What if I told you ‘Kitkat’ is spelt without a hyphen.
It’s ‘The Flintstones’ not ‘The FlinStones.’
The evil witch in Snow White and The seven Dwarves said,” Magic mirror on true wall...” not ‘Mirror mirror on the wall…’ The iconic words ‘ Luke, I am your father’ were never uttered together in the same line in Star Wars.
You’d be surprised if my next sentence wasn’t something about pigs flying and I would be amused if you believed all of that in the first instance, without googling it to check it yourself.
How many times have you been so sure about something being a certain way, only to be proven wrong. Raise an eyebrow if you were almost certain that you thought you owned a pair of ‘Skechers’ not ‘Sketchers.’ You’ve seen it, you know it, you could bet a limb on it and yet, you’ve been proved wrong. Yes, you were wrong. But more importantly, you’re not the only one who is.
Paranormal consultant Fiona Broome explains this phenomena, the ‘Mandela Effect’ through pseudoscientific theories.
First off, what is the Mandela Effect? When a large number of people remember something being a certain way even though it isn’t. This term became popularised when Fiona Broome had a memory of Nelson Mandela’s tragic death in a prison in the 1980’s when in reality he passed away much later in 2013, as a result of a respiratory tract infection. And she wasn’t the only one. She believes that these differences are a result of collision and action between parallel realities( a feature of the multiverse) There are several theories surrounding this phenomena – consequences of time travellers making small changes in the timeline, Satan, the Butterfly Effect. Throw in a few theories of witches and black magic and you’ve heard few of the far fetched theories that Mandela Effect enthusiasts have come up with over the years.
However, scientific studies say otherwise. If you were to work the psychological angle to reason with this, memory and social effects like false memory have a huge role to play. This involves distortion of existing memories or remembering events that haven’t even occurred. The Deese-Roediger and McDermott paradigm explains how reading a list of closely related words like bed and pillow can lead to false recognition of related words like sleep even though they weren’t present in the list. This seems to be a plausible explanation.
Harvard neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, after extensive research, chalked his observations up to the inefficiency of the human memory. We often end up filling gaps in our memories with false stories. He explained that the Hippocampus, the part responsible in our brain for pulling out bits of information, is capable of not only recalling the past but also reconstructing the past.
“Every memory is a kind of almost mild false memory,” he explained.
“Sometimes when you have multiple people with imperfect memories confirm each other's bias about that particular memory, then it's more likely to kind of snowball and then you get a little pocket of people that believe A happened, when, in fact, B happened.”
Studying the Mandela Effect through the psychological perspective also leads us to considering the theory of ‘Schema driven errors.’ Schemas are basically patterns of thought and behaviour that organise categories of information and the relationships among them. So when psychologists say ‘Schema driven errors,’ what they mean is that your mind undertakes a process( effort after meaning) through which you tend to omit out inconsistent details from your memory. For example, if you were to recollect objects that were present in your classroom yesterday, you’re more likely to leave out jacket that has been lying by the door, than the standard desks and chairs because they’re more likely to fit into the image you’ve concocted in your head.
Lastly, this wouldn’t be a comprehensive article if we discussed the Mandela Effect without mentioning the rapid spread of misinformation. The observation that most of these examples are tiny details, point in the direction of misinformation due to selective attention. Psychologist Ramirez also highlighted in his research how the Mandela Effect can be exacerbated by media.
Why does this change everything? The answer lies in these questions. Imagine. How crazy would it be to imagine that everything you’ve known, everything you’ve experienced, everything you’ve read might just be an altered version of someone else’s story. How crazy would it be accepting and absorbing information but never really finding out the facts. How crazy is it coming to terms with the idea that every thought you’ve had, every corner of your memories could be a well-fabricated illusion. Not so crazy, after all.
Mind-blown? Me too.
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