Have you ever been convinced that something is in a particular way only to discover that you’ve been remembering it all wrong?
Like thousands of other people, do you recall the infamous Snow-White dialogue, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Turns out, it has always been, “Magic Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Well, that sounds off-kilter to me. This leads me to wonder, how can so many people have the same misconception – a little weird don’t you think?
The unusual phenomenon where many people misremember well-known events or details is known as the Mandela Effect. The term was coined in 2009 by a paranormal consultant, Fiona Broome, in reference to her false memory of Nelson Mandela’s death in the 1980s. Although he died in December 2013, Broome and an alleged thousands of people reckon that they remember clips of his funeral on TV. While various conspiracy theorists like Shane Dawson believe this is proof of an alternate universe, many neurologists use it to illustrate the shortcomings of human memory.
*The Mandela Effect 2019: A man starts to question reality when he becomes obsessed with facts and events that thousands of other people can’t remember.
The pseudoscientific perspective of Broome asserts that the difference in the figments of our collective memories arise from movement between parallel realities. This theory originates from quantum physics and relays the idea that within each universe, alternative versions of events and objects exist. Supporters of this theory claim that such instances are evidence that we have entered a time shift with our memories glitching and recalling different versions from another parallel universe. A very famous example includes the Star Wars line, “No, I’m your father,” commonly remembered as “Luke, I’m your father.” Some people even compare these “memory glitches” to the Matrix. Unfortunately, the idea of alternate realities is unfalsifiable. It further spurs this conspiracy as there is no way to prove or disprove the existence of a multiverse.
On the contrary, scientists offer some potential explanations for this strange confluence of perceptions and shed light on this unique phenomenon. They suggest that these instances are false memories influenced by similar cognitive factors affecting multiple people. These may include social and cognitive reinforcement of inaccurate memories or fake news reports and misleading photographs that influence the formation of memories. In fact, this memory distortion (often known as the misinformation effect) is where the information you learn after an event can interfere with the way you recall it. For example, the passing of another prominent South African anti-apartheid activist in 1977, Steve Biko, possibly caused the misperception about Mandela’s death.
The Mandela Effect is a testament to the fact that misconceptions in a media-saturated world are too easy to come by and create. The mind-boggling prospect of multiple timelines takes precedence over our acceptance of a simple fact: the human memory can be unreliable and imperfect. But hey, with the realm of possibilities that encircle the deepest nooks of the universe, one can never be too sure! The next time you see the Pepsi or Ford logo differently, don’t be frightened to consider the possibility that you switched between universes!