Language, Memory, and the Mandela Effect

A brief overview of the Mandela Effect

As the world gets weirder, humanity continues to search for ways to explain its weirdness. Once we understand that weirdness, then maybe we can find a way to control it, or at least work around it. One trendy way to explain our lapses and misunderstanding of time and history is the Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect is the answer to why we remember something one way, but when we go to fact check it, we see that we were wrong. And it’s not just one person remembering it wrong. Many agree that it used to be different.

This experience could be hearing a famous line in a movie differently, seeing a word spelled different from how you remembered, or even recalling historical events that didn’t happen or happened another way, such as the death of Nelson Mandela, the event from which the pseudoscience derives its name. The ultimate answer behind the Mandela Effect is in response to multiple realities colliding with one another and basically rewriting history. An event did happen one way when you first experienced it, but we have since slipped into another reality where history was rewritten.

The science behind The Mandela Effect

I’m willing to put some stock into this theory. After all, scientists, physicists, and other really smart people concur that the idea of multiple dimensions is not far-fetched. Even the idea of worm holes being linked to time travel has merit these days. The science behind it goes way over my humanities-centric brain. But if time travel can exist, so can alternate realities.

To me, once it’s deemed that something can possibly exist, so can any possible incarnation of that thing. So, if alternate realities can exist simultaneously, they can also collide into each other. As a result, we might not realize that we have just entered a different reality, or even a new phase of time. And it might not be happening to everyone at once, just certain people. This is why not everyone agrees on how we remember events. But large enough chunks of people do that it calls our entire reality into question.

However, we have to take into effect the science that we can test: human psychology, biology, and sociology. We can’t get into our magic school bus and travel through alternate realities to see what parts of reality the Mandela Effect has altered. If we could, our history would be cataloged like superhero comics, referencing the multiple earths in which we exist and the timelines for each. This reality that we do know is packed enough with enough details as it is. How would we even function?

I feel like our current knowledge of the world and of humanity can somewhat explain away this effect in many instances. However, that doesn’t mean that I discount it altogether. I just don’t think that every facet of it should be taken as gospel, at least not yet.

Misremembering

Let’s look at the namesake of the Mandela Effect: Nelson Mandela – particularly his death. I first read about Nelson Mandela in a book of stories of inspirational people when I was a teenager. There, I learned a brief overview about his political actions, his imprisonment, and his ultimate release. However, many recall that Mandela died in jail decades before his actual death. When I first heard this, even I initially thought, “Yeah, didn’t he die in jail?”

Maybe we’re just quick to agree with the questions that people ask. This is especially true if they are sincerely questioning it themselves. Questions inspire more questions. Soon, we’re questioning everything we know to be true about a subject.

But I had a second reason to confidently answer “no” to this question.  Because there’s another, more blatant and pop culture-friendly reference that I could refer to. That is the 2009 movie Invictus, starring Matt Damon as a South African rugby player and Morgan Freeman as President Nelson Mandela who rallies the team to win the 1995 World Cup. I have seen this movie, and I knew that it takes place after Mandela’s release.

Now, let’s say that a Mandela Effect occurred. We are now living in an alternate reality where Mandela was freed from jail, went on to become the president of South Africa, and died in 2013. In the original reality, Mandela died in jail within the 27 years that we in this reality believed him to have been imprisoned (prior to his release in 1990).  Having read a book and seen a movie about this man in this reality, I was still quick to agree that, “Yeah, I thought I heard he’d died in jail too.” Sometimes we’re just quick to agree with misremembered facts.

Cultural effect

Another aspect I would look into in terms of the Nelson Mandela theory specifically is how many people from South Africa buy into this theory. We Americans are notorious for our lack of world history. Even our own history can get pretty sketchy when we try to recall it.

So, to hear that Nelson Mandela had been thrown into prison for nearly three decades, a quick assumption would be that he may have died there. It would make for a juicier tale of martyrdom. Or, it just made sense in terms of speculating what happened next, had you never heard the full story.

So, you fill in the gaps that you may have forgotten or never learned at all. Because the main fact is that Nelson Mandela spent a long time in prison. Everything else is a detail that can be misconstrued, forgotten, or twisted until it no longer resembles the truth.

It’s like that exercise that you learn in school where you play telephone. The person who hears it last rattles off a sentence that sounds nothing like the words that the first person made up. We mishear words, fill in details, and even outright lie to make a story juicier. The message spreads into something completely different than what was first intended.

Another detail to consider is the accusation that there are South African history books stating that Nelson Mandela had died in prison. But we all know that history books don’t always get the facts straight, especially initially. I’d like a more airtight argument before I can accept these books as proof in favor of the Mandela effect.

How the brain processes the written word

One major subset of the Mandela Effect is the belief that certain words used to be spelled differently than they are now. These words include:

• famous products like Jif vs. Jiffy peanut butter
• titles such as Looney Tunes. vs. Looney Toons,
• and even last names such as The Berenstein bears vs. The Berenstain Bears.

Again, if we were to have entered an alternate reality, all evidence of the previous spelling would be replaced by the new version. However, if we had entered into another reality, would the spelling be the only thing that had changed about that particular word? Shouldn’t Froot Loops, if they were once spelled Fruit Loops, contain different packaging, colors, or mascot? Why does everything else about the product look and feel the same besides the spelling of the name?

You also have to take into account the studies that have shown how the brain reads words. Our minds are always jumping ahead to assumed letters and sounds that follow what is first seen. It’s how we are able to read the vanity plates with missing vowels or numbers instead of letters. It’s how we’re able to read words with letters that have been transposed and tend to miss spelling errors when we’re editing our writing. So, it’s not far-fetched to believe that we’ve been reading Berenstain as Berenstein this whole time.

I remember it being a revelation to me that Roald Dahl’s first name wasn’t Ronald. For years, I’d just inserted the extra “n” into his name each time I read the cover of one of his books. I was surprised that this name wasn’t included in the Mandela effect’s website.

Our memories are really bad

I consider myself to have a pretty solid memory. But even I get things wrong when I see evidence to the contrary.

I took a sociology class in college. In one lecture, our professor told us about an experiment that one of her professors conducted in her sociology class when she was still a student.

A man ran into the classroom, grabbed a student’s purse, and ran out of the room. Everyone was asked to describe the thief, including his physical features and what he was wearing. They were also asked to describe the purse that he had taken. Not one person, not even the victim, was able to accurately describe the man or the purse. Most didn’t even get the color of the purse right.

I feel like I’m an observant person who would be an accurate witness. But then, so does everyone else. You’d hate to think that you can’t trust your own eyes, let alone your memory of something that happened seconds ago.

After several studies regarding eye-witness testimony, its credibility has depleted in the court systems. So, how can we trust that we’re getting the most mundane details right?

This is especially true of movie quotes, another popular element of the Mandela Effect. We’re certain that we’ve heard a famous line said a certain way. But then when you actually watch the scene again, we hear a totally different combination of words. Like reading, our brains store these memories so that we get the gist of what was said. But we may not remember it word-for word. We also hear others misspeak or spoof a line and take their interpretation as gospel.

Making up stories

Do you ever recall a memory that you know you were too young to remember? Sometimes we’ve been told a story so often that it registers as a memory. Some people say that they remember Nelson Mandela’s funeral coverage and rioting in the streets. But they may have just merged it with another historical event that they did witness on TV or read in the newspapers.

I have been called out on mixing two memories together, particularly early memories. Sometimes we look at old pictures so many times that we start to form memories relating to that picture. It can be hard to decipher what we remember experiencing and what we’ve only heard or seen after the fact.

Keeping an open mind

The Mandela Effect is the perfect example of how we need to analyze every theory presented to us before we fully embrace it. However, I still don’t want to discount it as an actual phenomenon.  I just feel like they are grasping at straws with some of the facts that they choose to claim are part of the event.

The longer that humans evolve, the better understanding we will have of our reality and the potential for other realities to surface. But we can’t discount the science that we do have.

If alternate realities are real, I’m sure that we would be unaware of them. That is, at least until we can time travel and make ourselves aware of how we’re entering these realities. Also, our modern day abilities to better catalog history will give us further proof and less hearsay to help support the words we are misreading, talk that we are mishearing, and the false memories that we are creating.

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