: ‘I have difficulty finding right word, especially when I use vocabulary that I learned for my job’,” Dominguez says. As a Spaniard who has spent most of her professional life abroad, she recognises that struggle, telling me: “If I had to have this conversation in Spanish with a Spanish person, I don’t think I could do it.”

However, when she analysed her test subjects’ language use further, she found a striking difference. The isolated Spaniards had perfectly preserved their underlying grammar. But the Cubans – who constantly used their mother tongue – had lost certain distinctive native traits. The key factor was not the influence of English, but of Miami’s other varieties of Spanish. In other words, the Cubans had started to speak more like Colombians or Mexicans.

In fact, when Dominguez returned to Spain after her stay in the US, where she had many Mexican friends, her friends back home said she now sounded a little Mexican. Her theory is that the more familiar another language or dialect is, the more likely it is to change our native language.

She sees this adaptability as something to celebrate – proof of our inventiveness as humans.

Once you start learning a new language, the two systems start competing with each other (Credit: Getty Images)

“Attrition is not a bad thing. It’s just a natural process,” she says. “These people have made changes to their grammar that is consistent with their new reality... Whatever allows us to learn languages also allows us to make these changes.”

It is nice to be reminded that from a linguist’s point of view, there is no such thing as being terrible at your own language. And native language attrition is reversible, at least in adults: a trip home usually helps. Still, for many of us, our mother tongue is bound up with our deeper identity, our memories and sense of self. Which is why I for one was determined to crack my brother’s mysterious text about ‘fremdschämen’ without any outside help.

To my relief, I figured it out pretty quickly. Fremdschämendescribes the sensation of watching someone do something so cringeworthy that you are embarrassed on their behalf. Apparently, it’s a popular word and has been around for years. It just passed me by, like countless other trends back home.

After 20 years abroad, I shouldn’t be surprised by this. Still, I have to admit that there is something a bit sad about my own brother using words I no longer understand; a hint of loss, perhaps, or unexpected distance. There’s probably a German word for that, too. But I’ll need a bit more time to recall it.

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The first piece of information strangers learn about most people is a moniker picked for them by their parents. But what you are called can have a surprising impact on how others perceive us.

You might have dwelt on the different ways that your parents shaped you – from their warmth and strictness to their generosity and pushiness. But perhaps you haven't thought so much about the consequences of one particularly important gift they bestowed upon you – your name – and whether you like it, and how wider society views it.

Parents often agonise over what to call their children. It can feel like a test of creativity or a way to express their own personalities or identities through their offspring. But what many parents might not fully realise – I know I certainly didn't – is that the choice they make over their children's names could play a part in shaping how others see their child and therefore ultimately the kind of person their child becomes.

"Because a name is used to identify an individual and communicate with the individual on a daily basis, it serves as the very basis of one's self-conception, especially in relation to others," says David Zhu, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, who researches the psychology of names.

Of course, many factors sculpt our personalities. Some of it is influenced by our genes. Formative experiences play a huge role, so too the people we hang out with, and ultimately the roles we take on in life, whether at work or in the family. Amidst all these dynamics, it's easy to forget the part played by our names – a highly personal influence imposed on us from birth and that usually stays with us through life (unless we go to the trouble of changing it). As Gordon Allport, one of the founders of personality psychology put it in 1961, "the most important anchorage to our self-identity throughout life remains our own name".

For most of us, we are stuck with the names that are chosen for us at birth until we become old enough to change them for ourselves (Credit: Catherine Delahaye/Getty Images)

At a basic level, our names can reveal details about our ethnicity or other aspects of our background, which in a world of social bias carries inevitable consequences (for instance, American research conducted in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks found that the exact same resumes were less likely to attract interviews when attributed to a person with an Arabic-sounding name as compared with a white-sounding name). This is unjust on many levels, particularly because names can be an unreliable indicator of our background.

These consequences should not be taken lightly, but that's not where the influence of names ends. Even within a single culture, names can be common or rare, they can have certain positive or negative connotations in terms of their meaning, and they can be seen as appealing or unfashionable and disliked (and those views can change over time with fashions too). In turn, these features of our names inevitably affect how others treat us and how we feel about ourselves.

A study from the 2000s led by US psychologist Jean Twenge, found that, even after controlling for family background and general dissatisfaction with life, people who didn't like their own name tended to have poorer psychological adjustment. This was most likely either because their lack of confidence and self-esteem caused them to dislike their name or disliking their name contributed to their lack of confidence – "the name becomes a symbol of the self", Twenge and her co-author wrote.

In terms of how names affect the ways we're treated by others, consider a German study published in 2011, in which users of a dating site were asked whether they would like to follow up with potential dates on the basis of their names. Jochen Gebauer, now based at the Universität Mannheim, and his colleagues, including Wiebke Neberich, found that people with names considered unfashionable at the time (such as Kevin) were more likely to be rejected, as compared with people with more trendy names (such as Alexander).

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If the dating situation is broadly representative of how these people were treated through life, it's easy to see how their names could have shaped how people treated them more generally, and in turn the kind of person they themselves became. Indeed, new research that's still in press, also conducted in Germany, found that participants were less likely to help out a stranger with a negatively rated name (Cindy and Chantal were the two names rated most negatively) as compared with strangers with names rated positively (Sophie and Marie were the most positively rated).

One can imagine it is difficult to be a warm, trusting person (having high "agreeability" in personality trait terms) if you face repeated rejection in life by virtue of your name. Another part of the dating study backed this up: the daters with unfashionable names who were rejected more often also tended to be less educated and have lower self-esteem – almost as if the rejection they experienced on the dating platform were a reflection of how they'd fared in life more generally.

Other recent work has similarly hinted at the harmful consequences of a having an unpopular or negative-sounding name. Huajian Cai and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology in Beijing recently cross-checked the names of hundreds of thousands of people with their risk of having been convicted of crimes. They found that even after controlling for the influence of background demographic factors, people with names seen as less popular or having more negative connotations (for example, rated on average as less "warm" or "moral") were more likely to have been involved in crime.

You could see this tendency toward criminal behaviour as a proxy for a person having low agreeability. Again, this is consistent with the notion that having a negative-sounding or unpopular name sets a person up for social rejection and an increased risk for developing a disagreeable personality.

Our names can have these consequences, says Cai, because they can affect how we feel about ourselves and how others treat us. "Since a good or bad name has the potential … to produce good or bad results, I suggest parents should try all ways to give their baby a good name in terms of their own culture," he says.

So far these studies point to the apparently harmful consequences of having a negative or unpopular name. But some recent findings also hint at the potential beneficial consequences that your name might have. For instance if you have a more "sonorant" sounding name that flows easily such as Marla (as compared with an abrupt sounding name such as Eric or Kirk), then it's likely people will prejudge you to be more agreeable in nature, with all the advantages that might bring.

Names can quickly go in and out of fashion, and so can the associations that people have with them (Credit: Alamy)

Moreover, while a less common name may be disadvantageous in the short-term (increasing the risk of rejection and lowering your likeability) it could have advantages over the longer-term by engendering in you a greater sense of your personal uniqueness. Consider another new study by Cai and his team at Beijing's Institute of Psychology – even after controlling for family and socioeconomic background, they found that having a rarer name was associated with increased odds of having a more unusual career, such as film director or judge.

"Early in life, some people may derive a sense of unique identity from their relatively unique names," the researchers say, proposing that this sense fuels a "distinctiveness motive" that drives them to find an unusual career path that matches their identity. This appears to be somewhat reminiscent of so-called "nominative determinism" – the idea that the meaning of our names influences our life decisions (apparently explaining the abundance of neurologists called Dr Brain and similar amusing occurrences).

Having an unusual name might even shape us to be more creative and open-minded, according to research by Zhu at Arizona State University and his colleagues. Zhu's team cross-checked the names of the chief executives at over a thousand firms and found that the rarer their names, the more distinctive the business strategies they tended to pursue, especially if they were also more confident by nature. Zhu invokes a similar explanation to Cai and his colleagues. "CEOs with an uncommon name tend to develop a self-conception of being different from peers, motivating them to pursue unconventional strategies," he says.

If you're a prospective parent, you might be wondering whether to plump for a common, popular name, perhaps enhancing your children's popularity and likeability in the process, or whether to give them an original moniker, helping them to feel special and act more creatively.

"Common and uncommon names are both associated with advantages and disadvantages, so expectant parents should be aware of the pros and cons no matter what types of names they give to their child," advises Zhu.

Perhaps the trick is to find a way to have the best of both worlds by choosing a common name that is easily modified into something more distinctive. "If [you] give a child a very common name, the child is likely to have an easier time being accepted and liked by others in the short-term," Zhu advises. "But parents need to find ways to help the child appreciate his or her uniqueness, perhaps by giving the child a special nickname or frequently affirming the child's unique characteristics".

Christian Jarrett is a science writer and author of Be Who You Want: Unlocking The Science of Personality Change

This article has been updated on 28/6/2021 as an earlier version incorrectly stated that David Zhu is based at the University of Arizona. He is in fact based at Arizona State University.

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In South America, a toxic chemical is being touted as a miracle cure for Covid-19. How did the mistaken belief in its powers take hold?

The flyer had thousands of shares on Facebook. It requested people to do something that, amid a pandemic, sounded outrageous: go to a square and protest elbow-to-elbow with a bunch of strangers. Yet, dozens of residents of Lima, the capital of Peru, left their homes the morning of 28 July 2020, and met in one of the city’s biggest parks to do just that. In their minds, they were not only not risking their own lives, but saving the lives of many others.

The protest was organized by an organisation called Comusav, a Spanish acronym for 'Global Coalition for Health and Life'. They said they were defending their rights to life and health, but their true cause was demanding their government accept a toxic chemical as a treatment for Covid-19.

Chlorine dioxide, the apparent cure they were clamouring for, is not only ineffective against Covid-19, but it can cause life-threatening dehydration and acute liver failure. It is considered hazardous for human consumption by health authorities all over the world, including those in Peru. Its promoters have had face-offs with doctors and have even been prosecuted by authorities for years, but the coronavirus pandemic gave them their biggest showcase so far.

Interest in chlorine dioxide on Google skyrocketed in 2020, and hundreds of pages offering it began to appear in social media. Several celebrities endorsed it in their social media profiles, and some even managed to win mainstream media coverage by praising of its alleged properties. Andreas Kalcker, one of its biggest promoters, has been invited to talk about it by well-meaning journalists, legislators and academics not only in Peru, but also in neighbouring countries such as Colombia and Bolivia.

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How did a substance the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) says "is the same as drinking bleach" trigger such a movement in Latin America? Social media had something to do with it, but also psychological traits and marketing techniques that have been around for a long time.

A simple solution

Chlorine dioxide was not the only fake cure to gain popularity as the world scrambled for ways to combat the pandemic. Other substances, like hydroxychloroquine, interferon, ivermectin, or azithromycin were also touted as possible ways to prevent getting the virus or suffering its worst effects. None of them, it turned out, showed any conclusive results against Covid-19.

"The narrative of fake cures is fed by hope, by this idea that 'we finally found the solution'," says Laura Merchan, a researcher from the Democracy Observatory in the University of the Andes in Bogota, who studied how false information about fake cures spread on Facebook in Colombia.

Chloride dioxide is highly toxic, and very similar to bleach, already debunked as a possible Covid cure (Credit: Maksim Safaniuk/Getty Images)

This was especially true early on in the pandemic, when scientists knew a lot less about the virus and it was not clear that a vaccine would appear soon. "All these drugs have legitimate uses, and in all of them there was a piece of evidence that suggested they might work," says Merchan. In a situation defined by its uncertainty, these drugs promised a simple way out – hence their appeal.

This is perhaps the oldest medical marketing trick in the book. Back in Renaissance Italy, town squares were packed with charlatans who sold all kinds of concoctions by exaggerating their therapeutic claims. In a time long before the development of sanctioned, effective medicines for most illnesses, street peddlers could offer a way out of the complexity, says David Gentilcore, a historian in University of Venice Ca’Foscari who has extensively studied charlatans' role in the history of medicine.

"A charlatan can come along and say, 'Oh, you have a fever, I have a simple remedy: You take a spoon, a spoonful of this every morning with a glass of wine and it'll put you right. It'll work on anybody, any time of the year, any age,'" explains Gentilcore.

This is also why in many cases "these cures were used as political instruments", Merchan says. Leaders like former US president Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro have promoted chloroquine as a cheap and widely available prophylactic against the virus. Soon enough, their supporters on social media started to claim its efficacy – using the digital infrastructures also used for pushing other types of disinformation and abusing political opponents. (Read more on BBC News' story on fake Covid cures in South America)

Since these political social media 'machines' excel at putting the same messages many times in front of people, they exploit what is known as the illusory truth effect – one of the top mechanisms that make people believe in false information.

"The brain tends to mistake familiarity for fluency: there's a lot of research that shows that the faster you process something, the more familiar you are with it, the more likely you are to believe it," says Sander van der Linden, a researcher from University of Cambridge who focuses on the psychology of misinformation. "The more misinformation is repeated, the more likely you are to think that it is true."

The drugs touted as cures are claimed to have dramatic effects – all the more attractive during the difficulties of the pandemic (Credit: Getty Images)

And there is a lot of false content about Covid-19 on social media. While it is very difficult to pin down a precise number, there are several figures which show how pervasive it can be. A survey by broadcasting regulator Ofcom in the UK shows that 54% of respondents have seen social media content labelled as untrue; and Facebook's most recent report, from April 2020, says the social network labelled more than 50 million pieces of content with fact-checking warnings, meant to alert users they contain false or misleading information.

Conspiratorial thinking

While most other substances were hyped out of the misunderstanding of scientific evidence, "chlorine dioxide works a lot more like a conspiracy theory", says Merchan.

In 2006, a US-born engineer and gold miner named Jim Humble published a book touting it as a Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS, and claiming it helped curing malaria cases in Africa. Since then, it has been promoted as a cure for multiple diseases, from acne to autism to HIV. As MMS gained popularity on fringe health circles worldwide, it attracted the attention of health authorities. The FDA published its first warning about it in 2010.

In a blog post in 2010, Humble wrote he found a solution: "Forming a church of health and healing." It was all about evading oversight: "If handled properly a church can protect us from vaccinations that we don't want, from forced insurance, and from many things that a government might want to use to oppress us." Humble created the Genesis II church with Mark Grenon, who became one of the substance's top promoters.

In 2016, a news report showed Grenon saying conspiratorial falsities in a church event, like the 11 September planes were "holograms created by the government", or that "chemtrails" were poisonous. Humble also has his fair share of bizarre claims on the record: he said he is a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy who asked to be put in charge of taking care of the Earth.

Other chlorine dioxide enthusiasts are also keen on conspiratorial thinking, like Luis Lopez, from Peru. While talking to the BBC, he said he believed public health measures like mandatory masks make people sick, and that the whole pandemic is an effort to depopulate the Earth.

Lopez tells me the pandemic forced him to close his business, so he took on manufacturing and selling the substance "because it works". He says he makes the equivalent of £580 ($820) in a good day, more than three times the monthly minimum wage in his country.

How did people like Lopez fall down the rabbit hole? "What we think might be happening is that these are people who feel distrustful of authority, basically are more likely to lean on the conspiratorial side of things," says van der Linden.

Another plausible explanation might have to do with how conspiracy theories exploit reasoning errors we are all prone to make. Van der Linden explains that "believers often commit what's called a conjunction fallacy", meaning they wrongly judge a specific set of conditions as more probable than a single general one. "The probability of a conspiracy actually being true is, of course, very low, but the way that it's framed makes things seem more plausible than they actually are." (Read more about why people believe conspiracy theories.)

Other factors that researchers have identified to make people more susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories are poor literacy and numeracy skills, a sense of distrust of medical institutions, and a self-perceived minority status. "Perceiving themselves as a minority is pretty predictive of people’s conspiratorial beliefs," says van der Linden.

Lopez says he was convinced to take chlorine dioxide by videos he saw on social media, but he also claims that it is difficult to recruit new people just by sending them content online. "You have to talk to each person," he says.

The jury is still out on the role social media plays on spreading conspiracy theories. There is research which associates a greater use of social media with more conspiratorial thinking, but other scholars remind us that conspiracy theories were out there long before the internet.

Still, Facebook and YouTube have taken down a lot of content from organisations like Comusav, and pledged to exclude all content that might cause harm. But when the content is deplatformed it does not disappear – it just goes somewhere else, like messaging apps that are impossible to moderate at scale, or video platforms with lax content moderation policies.

Putting on a show

Kalcker, the chlorine dioxide promoter who rubs shoulders with some parts of the Latin American establishment, knows how to put on a show. He delivers his speeches in perfect Spanish – with just a very slight German accent – often wearing a white coat and showing lab equipment in the background.

Many of the videos he and others make promoting the substance make grandiose claims, and strive to sound and look scientific: they talk about protocols, dosages, and chemical reactions with a fluency many doctors do not have.

Lopez, in turn, often sells the thing by telling his own story. "I got Covid, got very ill and needed oxygen. But I was taking it for some time, and the virus left my body in a week." When asked why did he get sick despite taking chlorine dioxide, he says he stopped before getting Covid. His claims sound outrageous: he also says his rhinitis and constant ear infections have been cured for life.

Both tactics are similar to those the Italian charlatans used centuries ago. On the one hand, they put on a show on the piazzas to be noticed among other merchants. "The first description we ever have in any European language of puppets on a string is a description of a charlatan troupe," says Gentilcore.

Another thing they did was publishing personal stories of people who they claimed they cured. "Some of them published pamphlets where they'll give the names of people that were cured by them, which will include names that people will recognise."

But there is a key difference, he explains. The word "charlatan" did not have the pejorative meaning it has today, as it referred to the act of selling by putting up a show, "to talk up your thing and do it from a stage". Furthermore, the concoctions charlatans sold were not only approved by the authorities, but also were not so different from the remedies official medicine practitioners of the time would offer.

Modern day charlatans today may be skirting far closer to illegal activity. Kalcker has had standoffs with the Spanish police, who briefly detained him in 2012 (Kalcker says on his website he has no criminal record in Spain and did not respond to questions from the BBC). Grenon was arrested in Colombia in August 2020, and is due to be extradited to the US, where he faces charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and criminal contempt.

But some loyalists just do not care. On the day of the Lima protest, a journalist recorded a livestream from her radio station’s Facebook page. The images showed a small, harmless gathering, animated by the timid cries of someone with a megaphone.

"Protests do not work. You give people a flier, they skim through it and throw it away," says Luis, who was not there but organised other similar demonstrations in another Peruvian city.

Half of the people who reacted to the transmission on Facebook used the "Haha" button. Yet, the reporter suddenly changed her tone: "Look out! The police detained one of the protestors!"

The people from Comusav did not have permission to hold the protest, but they managed to get their point across the higher spheres of the country. Despite the repeated health warnings, the conclusive evidence that it does not help to prevent or treat Covid-19, and the legal problems of some of its promoters, the Peruvian congress decided to set up a committee to "investigate the possible positive and negative effects of chlorine dioxide".

While most people have adhered to guidelines such as wearing masks, some have been swayed by conspiracy theories (Credit: James Matsumoto/Sopa Images/Getty Images)

The promoter of the committee, congressman Posemoscrowte Chagua, has been accused of sharing conspiracy theories in Congress and did not backed up his proposal with robust evidence, reported Peruvian paper El Comercio. When contacted by the BBC, Chagua conceded that there is no evidence supporting the use of chlorine dioxide for treating Covid-19, but said the commission will examine "successful experiences" medical doctors have had with it in several countries, although he did not provide any evidence of such research results.

The commission is unlikely to change the country’s official stance towards the poison, but this is not the real problem many see with the Congress’s decision. The commission “opens a space to pseudoscience and fake news,” tweeted Alberto de Belahunde, another Peruvian congressman. “It sends an awful message to a citizenry desperate for solutions.”

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In November 2020 I wrote a feature about us becoming more forgetful during the Covid-19 pandemic. My starting point was anecdotal reports from people telling me that their memories seemed to be letting them down more often during the lockdowns.

In the feature I spoke to a memory researcher, Catherine Loveday, who is professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster. We discussed the various factors that could be at play, but at that stage there wasn't any data quantifying how common this sense of impaired memory might be.

Now, thanks to Loveday, we have the data. It's currently being prepared for academic publication, but on the psychology show that I present on BBC Radio 4, she gave me a sneak preview of the results.

In her research, Loveday used the Everyday Memory Questionnaire which asks respondents to give subjective ratings of how different aspects of their memory have performed recently (something we're better at than you might think). It asks questions like these:

Did you forget to tell people something important?

Did you start reading something, only to realise that you've read it before?

For this study of our memory in the Covid era, people were asked whether, for each question they believed their memory had improved, stayed the same or got worse during the pandemic. And the data did appear to back up the anecdotal evidence.

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While a few lucky people felt their memory had improved, 80% of the people who took part, said that at least one aspect of their memory had deteriorated, a significantly higher percentage that we would normally expect to see.

We do have to remember that some of these participants had responded to a call on social media, for people to complete a questionnaire on memory failings during the pandemic. In other words they were a self-selecting sample who might have taken part for this reason. But not all the participants were recruited that way and the results are similar, regardless of how they came to take part.

The most common change was forgetting when an event or incident happened, which 55% of people said was happening to them. This suggests the pandemic has affected our perception of time, which is hardly surprising. When I examined the literature on time perception in my book Time Warped it was clear that some memories come with what's referred to as a time-stamp. When a memory is distinctive, vivid, personally involving and becomes a tale we have recounted many times since, we can pinpoint that memory exactly in the timeline of our life.

But most events in our lives are not like this and so we struggle to place them precisely in time. This issue has been particularly true for many aspects of the pandemic. Of course, you probably remember when you first heard we were going into lockdown or (if you're lucky enough to have had one) when you had a vaccination. But not much else vivid and distinctive (or interesting to anyone else) has happened in more than a year.

Our range of activities has been very restricted – online meetings, walking, television, yet another meal at home. Days, weeks, months have merged into one. Last Wednesday feels very much like the previous Monday, and it's very hard to know even in which month you might have gone walking in a particular park, let alone the exact day.

I was interested to see that the next most common category where people said their memories had got worse was in remembering the right word to say in a sentence. This is known in psychology at "the tip-of-tongue phenomenon". We all experience it from time to time and it happens more often with names. (Usually, the name it comes back to us later on, when it's too late. "Oh yes, he's called Tom!")

The fact people are forgetting to do things may be because there are a lack of cues in our local environment (Credit: Luis Alvarez/Getty Images)

Why this forgetfulness about words should have increased during Covid-19 restrictions is not clear, but it could simply be explained by the fact that many of us have been working from home alone or even distanced in a workplace, and we've therefore had fewer opportunities to talk with other people in person in the past year or so. We're out of practice at social interaction.

Other common memory difficulties revealed by the new data were forgetting you were told something, or forgetting to do things you said you'd do. The most likely explanation for this is a lack of cues in the external environment. Instead of travelling into work, moving about in an office, going to other places for meetings and bumping into people constantly, some of us have been mainly confined in one room at home, staring at the same screen for endless online meetings. When people were getting out more, they'd pass the room where they had a certain meeting or see someone walk past the desk, the sort of cues that remind us that, yes, we need to do a report for the next meeting or tomorrow is that friend's birthday.

It's notable that most of distinctive memories, the sort that come time-stamped or that we tend to remember, involve events that take place outside, which might fit in with the hypothesis that when we are away from home, the hippocampus in our brain becomes more active, possibly in a bid to make sure we can always find our way back. By contrast, if our lives become more confined, activity in this part of the brain that is so crucial for autobiographical memory is likely to reduce.

It follows that in this new research on memory during lockdown, one of the biggest predictors of how good people felt their memories were, was how much they had moved around during the day. People who got out and about and into different buildings, or who were able to go from room to room, reported fewer memory difficulties.

The other big factor – more surprisingly at first sight – was gender. Women were more likely to say their memory had worsened. What could account for this? It seems women had higher scores because they experience more negative changes in their work situations, their relationships and higher rates of overall stress. This fits with other studies which have shown women being harder hit by lockdowns.

Loveday also asked people to describe a notable memory from their life in lockdown. People were far more likely to choose memories from April 2020, early in the first lockdown in the UK than during later lockdowns. Certain themes came through strongly including spending time in nature, beginnings and endings such as new jobs, births, leaving jobs and funerals. People were also likely to describe doing normal things with friends or family, but in an unusual way. One participant talked about playing table tennis with her mum dressed in gloves and a mask. The good news is that these so-called episodic memories were very detailed. "I would see this as an indication that the memory systems are not 'broken' as such," Loveday concludes, "but just not firing on all cylinders all the time."

This suggests that when life gets busier again, for those of us without cognitive impairments, the old cues will be there and our effective memories should return. Soon, like other aspects of this strange and sad year, increased forgetfulness will fade from our minds.

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Many of us have found ourselves in an isolated routine during the pandemic – and it turns out, that’s not very good for your memories.

If, since lockdown, you have found it hard to remember to email someone, summon up the word you need, or yet again forgotten to buy the milk – you are not alone. I’ve lost count of the number of times recently that friends have bemoaned their worsening memories.

Data is not, of course, the plural of anecdote and it’s too early for research comparing our memory skills before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. But in a survey conducted by the Alzheimer’s Society, half of relatives said that their loved ones’ memories had got worse after they began living more isolated lives.

Limits on socialising within care homes and in some cases a ban on any visitors for many months seems to have taken its toll.

At the University of California Irvine, research is beginning on how the lockdown has affected people’s memories. It’s been reported that even some of those amazing people who usually remember events like buying a cinema ticket 20 years earlier because they have highly superior autobiographical memory are finding they are forgetting things.

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There are, of course, several different types of memory. Forgetting what you intended to buy is different from forgetting someone’s name or what you did last Wednesday. But research on how memory works points to several ways in which our newly constrained environment could be having an impact.

The most obvious factor is isolation. We know that a lack of social contact can affect the brain negatively and that the effect is most serious in those already experiencing memory difficulties. For those with Alzheimer’s Disease, levels of loneliness can even predict the course of disease.

Of course, not everyone has felt lonely during the pandemic, and the results of some studies have shown that levels of loneliness have plateaued over time.

The monotony of Zoom calls, usually on the same screen day after day, makes it hard for individual meetings to stand out (Credit: Fiordaliso/Getty images)

But even if we don’t feel distressed at a reduction in human contact, many of us are still seeing fewer people than usual. We’re missing out on those water cooler conversations in the office or at parties where we might talk to dozens of people in one evening, exchanging tales of what we’ve been doing.

Repetition of stories helps us to consolidate our memories of what happened to us – so-called episodic memories. If we can’t socialise as much, perhaps it’s not surprising that those memories don’t feel as crystal clear as usual.

When we do get the chance to chat, we also have fewer stories to tell. As holidays get cancelled, weddings are postponed, concerts and sporting events go ahead without live audiences, we have less to talk about. And as for tales of woe at work, they’re mainly about the frustrations of technology letting us down.

It’s true that you might be compensating with more online socialising. But those conversations are not quite the same. You might be less likely to mention the inconsequential things that have happened. To make it worth preserving with delays or drop outs, your story needs to be worth telling. If your threshold for what counts as interesting enough to say has risen, then once again you miss out on underlining those memories.

But there is more to it than a lack of socialising. Many people mention feeling of a background anxiety to life now. Even if you appreciate how lucky you are, and how others have it worse, the sense that the world has become a more uncertain place can be hard to shake off.

At University College London, psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt and her team have been conducting research in the UK throughout the pandemic on how people have felt. Although levels of anxiety peaked when lockdown started and have gradually reduced, average levels have remained higher than in usual times, especially in people who are young, living alone, living with children, living on a low income or in urban areas.

Meanwhile, the Office of National Statistics in the UK has found that rates of depression have doubled. Both depression and anxiety are known to have an impact on memory. Worries tax our working memories, leaving us with less capacity available for remembering shopping lists or what we need to do for work.

It can be hard to remember events because there is so little to distinguish day from day (Credit: Robert Reader/Getty Images)

This is all made more difficult by a lack of cues to aid our memories. If you go out to work then your journey, the change of scenery and breaks you take punctuate the day, giving you time points to anchor your memories. But when you work from home, every online meeting feels quite similar to every other online meeting because you tend to sit in exactly the same place in front of exactly the same screen. There is less to tag your memories too to help you distinguish them.

As Catherine Loveday, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster puts it: “Trying to remember what’s happened to you when there’s little distinction between the different days is like trying to play a piano when there are no black keys to help you find your way around.”

As well as the days merging into one, so do the things you do in those days. In an office you might walk past a room where you had a particular meeting, which reminds you that you needed to email someone about it. At home there are no cues to help you remember the different parts of your work. Every memory is tagged to sitting at your computer. At work you might remember exactly where you had a conversation – by the lifts or in the office kitchen – and that helps you not to forget it.

Then there’s a general fatigue, which also doesn’t help our memories. Zoom meetings are tiring, some work is much harder from home and holidays are getting cancelled. A lack of routine and anxiety about the pandemic can disturb our sleep. Put all that together – basically we’re consistently tired.

So with the combination of fatigue, anxiety, a lack of cues, and fewer social interactions, it’s no wonder that some of us feel our memories are letting us down.

And Loveday believes there is an additional factor involved – one that we might not even have noticed. It concerns the impact on our brains and on our memories in particular, of spending time in different geographical locations.

Meetings in the office might be held in different rooms, allowing us different experiences to cement the memory (Credit: Luis Alvarez/Getty Images)

Finding our way back home has always been important to our survival. As soon as we leave home, we start paying attention. Whether we are navigating our way through a forest or around a town, we make more use of the seahorse-shaped brain region known as the hippocampus. Remember those studies showing that black cab drivers in London who learn every back street? Those drivers end up with a larger hippocampus.

We need to engage the hippocampus in order to remember new information, but Veronique Bohbot, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Canada, has found that if people’s lives become more confined and repetitive as they age, their use of the hippocampus decreases.

Likewise, she found that drivers who rely on satnav rather than finding their own way made fewer spatial memories, the kind of memories that particularly rely on the hippocampus.

If we’ve been at home most of the time for several months due to the pandemic, we’ve lost that extra stimulation that comes from finding our way around.

The good news is that there are things we can do about it. Going for a walk, especially along unfamiliar streets, will bring your brain back to attention. And even moving makes a difference. Do you have to sit at your desk for every meeting? If it’s a phone call could you walk along the street chatting instead.

Making sure the weekdays and the weekends are different enough not to merge into one can help with the distortions our new life can have on our perception of time.

As soon as we leave home - even for a walk in the park - our brain starts paying attention (Credit: David Soanes/Getty Images)

Loveday advises adding more variety to our lives, which might involve some creative thinking to achieve. If you can’t go out, she suggests finding a completely new activity at home, and then telling someone about it afterwards to help you remember it better.

Deliberately reflecting on your day each evening can help you consolidate your memories. You could even write a diary. It’s true that less happens that’s noteworthy these days, but it could still be interesting to look back on one day. It can also help your memory right now.

And if you’re forgetting to do things, then making lists and setting alerts on your phone can make more difference than you might think. You can also harness your own imagination. If you want to remember to buy milk, bread and eggs, then before you go picture yourself visiting each of the necessary aisles in the actual shop you are going to. When you get there, this imaginary shopping trip will pop back into your mind and you’re more likely to remember everything you need.

Claudia Hammond is the author of The Art of Rest.

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