Life is full of not only memories but experiences and changes that stick with us, that shape us, and that guide our life.
But if you think about it, there are always certain things we will remember specifically in pinpoint accuracy. Maybe, it's where you were when the towers fell on nine eleven, or maybe it's where you were when Michael Jackson passed away. There are so many different things that happened that we remember and nothing could shake our confidence in those memories. But what does it mean when thousands of childhood memories and adult experiences are remembered differently? In a sense, how can all these different experiences, different memories, different perceptions of an exact thing happening as they remember it be incorrect? This is a phenomenon that's leads many people to wonder if this is just an auto currants or possibly that alternate or parallel realities might be causing it.
What we're talking about is called the Mandela effect. It is essentially the notion that hundreds, if not thousands of people, around the world remember certain events, names, occurrences differently than history or what they really are right now. It has to do with the concept that this occurrence happens because of alternate realities, a kind of mesh in a sense, and coming together to form what we see now. It had a massive boost in momentum in 2013 when Nelson Mandela finally died.
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Nelson Mandela was a huge political activist who was actually imprisoned and then released. He later become the president of his country. It was a big deal when he died. Many people cared. It was also huge on social media. However, many people around the world were confused because they’d heard that he died while he was in prison sometime around the nineteen eighties. In addition to the sadness at such a huge figure passing away, there was also a huge community of people who didn't understand how they had heard or got what they experienced wrong. People remember news clips, they remember reading about it in magazines. They remember talking to friends after it occurred, yet somehow he didn't really die in the 90s because he had just died in 2013. People did not understand how this happened. Other experiences as well were realized by different people as having been different in the past but is now viewed in a certain light.
There are the examples of the Berenstain Bears being spelled with an e which I remember as a kid. But now, and according to the books and online shows, it was always spelled with an a.
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Another easy one is Looney Tunes that I remember being spelled like this but it is actually spelled looney tunes.
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And a normal wedding tunes which I also don't remember and maybe you remember it differently as well.
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There's also a huge community online of Italians that lived in Italy that could have sworn Sicily was connected to Italy. But look on any map and geographically, if you ever visit Italy and try to go to Sicily, you can very easily see even from space that they are separated by a huge body of water. These are just three of thousands of different examples of this happening to people around the world, and I think the ones that have to do with geography, especially the one that I just said about Italy and Sicily are some of the ones that really pull up the most confusion. It's not just getting words wrong or spelling wrong, it's also getting the shapes and form of continents and countries wrong.
But why do people have this idea of parallel realities or alternate universes? The reason is because on a quantum level, this could be an actuality that actually happened although it's very unlikely and highly improbable. It still holds a small percentage chance of happening and this is why Andrew Friedman from MIT thinks that the most unlikely of scenarios and quantum occupancy such as this one right here would fit the many-worlds theory. It would fit the idea of universes kind of collapsing onto each other.
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Therefore, people's memories are certain experiences from those who have collapsed into this reality.
This would occur if the universe ended, something happened in one universe. Whatever bits and pieces were leftover would collapse down or collapse into wherever they may stem from our universe. And what we see is that memories are different for all those people in those experiences. They bring with them what happened in their universe and it also explains why only a select few people remember the differences or experiences differently than the rest of the population.
But this alone is severely stretching the theory. Yes, it is possible, there are other better reasons that are more logical, more understandable. Reasons as to why it's happening other than the parallel universe theory. I think the true culprit is something known as confabulation of which the Mandela effect is a huge example in pop culture.
Essentially, confabulation is a psychological phenomenon. You can “mis-remember’ your experiences and then basically take in the incorrect information you are given which therefore becomes reality to our minds. So, maybe mis-read a book, maybe you looked at the map wrong. Maybe you had an experience that might have changed and you might have remembered it incorrectly. Because we have experienced it, we helped it to be true, and so by the time we realized it's fake or incorrect, our brain goes into a state of cognitive dissonance and won't accept it. So maybe there was a hoax in the nineteen eighties where Nelson Mandela may have died. Maybe the Berenstain Bears just sound like Stein because it's a German rooted name and that's its stems which uses an e, but the Berenstain Bears don't and that's where we got confused.
The thing is, humans aren't cameras or voice recorders or teleprompters. We don't have a perfect mechanical function that takes in information and stores it perfectly. We have a new information command, we have a new memories command, and things change thing to store things warm. And that's why people are so good at convincing themselves, not only positively or negatively and incorrectly as to what they experienced or what they think they experienced in their life.
A lot of the things we experience or already memorized or we remember are probably true but then again, there's also a lot that's probably wrong. These Mandela effects are a pretty solid example, I think, of how we can mis-remember, because for every thousand or so people that say they think Nelson Mandela died in the eighties, we have millions of people who say, no, I don't know what you're talking about. We thought he was alive.
So that indicates how likely it is that two people have this memory and it's correct, and then all of us just missed that information so long ago.
However, if you would like to think it’s an alternate universe, by all means feel free. That is your right, but if you want to really understand psychology, just the basic aspects of how we are memorizing, how we remember anything at all, this more than likely explains the Mandela effect and why it happens to us, and why we get so confused about things we are so rooted in being a hundred percent true.
That is the post for today. I hope you guys enjoyed this.