Have you ever thought you remembered something exactly, only to realize you never did? You may be a victim of the Mandela effect.
Our brain processes and stores a large amount of information daily, even when we sleep. It is a complex organ that has evolved over our history, even increasing in physical size to allow us to understand complex concepts such as coding, genetics, or aeronautics.
There are numerous studies that investigate the capabilities that this organ has and could have, but experts agree that, even today, the brain is a great mystery. And one of the most intriguing cognitive aspects is the functioning of memory, the process that allows us to retain the knowledge and experiences we receive from our environment and retrieve them in the short or long term, voluntarily or involuntarily.
What is the "Mandela Effect" ?
The Mandela effect is, in simple terms, a collective false memory.
It is a mistaken belief in the form of a vivid memory that is shared by a large group of people, despite the fact that it never actually happened or did not happen in the way it is remembered.
This discrepancy between reality and memory is a mind phenomenon that occurs because short-term memories are modified by our brain, which completes and subjectively personalizes the information we perceive.
This is how we end up storing data in our brain that contains some errors and that will lead to memory lapses, a very common occurrence. However, a curious phenomenon occurs when these individual brain failures occur simultaneously in several people with specific cases.
Why does this happen ?
The truth is that it has not been possible to stipulate a concrete cause for this phenomenon from the point of view of brain mechanisms, with each expert proposing a plausible explanation applied to their field.
From a psychological point of view, it is argued that, due to the fact that memory is highly suggestible, some false memories may have already reached the mind modified, and may even have been implanted externally unconsciously, taking into account that we are in constant communication with other individuals.
Quantum physics, on the other hand, proposes that sporadic connections between parallel realities occur, thus explaining why several unrelated people can share the same false memory.
5 Famous examples of the "Mandela Effect"
The best way to understand a theory is to use an example. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are countless examples of the Mandela effect that are shared by a large part of the population. Some of them are explained below:
- The Monopoly man does not wear a monocle, although most people remember him as such from the image on the game box.
- Darth Vader never said the phrase "Luke, I am your father" that became part of popular culture. The actual phrase in The Empire Strikes Back is "No, I am your father."
- The man who stood in front of the tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests (China, 1989), whose photograph made the rounds of the world, was not run over by the tank, but managed to stop it. However, many people claim to remember his murder.
- Geographical location can also produce the Mandela effect: New Zealand is located below, to the right, of Australia, and not on top, as is often thought.
The Reason for Its Famous Name
What do a South African activist and this memory phenomenon have in common?
In 2013, when the international announcement of Nelson Mandela's death due to a severe lung infection was made, thousands of people around the world revealed that they were convinced that Mandela had died during his time in prison in the 1980s.
Fiona Broome, an American blogger, was the first to comment and inquire about this event, even years before his death. In 2009, she coined the term "the Mandela effect" in a popular blog post in which she first commented on the popular belief that the activist had died, when in fact he was still alive.
These observations aroused much curiosity, and since then, Broome has begun to collaborate with scientists who have provided different theories and perspectives (this and that, for example) on the cause of this effect on collective memory.
Through this investigation, they discovered that the Mandela effect occurred with many other facts, events, and situations, transforming it from an isolated case into a recognized phenomenon.