ARE you familiar with the image of Mr Monopoly sporting a monocle or your childhood cartoon Pikachu having a black stripe on its tail?
How about the iconic line, “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” from Snow White?
The Mandela Effect is an odd phenomenon as it makes us question our collective memory and challenges our perceptions of reality.
But is the Mandela effect actually just false memories?
Verdict:
TRUE
If you have answered yes to all of the questions above, you are most likely experiencing The Mandela Effect.
The real line in the Snow White movie was actually “Magic mirror on the wall,” Mr. Monopoly never sported a monocle and Pikachu has never actually had that design on its tail. Shocking right?
The name of this occurrence first originated from an inaccurate belief about Nelson Mandela’s death. Numerous individuals recollect Mandela passing away during his captivity in the 1980s.
The term “Mandela Effect” was coined by Fiona Broome, an alleged paranormal expert, who believed that she was not alone in recalling Mandela’s earlier passing. But the reality is quite the opposite.
Mandela was elected South Africa’s president from 1994 to 1999 after serving 27 years in jail; he passed away in 2013.
This false information resulted in more people piquing the interest of others who had similar false recollections.
Now, the term is widely used to refer to any collective false memories.
This topic has since gone viral again after becoming increasingly popular on social media such as Reddit and TikTok after users were trying to explain what is actually happening that is leading to these collective incorrect yet real memories.
Human memory is very adaptable. External forces can distort memories, creating false or distorted recollections of events that never really happened.
Rare research on the Mandela Effect was published in the journal Psychological Science in late 2022. Researchers first concluded that individuals had confident but incorrect visual recollections of famous icons or characters.
Explaining these errors in memory, the phenomenon that can be most closely related to the Mandela effect is “gist memory”.
This occurs when people have a general understanding of a subject but cannot recall its details.
For example, most appear to be ‘gist memories’ modified to fit individual existing beliefs or understanding.
This explains how an individual tends to fill in the gaps with an image that they may think existed in the initial memory, making it real in their thoughts.
Let’s always double-check whether someone you know thinks it is true and avoid falling prey to our own minds.
References:
1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.
2. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/
4. https://www.forbes.com/health/
5. https://aeon.co/ideas/on-
7. https://www.livescience.com/
8. https://jov.arvojournals.org/
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