• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Merged The MANDELA Effect.

I mentioned this to my spouse and she told me she had a faulty memory regarding the show 'Sex And The City'which she though was Sex In The City'.
 
Many people confabulating trivia is the Mandela Effect then?

All right, so if we want to give a name to this specific type of cognition error, we can. Now, on what basis can we conclude that it is increasing? Even if we can demonstrate unequivocally that it is increasing, the nest step would be to propose competing hypotheses to explain the increase. We're nowhere near lizard men of the matrix on this yet.
 
Last edited:
I think another thing that contributed to the Mandela Effect was a presumption about state leaders in the African continent. They are either there for life or imprisoned/murdered after a coup. Mandela voluntarily stepped down after his tenure to retire. His absence in SA politics post retirement lead people to assume that he had died.
 
There are famous people who I thought had died, but later I found they were still alive.

Example, I thought that Kelsey Grammer had died in 2008, so of course was puzzled when he continued to appear in films.

As you may have guessed, what happened was that he had suffered a heart attack that year, and only partially paying attention to the news, I assumed that he had died.

If other people had made the same error, this would be a mass mis-remembering similar to the Manedla effect. However, I was able to be rational rather than go on about alternate realities.
 
Alice Shortcake said:
Perhaps people remember the name Berenstein because it's more common than Berenstain, so the latter somehow doesn't look right. For decades I was convinced that the actress Miriam Margolyes' surname was Margoyles.
Click to expand...

This. When I was in grade-school, there was as girl whose last name was Robertson. How exotic !!! The really pedestrian kids couldn't get past "Robinson" as in Swiss Family". Any name that is even slightly unusual will be gotten wrong frequently, with preference for the more common.
 
Marasmusine said:
There are famous people who I thought had died, but later I found they were still alive.

Example, I thought that Kelsey Grammer had died in 2008, so of course was puzzled when he continued to appear in films.
Click to expand...

I had a similar experience when Australian horseracing identity Bart Cummings died in 2015, a short while I thought I had heard his death announced a few years earlier. Some quick checking showed that I was confusing the death of actor Bill Hunter (2011) who had played Bart Cummings in his last film with the death of Bart Cummings.

Again, my realization that something was not quite right led me to double check what I was remembering, rather than jump to claiming that reality had changed around me.
 
Re the specific case of Mandela: perhaps people remember hearing about Stephen Biko. Like Mandela a big name in anti-apartheid activism, though with different organizations. He died from police brutality while in custody and had a big funeral attended by 1000's of people, including foreign diplomats.

Ten years after his death in 1977 the movie "Cry Freedom" about his life were made, starring Denzel Washington and focusing heavily on his death. I dimly remember news-spots on apartheid in the 80's that would mention Mandela's incarceration and also show pictures from Biko's funeral. An inattentive viewer could leave with the impression that it was Mandela who had died.
 
Didactylos said:
Re the specific case of Mandela: perhaps people remember hearing about Stephen Biko. Like Mandela a big name in anti-apartheid activism, though with different organizations. He died from police brutality while in custody and had a big funeral attended by 1000's of people, including foreign diplomats.

Ten years after his death in 1977 the movie "Cry Freedom" about his life were made, starring Denzel Washington and focusing heavily on his death. I dimly remember news-spots on apartheid in the 80's that would mention Mandela's incarceration and also show pictures from Biko's funeral. An inattentive viewer could leave with the impression that it was Mandela who had died.
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting that, given what I and Marasmusine posted, it suggests a possible mechanism for how this got started.
 
I thought Ben E. King was dead, then he did a show at the Floral Pavilion in New Brighton, which I sadly missed, and then he actually did die not long after,
 
Graham2001 said:
Thanks for posting that, given what I and Marasmusine posted, it suggests a possible mechanism for how this got started.
Click to expand...

I googled '"Mandela effect" Biko' and found that this mechanism has already occurred to plenty of rational people. And (surprise, surprise) that the true believers will not abandon their dreams of parallel universes and steadfastly reject that they could have been confused this way.

To me this "phenomena" seems very US-centric. The two most prominent cases are:
1) A US series of childrens books are spelled slightly different.
2) A charismatic foreign leader, who as president steered his country through a tumultuous transitive period, actually died long before he became president.
The proponents of the Mandela effect seem to honestly believe these two changes are of a similar level.

Mandela's early death would vastly impact the last 20 years of South African history. But all these people remember is that Mandela died in the 80's, then apparently never heard about him again (or South Africa) until he actually died in 2013.
 
Last edited:
Has anyone proposed a single universe where confabulation exists and also where people imagine other universes.
 
Didactylos said:
I googled '"Mandela effect" Biko' and found that this mechanism has already occurred to plenty of rational people. And (surprise, surprise) that the true believers will not abandon their dreams of parallel universes and steadfastly reject that they could have been confused this way.

To me this "phenomena" seems very US-centric. The two most prominent cases are:
1) A US series of childrens books are spelled slightly different.
2) A charismatic foreign leader, who as president steered his country through a tumultuous transitive period, actually died long before he became president.
The proponents of the Mandela effect seem to honestly believe these two changes are of a similar level.

Mandela's early death would vastly impact the last 20 years of South African history. But all these people remember is that Mandela died in the 80's, then apparently never heard about him again (or South Africa) until he actually died in 2013.
Click to expand...

It is the same with many conspiracy theories, they only make sense if the world stops at the continental borders of the United States. That said, I tried your suggested Google search and amongst the first entries was a New Ager with some really loopy claims, such as this:

If we didn’t live in a holographic multiverse in which we’re all venturing in various directions to experience a multitude of different possible futures and pasts, we wouldn’t find the tremendous divergence between peoples’ memories. As we enter the Quantum Age, it’s time that we stop calling such differences in memory “false recollections,” in favor of “alternate recollections,” indicating respect for the fact that each and every one of us exists in a superimposed state, with access to many possible alternate histories, presents, and futures.
Click to expand...

https://cynthiasuelarson.wordpress....ndela-didnt-die-in-prison-and-why-it-matters/

That's right, our brains are quantum computers seeing all realities and that's why memories fade and change with time.
 
Mandela effect: what do they expect from us?

In reading several people’s experiences with the Mandela effect, I started to wonder; what is the desired response from people who didn’t experience it?

Suppose I remember that Mandela was president of South Africa, but most everyone around me remembers that he died in prison. Not only that, but everything around me (TV shows, newspaper articles, history lessons, you name it) supports that.

Obviously, I wouldn’t expect people to change their minds. I may remember that he was president, but if everything around me contradicts that, down to archival news broadcasts, then it would be folly to expect people to believe me instead.

If I didn’t think that my memory was wrong (for whatever reason), and I was unable to get back to the reality I came from (side-note; do people try that?), what would I do?

Well, I’d accept reality as I find it, and I don’t think I’d insist reality had changed. After all, what is more likely; that all of reality has changed, including everyone’s memories (excepting a small group), or that I am from a different reality altogether? (For the moment, let's exclude the actual answer; my memories were incorrect)

All this is to say that “But it used to be different” doesn’t carry any weight. It’s an interesting story, but you’ll need more to convince me that MY memories (and most everyone else’s, plus all video and print) are wrong instead of yours.

So, with that out of the way, my question is:

Ideally, how do they want people to respond to their experience?

I have considered asking them directly, but I have so little knowledge of that community that anything I'd say could be seen as condescending, thus depriving me of answers on principle (and rightly so, I think).


By the way, my memories regarding Mandela line up with reality, and the above was purely an example.
 
Some people remember things differently than everyone else, such as the supposed death of Nelson Mandela in the '80s, but also more trivial stuff such as the name of the Berenstain Bears (they remember it as being "Berenstein").

There are different explanations given, but the common thread is the idea that things were really that way for them, and that it isn't faulty memory.
 
I don't think there would be a "one size fits all" approach to all people.

There are plenty of people who realize that their memory may be faulty, or that their memory may be playing tricks on them. Those people would simply be convinced by showing them a wiki page, or media articles or broadcasts that show they're wrong. Though even then, of course, if somehow the stakes are high for them to hold to their previously held conviction, they may try to double down.

I don't dare to go into how other people could be convinced.

I'm more than a little skeptical about the namesake story of the effect. According to wiki:
The term was coined by paranormal enthusiast Fiona Broome, who says she and other people remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s, rather than in 2013.
Click to expand...
Mandela, after his release from prison, led the ANC in the negotiations to abolish apartheid, became the first SA president, led the reconciliation process, and got the Nobel Peace Prize. His funeral in 2013 was attended by virtually every head of state, broadcast globally, and is also notable for the incident with the sign language interpreter. You must have been really living under a rock to not know any of that (or have gotten your news only from the National Enquirer).

We have no evidence for Ms. Broome's claim other than her say-so. Maybe she did indeed ask 50 people at DragonCon about it and 2 others had the same faulty memory. Confirmation bias at best, I suspect.

I'm not skeptical about the other prototypical example trotted around: the Berenstain Bears. I think it's totally believable that in shedloads of people, their memory "corrected" the really uncommon -stain spelling to the common -stein spelling, all independent of each other.
 
I have to say I was confused by the OP. We had a thread about this a few years ago, and it was simply a discussion of mis-remembered(with certainty) items. I believe that my position was "hey, if you want to call it The Mandela Effect, have fun but it's been known for years and it's just normal human memory".

When did the lunatic fringe latch onto this? There's a bucketload of woo material on the inter toobz. Alternate reality, parallel universe, mind control plots, etc.... I may have heard the term in recent times and thought they were referring to the phenomenon of faulty memory.
 
I've encountered four people who "remember" that the opera singer, Luciano Pavarotti was responsible for the death of princess Diana. Are their memories correct for them?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom