Category: The mandela effect
Proof of time travel, false memories or a parallel universe? A look at the wacky world of the 'Mandela Effect'. The Mandela effect is an idea that people move between parallel universes.
Just as powerful as human memory is, it is also tricky. Memories are an important part in shaping our identity. Any kind of evocative senses - mainly smell - can instantly trigger memories related to it. But memories can also be misleading. Has it ever happened to you that you misremember a certain situation? It can be as trivial as where you have kept your documents or as important as how you have met someone.
This doesn't always necessarily happen to one person. It might happen that a group of people collectively remember something which is wrong. This phenomenon is known as the Mandela Effect.
So let's understand what is the Mandela effect is and how it affects the world around us.
Confabulation Or Memory Errors
The Mandela effect is named after Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela was the former President of South Africa and a civil rights activist. His death in 2013 has revealed some very astonishing and mysterious memories. People all around the world claimed that they have heard the news of his death decades ago in 1980s. Some even claimed that they very clearly remember his funeral telecasted on television.
One of those many people was Fiona Broome. She is a paranormal researcher and also the first one to coin the term 'Mandela effect.' She had researched and written about the errors of memory on her website and collectively termed them as 'Mandela effect.' A more scientific term for these memory errors, be it individual or collective, is confabulation.
Surprisingly the Mandela effect is not only limited to a group of people wrongly remembering some events. It can also be applied to collective memory mistakes. One instance of this phenomenon is the name of the children's book series or TV cartoon “The Berenstain Bears,” which is remembered as “The Beren-stein Bears.” Another instance of such wrong remembrance would be how people are sure that there are 52 states in the USA, which is actually 50.
How The Brain Plays Tricks On Us?
Confabulation in masses or the Mandela Effect have helped us to understand how subtly the human brain related things. In The Berenstain Bears case, people remember it as 'stein' as that is a more common ending. Till now you might not have even made any effort to notice the spelling. In the other case where people think that the USA has 52 States, it might be possible that the brain has remembered it relating it to a deck of cards which consists of 52 cards.
Similarly, as Nelson Mandela was out of the limelight during his stay in prison for a long time, people thought that he was already dead. But how some people have claimed to watch his funeral on TV still remains a mystery.
What we understand from these examples is that memory is not like a recording machine as we had thought. It is like a story or picture which the brain constructs choosing from multiple building blocks. And in the process sometimes the blocks are misplaced or get mixed up.
The reason for the Mandela effect can also be multiverse theory, which suggests that there are many worlds other than ours, where the actions might have happened exactly how we misremember it in this world.
8 Bizarre Examples of Mandela Effect
