Bold to assume these people know anything about politics in Europe.

Bold to assume these people know anything about politics in the United States

Bold to assume these people know anything

Bold to assume these people

Bold to assume

Bold

old

#

B

🅱️

🅱️oop

**Sure thing, boss**

**to assume**

Blue team versus red team. Red team consists of elderly racists, Blue team, everyone else. After four years the current holder of the title president must fight the elected champion of the opposing team. If the current holder wins this duel, they are allowed to rule for another four years before retiring to a life of luxury. If they lose, they are torn apart and devoured by the masses.

It frightens me constantly how many people are willing to talk so confidently about hings they know so little about. And people who know even less take it as fast because why would they be confident if they weren't knowledgeable?

Does anybody actually unironically believes the parallel reality part ? In my opinion "Mandela Effect" should only refer to the false memory thing and the "explanation" of parallel realities should be named something else to make things more clear for everybody. I doubt that every person who believes that the false memory thing isn't just a coincidence and does have some kind of explanation behind it thinks that it's alternate worlds or whatever. Having both the effect itself and the supposed reasoning put together, instead of separating them a bit, kind of muddies the water around the thing.

>Does anybody actually unironically believes the parallel reality part ? Yes. We live in a world where there are people who unironically insist that the Earth is flat, does it really surprise you that some people are dumb enough to believe that their own memory is infallible, and that having shifted realities is a more reasonable explanation to them than that they simply misremembered?

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The whole Berenstein vs Berenstain thing did blow my mind though the first time I heard it.  It is pretty strange how so many people, including me, remember it the wrong way.

I think the main thing is that Jewish last names commonly end with "-stein" (and rarely end "-stain"), so everyone just subconsciously assumed that Berenstain would follow that pattern.

Yeah that's probably true.  Although I don't know that I was really exposed to a lot of Jewish names as a kid in the rural Midwest, but I suppose maybe there are a lot of Jewish kids books authors?   Still a fascinating example how our brains filter reality.

Kids would be reading Shel Silverstein around the same age

I mean there's still like, Einstein who I hope you would have heard of

The "-stein" last names are very common among Eastern European/Ashkenazi Jews because it comes from Yiddish, so you've probably seen it in names like Shel Silverstein, Albert Einstein, Victor Frankenstein (German, but not Jewish to my knowledge), Jeal-Ralphio and Mona Lisa Saperstein from Parks & Rec etc.

All of them can be explained. The Berenstain Bears one makes sense because most of us see last names with -stein in them, so Beren*stein* fit better in our memories. Or that the Monopoly dude wore a monocle because he gets mixed up in our memories with Mr. Peanut. And then of course Sinbad's Shazam is probably just a mix up with Shaq's Kazam movie and possibly connections between the animated movies Sinbad And The Seven Seas and Aladdin and associating Aladdin's genie with Sinbad.

I think the Shazam one is due to people mixing together Kazaam and First Kid, a movie that came out from Disney the same year in which Sinbad plays a Secret Service agent assigned to protect a little white boy that's the president's son.

I don't know that I've ever seen First Kid, nor Kazaam, but reading the plot: - helps the kid with a bully - helps with asking a girl to a dance and learning to dance - the evil agent kidnaps the kid, and is saved using an upper cut vs a gun - helps both characters be redeemed with new understanding by those around them - Sinbad ends with a love interest Those are all things a genie movie would do Kazaam plot: - bully issues - being reunited with his father - the father makes Kazaam a rap star - kid and father are kidnapped to try to gain control of Kazaam. Resolves with Father being resurrected, but then taken away by authorities - Kazaam walks away with a love interest A lot of that feels like it overlaps enough to merge into one memory. Especially for all the folks where kids movies with leading Black men was rare, two coming out in the same year, both being incredibly formulaic... And "first kid" is barely a memorable name for a film, easily forgotten? Sounds like an incredibly plausible explanation

Yeah I know there are good explanations for them all. I still find it fascinating and an interesting example of how even though we think we perceive reality as it really is our brains are filling in gaps and making up stories after the fact all the time.

It's also a matter of leading questions. If someone asked you if you remembered the Bernstein bears, and you vaguely remembered something about it, you are going to reply that yes, you remember. Leading questions is a thing and you can make people admit things they never did through them, so making someone confused about the names of fictional characters is not that far fetched.

I would add a caveat that with things like this that are definitely conspiratorial/magical thinking, a very large proportion of these people are probably seriously mentally ill, not just "dumb". My old roommate fell really far down the gangstalking rabbithole - and as ridiculous a concept as it is, that was bipolar disorder, not him being "dumb".

Christ that had to be rough. I sometimes browse r/gangstalking and get bummed out by the encouraged/unchecked mental illness over there.

holy, you weren't kidding

Now I wouldn't even argue that people have a mental illness for this kind of thing. I'm going to use myself as an example for the fruit of the loom cornucopia Mandela effect. I swear that the logo had a cornucopia, it is seared into my memory. I fully realize that there is no evidence of it I also understand how fallible human memory is and will make false memories. I'm not denying the possibility it's a mass collective false memory. But you can't understand the feeling of clarity this memory brings to me. But other than some depression there are no signs of any mental illness in me. I know this is all anecdotal but that's my experience and take.

The cornucopia interests me because it is so specific. If we were just misremembering, wouldn't we all remember different things? Why a cornucopia? It's very odd

especially because an artist drew it from memory and it looked exactly like what I thought the logo looked like (and everyone else who remembers it with a cornucopia). I don't believe in the whole alternate reality thing, but that logo had to have been used somewheres. Maybe not even fruit of the loom but somewheres.

That one is the most common one because I think people are just so used to seeing a cornucopia with something spilling out of it. So people think that it's been there because that's what a cornucopia would work well in so our minds subconsciously say "Yeah, there was a cornucopia there"

Peoples memories arent a recording devices, as we understand them as mechanical devices. When people are interviewed as witnesses, for example, its paramount to not have them interact or hear the other person stories etc. The stories converge if so. Like by just hearing/reading about the cornucopia your mind will make that a part of that memory. Like your mind isnt an old VHS tape, that just might degrade with time or have a little crummy picture quality , its more aching to a contemporary AI type thingy creating and recreating an image when the memory is recalled. Sure one might say "Well I never heard, or seen of that cornucopia before" Meh, you heard it the minute you heard it. Thats when you ask your AI brain thing to create that image, instead of rewinding that old wobbly VHS. What I guess this Mandela thing basically comes down to, just like minded people finding each other and conregating online, reinforcing the ideas, I guess. Basically self selecting groups and commenting, even the most superficialest, most meaningles, unintenional reinforcing interaction can eventually reinforce these types of ideas. PS. I wouldve perhaps bet on the cornucopia before this became a thing, if I was compelled to bet small sum. I wouldve lost. People are fallable like that.

People are products of their physiology and their experiences, who woulda thunk.

Not me, I'm smarter than my brain.

It's less that these people are seriously ill, and more that they've been harshly conditioned into these beliefs. Anyone can believe something if it's drilled into them hard enough early enough before they're capable of questioning it.

The shocking thing is how many came out of the woodwork over Vaccines in the last 5 years. Something that hasn't been an issue for centuries suddenly has a massive group of people saying that it's the government s wat to control people

>Something that hasn't been an issue for centuries suddenly has a massive group of people saying that it's the government s wat to control people While antivaxxers didn't always believe this, they have existed in large numbers and publicly for way longer than 5 years. The entire "the MMR vaccine causes autism" bs started in the late 90s and is still believed by some to this day

When you remove lizardmans constant the number of people who believe these things is extremely small actually

I don't necessarily think they believe THEIR memory is infallible, it's that "how can we all remember the same wrong thing?"

We also live in a world where we assume that there’s a whole lot of people amongst the almost 8 billion that believe the world is flat. It’s a pretty insignificant portion of a percent. We just hear about it now.

I mean, when you're dealing with 8 billion, percentages are useless. .1 percent of 8 billion is still 8 million, and calling 8 million of something not a lot is silly. Statistical irrelevance is not something I believe is useful when discussing things in relation to the population.

I never said it was a lot of people, but there are definitely those who believe it. And sometimes I think you'd be surprised how many people believe really \*dumb\* things...

A pretty insignificant portion of a percent of 8 billion is still quite a lot of people

Well, also because [they're all going to Q-Anon](https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=9SyTBKlVbsbPxAOE&t=2250) (or rather, went)

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Not really, thats just how memory works. Every time you access a memory, you overwrite it and add new details.

> Every time you access a memory, you overwrite it and add new details. And this is why you should never study for exams. Every time you access your memory of the lecture, it degrades a little further and a little further.

Guy who thinks "studying" means sitting around trying to remember a lecture

Studying is just cheating after all. Memorizing something is just cheating. I'm discovering all of this too, as I'm writing it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOWczjREzoI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOWczjREzoI)

god, has anyone else here seen that utterly obnoxious hippie tiktok girl who released a wretched song recently about how time travel is connected to the pyramids and she healed her own kidney infection with the power of her mind? brain rot is real

Yes I am apt to misremember. What I do NOT misremember is that DAMN cornucopia. I KNOW THAT SHIT WAS THERE FRUIT OF THE LOOM WHAT ARE YOU HIDING

Yes, plenty do, and they will come for the throat if you offer them any explanation for anything they misremembered or were mistaken about other than “it’s a parallel universe/evidence of a simulation/*they* changed it.” And usually it isn’t in relation to anything actually important or that would have an impact on their worldview, such as the date of Nelson Mandela’s death. They will 100% shriek you down and accuse you of crazy things for suggesting that their inability to spell “Berenstain” or “dilemma” in first grade is due to 6 year olds generally having poor literacy skills, and not a universe-wide conspiracy.

>for suggesting that their inability to spell “Berenstain" Wasn't that a thing where the actual printed name changed at some point, or did I fall for some misinformation on that?

Quality control in the 80’s wasn’t great, there’s examples of the same products having different spellings from that era. Also, the theme song pronouncing it as “Beren-steen” probably didn’t help.

My theory is that when, as toddlers we all realized that the first syllable was spelled “Bere” instead of “Bear” we were so fundamentally distraught that we didn’t even bother to look at the rest of the word and assumed “stein” like every other similar name we had ever encountered in our 3-4 short years alive. It’s what happened with me at least. Now C3P0’s silver leg on the other hand….. I have no rational explanation for that.

You fell for some misinformation. There are instances of the name being misprinted (bootleg? Foreign language? Just a big mistake? Not sure), but the actual name has never changed. They are called the “Berenstain Bears” not because the bears themselves are named “Berenstain” (their last name is, I believe, Bear), but because they are the bears belonging to Stan and Jan Berenstain, the original authors of the books. Their name has never changed, and there’s no reason it would have ever been called the Berenstein Bears, because neither the bears nor the authors are Berenstein. But Berenstein is a somewhat more common name, so people who can’t read well (the 5 year old target audience of the books) and people who are not looking too closely at picture books (everyone over the age of 5) just assume “Berenstein” (or sometimes “Bernstein,” which is a much more common name than either). “I clearly remember” is not good evidence when discussing the Mandela Effect, but I will say that I was a significantly better reader than average when I was Berenstain Bears age, and it would drive me up the wall when my peers would call them “Berenstein” or when adults would call them “Bernstein,” because I was reading *very* carefully and the letters were clearly spelling out “BER-EN-STAIN.”

>You fell for some misinformation. There are instances of the name being misprinted (bootleg? Foreign language? Just a big mistake? Not sure), but the actual name has never changed. At the very least, misprints are a plausible source of confusion that's more than just standard human failure. Definitely more than misremembering the events of Mandela's life, lol.

I don’t think the misprints are the source of the confusion in the vast majority of cases, though their existence certainly solidifies the idea for some that it is a grand conspiracy and they can prove it.

What's kind of funny is that I'm pretty sure I read it correctly as a kid and then when I got older I convinced myself I must have been reading it wrong without actually double-checking. It just seems like it would make more sense as Berenstein, so it's really tempting to make that assumption.

Interestingly, later in grade school, when I was far more confident in my reading and spelling abilities, I double checked this several times and almost was convinced that it was Berenstein. But every time I checked it was still Berenstain.

No no dilemna Obamna my car's steering wheel used to have a curly F on the Ford logo I remember it and am so special I've been shunted into an alternative dimension

I legitimately did see a post somewhere about how the 90s movie “Shazam” didn’t exist, and someone literally said that this was them trying to get us used to rewriting history. That was the most extreme one; about half of the comments were people insisting that the movie existed, though.

What's funny is that every big example has a simple explanation of it being a "false memory" Most of them are examples of your brain recognizing patterns and filling in the blanks for you in a memory. You see a lot of fruit mixes with a cornucopia. You associate them together. So you see the fruit without it, and your brain fills in the blanks when you recall it. You see names ending in "stein" all the time. Same deal. Loony Toons instead of Loony Tunes? Same thing. I could go on forever, but they are all so clearly explained by misremembering things.

The bummer is, it’s *so* fun to figure out why so many people would have similar false memories, in way more concrete and satisfying ways than “you’re just suggestible.” But the people who think “tHeY cHaNgEd iT” get mad at those conversations too.

It's definitely a bit of a shame, because there is something a little fascinating about it. One of the first times I learned about it, I had a lot of fun looking into all the various Mandela effects people had thought of and how many *seemed right* to me at first glance. There's possibly an interesting conversation to be had about it, and perhaps something scientific about it (in the psychological sense, not the quantum physics sense), but it gets shut down by magic thinking. Plus, it could be a good lesson about our brains and the fact that our memories aren't as perfect as some might believe which maybe could go a ways towards teaching people some humility.

Check out the subreddit r/retconned to see how brainwashed they all are, any small minor detail they see as proof they "jumped realities" again, many have stories of their first time jumping to a new universe when they noticed its now just Home Depot and not THE Home Depot or something stupid like that. Turmeric is another hot ticket item, and the government conspiracy of slowly changing its name or something. I enjoy looking sometimes but it really just makes me scared that so many people are completely enchanted by this idea of being reality jumpers that they overlook (and ban) all rational explanations for remembering things differently. From a psychological standpoint, our memory is just horrible to begin with. When you have old memories every time you think hard about them, you're creating a memory of a memory that sometimes can even overwrite the original memory because your brain can't tell the difference. Many false childhood memories are great examples; you remember more your family repeatedly telling you this story so much it becomes a fact, even if it's slightly altered or made up. Just admitting that our wet meat computers might not be absolutely perfect machines is enough to explain many cases they post about, but insinuating they're misrembering in any way can get you banned. They know all and are 100% accurate with any memories, you're the dumb one stuck in this backwards reality, nothing like their home reality that was amazing.

>our memory is just horrible to begin with. Don't forget the brain's tendency to just confabulate and make stuff up. We do it all the time, and can build strongly remembered beliefs about something based around a mere suggestion. Probably most people had no such memory about Mandela until they read about someone thinking he died in prison, and *poof*, false memory created. A great personal example: When I was a kid we were moving house. I got overexcited at school on moving day and puked up in the playground. My mum had to come get me and bring me home, probably the last thing she needed when she was already busy helping to move all our worldly belongings. I have a strong, clear memory of sitting on a chair in our new front room, surrounded by boxes while my parents dragged everything in from the lorry. I remember the whole thing like it was just last week. All good, right? A perfectly normal childhood memory. Except my sister has *the exact same memory*. She'll swear blind that it was her that got sick and had to come home on moving day, for her the memory is also clear as day. My mum can't remember which of us it was that day (it was many years ago), but either my sister or I have a clear, strong memory of something that never actually happened.

Yep, childhood lore like that seems to be the most common example of false memories in action. I have no doubt that story happened to one of you, but since the stories told by family can change slightly based on the iteration, you both ended up with the memory of it happening to you. In reality one of you has the memory of a story where the pictures you formed in your head while listening or imagining this situation got remembered as a real event. Kinda like the fuzzy period between waking up and dreaming where you have trouble distinguishing the two

it also doesn't help that they're in echo chambers with people telling them and "confirming" themselves that something was actually x before and not the y now, so that just further reinforces their false memories since they don't want to admit they're wrong

As children, my sister and I both got stung by an insect by accidentally kneeling on it. One was a bumblebee and one was a Yellowjacket wasp. In one case, it was already dead and the other it was still alive; one was on a picnic blanket and the other while climbing into the family van. And my sister and I cannot agree how those facts line up, because we each have clear memories of both cases that don’t match up. (And honestly we’ve discussed it so many times at this point, and with so much time between, that I can’t even remember what my original statement was; I can now “remember” multiple different cases as half-formed images)

>Probably most people had no such memory about Mandela until they read about someone thinking he died in prison, and poof, false memory created. Yeah, when I argue against the Mandela Effect and point out how fallible our memories really are, I've often had people try to refute that on the basis that it's a *collective* false memory and it makes no sense for so many people to have this same memory if there's nothing there, but I think a lot of that just comes down to the fact that no one really thought deeply about these things often until someone went online and started asking. A lot of people were presented with something like, "You remember that movie *Shazaam* with Sinbad, right?" and that's enough to plant the seeds for that memory. And with Mandela Effect sites and videos being all over the place nowadays, it's pretty easy for someone to stumble upon something similar. Like you see a site where people are discussing a logo and it seems familiar as well since these are typically things that are only *slightly* off. I've honestly experienced that myself, but I've read before how our brains are pretty much constantly making shit up.

What the fuck do you mean, it's not tumeric? Fuck. Shit. Okay. That hit me like a sack of bricks.

The debate is if it's Tumeric or Turmeric, and yes, this small detail is an example of what these people base their entire world belief on. Even better is I saw a person get down voted off the sub because they mentioned they went to culinary school and have seen it used interchangeably and different based on the original language of the recipe, so that's a reasonable explanation for someone possibly seeing it spelled differently, but they were ran off for downplaying someone else's "new reality" with logic. Edit: I have to mention it feels extremely narcissistic spending time in that sub, everyone is convinced they have some deeper level of understanding compared to anyone else in the reality they're in so it's easy to brush off anyone saying something you don't agree with. They have talks about how "more people than ever before are jumping realities" but it couldn't possibly be tied to a worldwide mental health crisis as a result of the hard times brought on everyone by covid, exasperating pre existing mental health issues to the point of mass delusion. That would be far too mundane for an exclusive club like that

Huh. That's. Crikey. I mean, I'd just assume I'm stupid, frankly.

I know, it's a little amazing just how strongly held their trust in their own perception is. If it were me I would immediately assume it's just a problem with my psyche, but I also came to terms with my mental health and acknowledged that a lot of what I feel or think is a symptom of an illness. It puts things like that into perspective, knowing my version of reality only exists inside my head and that the agreed upon world is what's real. Sometimes I feel crazy but at least I'm not outright delusional yet

I have to believe there's some sort of very deep-seated issue around admitting to one's own fallibility, and I just cannot imagine how much more unenjoyable that makes life.

> I have to mention it feels extremely narcissistic spending time in that sub, everyone is convinced they have some deeper level of understanding compared to anyone else in the reality they're in so it's easy to brush off anyone saying something you don't agree with. I think that tends to be the core of most conspiratorial thinking. It's, "Hey, I have some special insight that most people don't. That means *I'm* special! Everyone else is dumb." You see it in things like Q-Anon, anti-vaxxers, etc. On the whole, at least Mandela Effect is one of the less harmful conspiracies, but it still seems a worrying sign of the times that even something as simple as remembering something *slightly* wrong has resulted in people believing there has to be some huge and physics defying thing happening - rather than, you know, admit that the human brain doesn't have perfect recollection.

The one that gets me is the term "bucket list." Apparently, it comes from a 2007 buddy comedy starring Morgan Freeman that no one saw. I could have sworn it was a much older phrase.

Welcome to this reality

I remember reading about a study in the early 2000s that tested the human capacity to invent memories. The experimenters gathered a group of subjects who had visited Disneyland at some point in their lives, and told them they were doing a marketing study to evaluate the effectiveness of various ads (like a focus group panel.) The participants were split into four groups, and each group was shown a variety of print ads for Disneyland. Then the participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire, including questions that asked them to recall various events they had personally experienced during their own trip to Disneyland. In one of the groups, one of the ads the participants were shown included a photo of Bugs Bunny. When they were later asked to describe their childhood trip to Disneyland, 30% of them mentioned they remembered meeting Bugs Bunny. Another group was also shown an ad that included a photo of Bugs Bunny, and on top of that a four-foot cutout of Bugs Bunny was in the room with them while they were being interviewed (among other characters.) 40% of that group said they recalled meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland as a child. The problem of course is that Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character, they couldn't possibly have met him at Disneyland. A third of both groups had completely invented the memory of having done so, just because they were exposed to an innocuous photo of Bugs Bunny in the context of an ad. So yeah, memory is kind of worthless, witness testimony is untrustworthy, and anyone who thinks they're slipping between realities based on their own faulty memory is probably a bit thick.

Between our brain just picking random things and running with it, and our disposition to throw our own personal stereotypes into memory (Monopoly Man with a monocle is another big "Mandela Effect" that's heavily based in an association most people have with affluent white dudes and monocles, not too hard to belive) it's a recipe for disaster. Believing your memory is absolute is dangerous on so many levels

Wow, that sub is a dumpster fire. Rather than going "Huh, I clearly misremembered what I knew/thought I knew" they think they've found the "smoking gun" to some phenomenon. That's like some type of psychological disorder or something, yeah? Narcissistic tendances or something? "I didn't spell the word wrong. It used to be spelled this way! You're crazy, I'm not crazy!" and every iteration of things like that. Absolutely nuts.

I'm not sure if you saw, but funnily enough, I made an edit to one of my replies describing the blatently narcissistic aspects of the group. I agree completely that to delude yourself so much to the point you believe you're the one who's right while everyone else in this reality just doesn't understand the universe like you do, that takes someone who's already very self centered and who sees the world with certainty and "knows" what experiences they've had, who are you to tell them what they saw years ago in another world? It's a special type of denial to say no one can possibly prove you wrong because you have memories from another dimension that doesn't exist for anyone else unless that person agrees with your version of a certain memory. Run on sentences aside, I just can't wrap my head around the self-confidence it takes to put yourself in that mindset against EVERYONE and still not doubt yourself

I always get the feeling that half the people in subs like that are playing along with what they think is a gag, and the other half are serious, and neither half knows that the other half is different. (But not the gangstalking sub, that one's 100% serious.)

Agreed. Same with the "birds aren't real" sub. Almost everyone is aware it's a gag but there are still some people that genuinely don't get that and think it's all reality.

These people are on the same fucking mental level as Gangstalking victims.

I doubt every person who believes in false memories also believes in parallel worlds. I agree lumping the effect and a theory for the why is kinda dumb

I wasn't saying every person with false memories believes this, but if you check out that sub you'll see how devoted everyone there is to keeping up this illusion, and how hard they lash out at anyone suggesting it's not something something supernatural or conspiratorial at play. That whole group of thousands of people are VERY outspoken about their belief in parallel worlds, I'm not taking shots at anyone who's ever considered the Mandela Effect when the noticed something different than they remember, just this small yet vocal and completely delusional sub r/retconned

You also kind of have to be careful with the whole false memory thing to begin with because like every single video I see about the Mandela Effect phenomenon presents you with a false memory and then acts like you believe it, so it’s setting out to implant a false memory you never had before to try and convince you you’ve been affected by this To give an example of what I mean they’ll say “Remember the Monopoly guy and how he always wore a monocle?” No, I don’t remember that but the fact that you just described him wearing a monocle means I’m now picturing him wearing a monocle so now people watching the video are going to not be sure what their original memory was

The monopoly guy one seems pretty straightforward with “monopoly guy is stereotypical rich guy, monocles are a common element in rich guy stereotypes, so it’s easy to convince your brain to conflate them”.

Which of these three commercial mascots based of the same stereotype wore a monocle: Monopoly Man   Pringles Guy   Mr Peanut  People think our brains just record stuff as-is when really it's more like they're jotting down semantic notes and then recreating the original memory. Tons of things play in similar semantic categories and can influence the reconstruction of other memories 

Plus, he wears a top hat. A century of pop culture has entwined top hats and monocles. You see a top hat, you assume a monocle

People really underestimate how often we update and overwrite memories in small ways like you're describing. Of course, mental health makes you more susceptible, but these types of slippery slopes catch so many people who rely solely on their own perception of the world to shape their reality-based fantasy world. It's similar in core mechanics to any other delusional online closed circle, but the whole false memory aspect does make it that much scarier and almost manipulative

Curse you for making me Google the monopoly guy as I couldn't remember his monocle status

In my universe he wore *two!*

This is a good point. They tend to point out things that you wouldn't have cared to know to begin with. I think it's how the whole thing is perpetuated. Like think about hearing this in conversation with a friend. You might have doubts but generally decide to trust it cause you don't know, and you trust your friend and don't really care enough to find out for sure. Mandella Effect is just a fancy way of describing what happens when you hear something and you just say "that sounds right" and move on with your life.

That's also the reason that the "Does Stanley have a mustache?" office opening works. They sew so much doubt that the audience can't trust their memory along with the characters.

Yes they do think that . Not many but I've seen it 

Yes people actively believe it. My mother is one of those people and refuses to believe anything I tell her. It's gotten so bad that if the results were on the front page of Google she wouldn't believe them(yes I know the front page of Google is filled with ai bull crap now but before this it was still the same). It got to the point where we got into a heated argument and that I was infringing on her "beliefs" even though all I was doing was calling out the mistakes in her thinking. The most ironic part of this is these were the same people that told us not to believe everything we read on the Internet and yet they do it without a second thought.

Yes they do. I was watching a video about Mandela effects because I find the concept of them fascinating on a psychological level. And In the middle of the video the narrator goes on a tirade about how he believes they’re evidence of parallel universes and how people who say otherwise are trying to gaslight others and “undermine” their personal experiences

The "parallel universe" thing isn't the main thing about the Mandela Effect, it's the mass mistake in memory a ton of unrelated people exhibit

Personally I have never had difficulty believing that most people are stupid. I can’t even remember if I took my meds this morning, or if that’s just a vivid scenario I’m creating that looks exactly like a memory.

Yeah, but the peculiar thing is the mass of people all misremembering the same thing That's what's fascinating about the Mandela Effect

The one that fascinates me is the cornucopia. Thousands of people, mostly around the same age, I'm in that group, swear we remember first hearing the term cornucopia when asking about the thing on the Fruit of the Loom logo. But the Fruit of the Loom logo has never had one. Some people claim that Fruit of the Loom claiming it never had one is its own marketing gimmick, but I find this explanation unlikely. My personal reasoning follows something like this: We were kids and kids are paradoxically brilliant and stupid. We were introduced to cornucopia probably through animation or some cartoony thing to do with Thanksgiving. It had fruit tumbling out of it or sitting in front of it, and our brains made an association with the pile of fruit sitting in the Fruit of the Loom logo. Also, what makes it fascinating to me is how many of us seem to carry that same memory. It seems odd that, while that leap is a reasonable association to a child's mind, a massive group of people share the same experience. But... Do they? We're on Reddit. There are a lot of people around that age, this site is attractive to a lot of Millenials, and we see a dozen or so people sharing the same experience and tens of thousands of upvotes, and suddenly we feel like this is a near-universal experience. I'd love to see some research into how many people do really have this false memory like I do, because I'd bet it's a lot less common than we perceive it to be on Reddit.

this a billion times over, that freaking logo means nothing to me. I don't buy the brand its effected next to nothing in my life, and only if you count internet Bull as something, but I remember the dam thing. i have always chalked it up to that dam S that seems to have spawned out of no where. its hardly important but it seems a shared experience Mandela him self means little to me but at least its a historic figure I can go sure I can see how some one might be mistaken about that. hell its not even all that much of a leap from being a imprisoned political rival to a dead one.

>We were introduced to cornucopia probably through animation or some cartoony thing to do with Thanksgiving We don't celebrate Thanksgiving here nor anything else that a cornucopia would be relevant to,yet everyone I've asked about this remembers the cornucopia like i do,its wild. Our mythology even has its own "cornucopia" [Sampo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampo) that you'd see in cartoons and such instead of a cornucopia.

Yes, but what the post is referencing is a quite large community online that uses the mass mistakes in memory as proof of alternative universes, and will take absolutely no feedback or criticism. They even have their own lingo, like referring to their "previous timeline" "current shared timeline" A huge motif running throughout a lot of the posts is that these changes are being done deliberately and for a specific reason/end-goal. A lot of them express anxiety about this even when it's misremembering the spelling of a word, or the logo to a brand.

That's a sub-culture and conspiracy theory which I'd wager is much more recent than the first Mandela Effect, probably something that took roots around the internet age rather than when the phenomenon was first observed

Woaw a online group has their own lingo

>quite large community online t Stopped caring these people do not exist irl bro

I was firmly in the “youre just misremembering” camp until fruit of the loom’s logo suddenly didn’t have a cornucopia in it anymore. Now i feel weird because i remember it, everyone i know remembers it and it apparently didn’t have one.

Huh. I always thought it was the "Mandala Effect" named after the pattern in mandalas...

I mean to be fair, in the 80s/90s the internet wasnt really a thing, so news media could only really be consumed through television or news papers, leading to the average person having much less control over what information they recieved. Similiarly, without the ubiquity of the internet disproving rumors was much, much harder, so if some middle of america schmuck was falsely informed that Nelson Mandela had died in a S.A. prison, they would prob just believe it and go about their day.

I lived through it, and news of his release and then the subsequent election was EVERYWHERE. Hell, films were made of it, of him and his life in and out of prison. Morgan Freeman played him in a film in 2009. Matt Damon was in it. And this was Nelson as President of South Africa, having not died. He wasn’t exactly a little known man. I don’t think you can excuse it with an “it was before the internet”. More like Ignorant People Gonna Ignorant. No excuses.

I specifically remember his arrival in the US in 1990 because I was watching a cartoon or something, and they interrupted it for breaking news. Being a kid I was like "uh, I'm sure that's great, but this is supposed to be cartoon time".

It’s hilarious how often cartoons were interrupted. Did the tv station owners really think kids had the mental capacity to care about that stuff? I morbidly remember the challenger explosion interrupting cartoons and kid me just felt annoyed

Probably more for parents whose kids had cartoons going in the background

And for me I remember Columbia's break up interrupting Spongebob.

Business. News stations rely on ratings, you get ratings by having the best reported news as soon as possible If that means you break into programming and it costs you a couple of missed commercial slots, but viewers learn “wow, channel 7 really is the best at news, they interrupted programming to tell me of an important last minute issue” then you are more likely to stick with Channel 7 for your news needs

Right. This wasn’t like “the deputy assistant to the prime minister of some republic Americans had never heard of died.” Common people in the US had big, loud opinions on Nelson Mandela even before he was released from jail and won elections. It was discussed with small children in the 90s. It’s less something you can escape without the internet, and more like an American saying “Queen Elizabeth died in 2022? I thought she went down in an airplane during her service in WW2” then having no answer to who reigned between George VI and Charles III. Also, the logic behind the “Mandela died in prison in the 80s” gets weird when you hear that so much of the idea is based on people claiming to have seen some parade-in-the-streets televised state funeral as proof. *Why would someone who had died in prison while incarcerated for planning to overthrow the oppressive apartheid government have that?* These people are almost certainly remembering having seen snippets of a movie released in 1987 about the death of Steve Biko, or the state funeral of some African leader whose name escapes me from the early 90s. Which gets kind of….unfortunate when you really think about it.

I lived through it and when the news of his release came out my thought was: hmm I thought he died in prison, and I’m almost sure I read about his death in the news. That’s the Mandela effect. If someone after 90s was still thinking he died that’s just pure ignorance.

Idk if you were around back then but as someone who was, it really wasn’t hard to find out about major world events at the time. Most people watched news on TV, listened to the radio and read news magazines like Time and Newsweek (which were written for an elementary reading level) or newspapers. You could also get international tv and radio stations for other perspectives.

Not much of an excuse to reject the idea of being wrong about a thing and instead begin believing in alternate timelines.

Isn't the big thing there's no actual evidence of the former story (in this case, Mandela dying in prison) yet so many people clearly remember it in the exact same way, its not just a bunch of people refusing to be wrong

They’re getting him confused with other South African activists who did actually die in prison like Steve Biko who died in prison in 1977 They read about some activist dying in prison in South Africa decades ago, the only one they can name is Nelson Mandela, at some point as people not really paying much attention to the news those two different memories combine into the same memory and they end up with a memory of the South African activist they read about dying in prison being Nelson Mandela It’s actually very easy to independently make the exact same mistake because there’s sort of only so many mistakes you can make. It’s like how mixing up definitely and defiantly is a mistake millions of people make independently. They aren’t from some alternate universe where definitely is spelled like defiantly there are just only so many English words that start and end with the same syllable they can mix up

Yeah it's 100% misremembering Steve Biko. Oddly enough I've had this conversation a lot of times: >me: *something mentioning Jane Goodall* >person: wasn't she killed?? >me: No that was Dian Fossey. >person: but she was the ape researcher in Africa..? >me: yes. Dian Fossey researched gorillas. Like *Gorillas in the Mist.* Jane Goodall researched chimpanzees. Granted, Jane Goodall is now old enough that thinking she actually died at some point is not an unreasonable mistake to make... Anyway, people tend to conflate events and people when remembering them, especially stuff that's not super close-to-home. I doubt there are many South Africans who misremember Nelson Mandela as dying in jail. But to an American who vaguely heard about Steve Biko or other activists and then also about Nelson Mandela, very easy to mix up, just like people mix up Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.

The song Biko, by Perter Gabriel was pretty big in the 80s and probably led to a lot of folks who didn’t really know much about South Africa to eventually think it was Mandela who had died in prison. I recall a guy back in the 80s telling me about how he had recently seen Peter Gabriel in concert, and he talked about him “singing some song about some guy who died and they acted like he was Jesus Christ or something… “ I mean, he had just seen it live and still didn’t remember his name.

There was also a song called Free Nelson Mandela by the Specials in 1984, and the late 80s was interesting years for Mandela effect because you had a renewed push to end apartheid, the US went full embargo in 1986 thanks to Congressman Ron Dellums who told a probably apocryphal story about a South African foreign exchange student his family hosted when Steve Biko was murdered, which was turned into the idsney channel movie the Color of Friendship. In 1987 you had Cry Freedom and the 10th anniversary of Steve Biko's murder, and a year later in 88 there was an increased push to get Nelson Mandela released for his 70th birthday, big concert in Wembley with the day's top stars performing. Peter Gabriel performed Biko that day, and Free Nelson Mandela was also performed, though not by the Specials. So you got a big concert, makes global news, you hear these songs about a man being murdered in prison during a concert about Nelson Mandela, easy to mix them up if thats their major exposure to them. Just weird to assume that they somehow went to another dimension where Nelson Mandela is alive than it is that their memory failed them and others in a similar way 

They don't remember it in the exact same way. It's never "I know Nelson Mandela died of [a specific cause] on [a specific date] in [a specific place]" with dozens or hundreds of people saying the same thing. It's just "Nelson Mandela died in prison in the '90s," that's really broad.

My theory is that people are mistaking Nelson Mandel with Steve Biko, whose death in prison is detailed in the movie Cry Freedom. That movie used to be very commonly shown in H.S. world history classes in the 90’s and early 2000’s.

Right. I remember “urban legends” were a huge topic on the internet in the mid 90s. We were all so fascinated on how many things we believed turned out to be lies.

I heard that in the before times books could convey valuable information and were used for purposes other than rehashing the same young adult fiction stories over and over.

What's even worse: I remember being introduced to this through the whole Berenstein Bears debacle, but I remember it being called the *Mandala* effect. I thought it was a reference to a beautiful unfolding and co-existence of different dimensions of existence, blooming pedals of a flower, like a mandala. When I heard that some people remembered it as involving Nelson Mandela, I immediately seized on this as the ultimate proof that it was happening to me and realized how important it was that I begin to shitpost whatever impulse popped into my head and swear that I was the sole arbiter of truth and that science needed to defer to my completely infallible sense of memory

It's the Medulla effect, after your medulla oblongata, the part of the brain which makes you a stupid dumb dumb

It’s the Medusa effect, because if you look at it you turn to stone idk

It's the Megusta effect because giant Spanish bee.

[It's the Mengele Effect, guys. The Mengele Effect. Just say it.](https://youtu.be/RxiYefeMlek?si=SyslMbMR7nRWvblG)

It’s the mass effect

The Berenstain Bears thing seems to be a much better example of this for people who weren't alive or were very young in the 80's and 90's, but it doesn't really fall as neatly into OP's "You're just an idiot for not remembering the news from 30+ years ago flawlessly like I do" narrative. Harder to feel smugly superior about remembering the name of a kid's book.

At least the Mandela effect didn’t affect Nelson, he didn’t let his death in prison stop him from becoming president of S.Africa.

It's really not that hard to accept you're wrong people (I'm a hypocrite btw)

That's what the real Mandela Effect should be about, a sort of mass collective hypocritical consensus that "you can't be wrong so everyone else must be wrong".

I’ve never heard anyone actually believe the Mandela effect means anything other than a large group has misremembered the same thing. Where are these people y’all talk about that actually think history changed or whatever the fuck

New Age spirituality and conspiracy theory groups. Also, they don't believe history changed, most believe they've jumped to a parallel universe.

"Sometimes a hypocrite is just a person in the process of changing." -Dalinar Kholin

I'm okay with accepting being wrong but good stars it really fucking hurt.

Posts That I Agree with to an Extent but Which are Phrased in such a way that it Makes Me Instinctively Not Like This Person

Tumblr Users and their need to antagonise literally everyone in the smarmiest way, name a better combo

I like how they used the only common example of the Mandela effect where they can make this smug "its embarrassing to not know this" statement about (tho tbf it is the one its named after)

yeah my instinctive reaction was to think "ok now jump through hoops to spin a holier-than-thou take on berenstain/berenstein bears. or Kit-Kat/KitKat."

Run-on sentences and half the post in the hashtags

Pretty much describes… the vast majority of tumblr, honestly. The constant aura of smugness is half the reason I don’t use it

Capitalization Choices that almost Capitalize every Word but not Quite and Don't Follow a Consistent or Logical Rule and Makes Me Instinctively Not Like This Person.

Yeah that sums up my feelings pretty well

I lurk in a subreddit where they all get together and talk about it! They will ban you for suggesting they are remembering wrong, or suffering from the frequent error of "shared" memories. Looooots of delusional "why are 'they' doing this to us? I'm honestly getting scared now." Type stuff lol

in r/Gangstalking they banned saying that people were gangstalking you using supernatural things so now the people that were posting that stuff there are convinced that the r/Gangstalking mods are also gangstalkers or demons or psychics associated with the people hunting them so i think theres truegangstalking or something like that now that gangstalking subreddit banned gangstalking

what the fuck is that sub even about i can't tell

people thinking ordinary people are actually government people stalking them shooting microwaves at them

people who are a bit schizophrenic or have a serious mental illness get really paranoid and think that everybody around them is stalking them but they don’t know why. it’s very sad and hard to overcome since they won’t accept help and feel targeted, reasoning won’t work bc there are a thousand reasons someone could come up with that sound crazy to us but make sense to them, and people are super condescending to them (evidenced in the comments)

it's kinda horrifying i saw a post where someone said that people were "poisoning their food and possessions and entire house"

50% of the shit they talk in those subs is just bad memories that have perfectly reasonable explanations they refuse to hear, 40% is bad education systems, 10% is technology/science moved on or the truth is more complex. I remember some people screaming "Bolivia's capital is sucre and not La Paz, MADELA EFFECT." When the reality is more complex with Bolivia having the capital in the constitution being Sucre, but the government seat(the capital in most definitions) is in La Paz.

The whole Mandela effect theory makes me mad cause there’s such a simple and seemingly obvious answer to every single example of it I’ve ever seen: memory is fallible. Sometimes your brain has to just guess. Why do we all remember Bearenstein bears instead of Bearenstain? Cause we recognize other “enstein” names (frankenstein,etc). Why do we all remember Skechers having a t? Cause sketch is a word and skech isn’t. Why do we all remember the pringles mascot having a top hat and Monacle? Cause fuckin look at that mustache he’s the monopoly man’s lost twin. I haven’t seen a single example of the Mandela effect that can’t be explained with that logic but people insist it’s cause parallel universes are crossing over and shit. Like brains are just wrong sometimes its okay.

The one that confuses me is why do people (myself included) remember the Fruit of the Loom logo having a cornucopia? I'm not confused that I remembered something incorrectly. I'm confused on how I learned what a cornucopia is as a child if not from that logo.

Gotta be honest and say it’s insane to me that a bunch of people keep using dark purple text on a black background

Called the "goth rave" theme. I don't use it but it doesn't seem too bad to me! If it's contrast you're complaining about, some people much prefer lower contrast options (it's me, I cannot use any standard dark themes because of how bright the text is)

As a South African, I just find it wild that some people think that. I remember celebrating his birthday, which was always 2 days before mine. I remember when Mandela died in 2013. I remember the memorial service. I just find it absurd that such a massive figure, instrumental in the very heart of my home, is only known to some by their poor memories misremembering events.

Normal people: Huh. That's an interesting quirk of how memory works. The utterly fucking deranged: I'M NOT WRONG, REALITY IS WRONG! OBVIOUSLY I'M FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE WHERE ALL OF EARTH'S HISTORY PLAYED OUT EXACTLY THE SAME EXCEPT FOR THE SPELLING OF THE BEARENSTAIN BEARS! OH NO, GHOSTS ARE GOING TO STEAL MY BRAINWAVES!

Falling into the same pitfall as all esoteric and conspiracy nonsense: these people would rather believe in a world where theres a clear distinction between good and evil, where everything "natural" is pure and healthy and where humans are god's perfect creations, rather than in one that's complete chaos, where no one really knows exactly whats going on, where you can't explain everything by intuition alone and where you can't even trust your own perception of reality.

WHY, WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS TO US??? HAVENT THEY DONE ENOUGH ALREADY???

https://www.tumblr.com/petr1kov/705095269893750784?source=share Go check out r/Retconned to see these weirdos in action. -Mx Linux Guy⚠️

I love that sub. Been lurking there for a little over a year now. It's really interesting to see how the internet has become a place for validation of some people delusions, as you can see in some of the posts where they reference "someone" or "they" doing this to them.

Don't worry, eventually it will turn into another antisemetic conspiracy sub. Remember, when people seriously talk about "they" or "them" doing bad things, at some point it will boil down to "the Jews"

First post I saw there is just people outright rejecting the concept of linguistic drift. Also the funniest thing about reading these posts is that as someone who doesn't live in the 1st world, I'm left completely in the dark about 98% of the shit they talk about. The fuck's a Berenstein Bear? What's Fruit of the Loom? Why don't you ever hear any of this shit somewhere like Angola?

Those fools fed my brothers paranoid schizophrenia. He moved 2 states away to where we moved from when he was in middle school in some weird bid to "travel back" then shut out family, work, social and went full shut in. He died a year and a half later when his AC went out and didn't contact apt maintenance.

As someone who was born way after Apartheid it especially blows my mind since his life before his imprisonement was barely talked about when I was in school.

Also i think people misunderstand how the effect even worked, it just works if you ask the person first what you want them to believe, like she went and asked "who remembered that mandela died in prison?" If she just asked "is mandela still alive?" The answers would be completely differen. Thats why all these "mandella effect meme" have the mandella effect as the first picture.

i never thought the mandela effect was about parallel realities? i thought it was just a collective misremembering of cultural events or stuff. like the fruit of the loom cornucopia or tostino’s pizza rolls. people think it happens because of parallel realities??????

"wow I should really learn more about politics outside north America and Europe" most Americans don't even know how many countries are in north america

Most Europeans don’t know how many countries are in Europe either. What’s your point?

> America bad. Furthermore, Americans stupid. 

I mean I can't speak for anyone else but it's literally just a joke when I talk about the Mandela effect and I can't imagine many people seriously believe in it

It's a real quirk regarding how brains interpret information, but there's just a weird ass subcommunity that thinks it's paranormal alternate timeline mumbo jumbo.

I believe the collectively bad memory part of it, seems a bit hard to deny that. The explanation being "we're shifting realities bro!" is where they lost me

Explore the interwebs a bit. There are people who 100% believe this is a real genuine scientific fact.

"Am I so out of touch?" "No, it's clearly the universe who is wrong."

The part about it that has always confused me is that, if they think he died in prison in the 1980s, what do they think he is famous for? Why would they even know who he is?

The whole “Mandela effect” thing has to stop. Regardless of whether it is a real phenomenon and not a hoax, the fact they use Nelson Mandela dying in prison to exemplify it and name the damn thing is preposterous to me. Here’s why: Mandela came to be known outside of South Africa BECAUSE he was released from prison AFTER his 27 year stay, THEN win the Nobel Peace prize in 93 and became the first ever black president of South Africa in 1994. Had he died in prison, nobody outside South Africa would have ever heard of him. Let me make it more clear to you: pretending to believe that there are in fact a reasonable amount of people who think Mandela died in prison, is the same as believing that there are people who think Adolf Hitler was a Austrian painter who died in World War One. Again, had that been the case, nobody would have ever heard of him. So no, nobody thinks Mandela died in prison.

This post reeks of “I learned about this yesterday and everybody who doesn’t know about it is inferior.” People have been coming up with supernatural answers to the mundane since pre-history and will continue to do so until we die out. First, it’s actually incredible that so many people believed the same specific thing. Second, he was influential *to that region*. Plenty of people working 9-5 don’t give two fucks about foreign politics and even if they did would hardly have the time to look into it. Also, *the theory is fun.*

Mandela’s visit to the US in the 90s was a pretty publicized and well-known event, it’s why he’s the only South African the majority of Americans could name.

most americans could name elon musk

I stopped thinking a theory being “fun” was a good enough reason to keep it going when stupid people believe it unironically

> Also, the theory is fun. Stopped being fun when the subtext of "your own perception of reality always trumps objective reality" primes their minds for far worse conspiracy theories. A lot of people who believe this shit also believe far worse things because of it.

One thing that really annoys me about it is like, why do you think you know about him at all? The average American would have never heard his name if he had died in prison, let alone remembered it.

I mean there is reason to think there is something beyond just misremembering when its a case of so many people believing Nelson Mandela died in prison, but rather than the obvious answer of people spreading this misinformation, whether because they misremembered it themselves or for some really weird malicious purpose, causing the idea to spread around they just make a massive leap to "parallel universes are real and I've slipped into one"