You would think your own memory would be one of the few things you could trust. After all, it is your brain.
But apparently, that’s wishful thinking. It turns out, our minds are more than happy to invent, distort, and outright fabricate memories, and worse still, we all seem to be getting the same things wrong.
This curious phenomenon is called the Mandela Effect, named after the baffling number of people who clearly remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. People even remember the funeral coverage and national mourning. The problem is, he actually died in 2013 after becoming South Africa’s president.
Since then, the Mandela Effect has become the go-to term for collective false memories. Some blame alternate dimensions, time travellers, or CERN and its Large Hadron Collider cracking open the universe. Others say we are all just a bit suggestible and our memories aren’t nearly as reliable as we would like them to be.
Brain glitch: False memory study
A well-known example of false memory comes from a study by Deese, Roediger, and McDermott, often called the DRM study. In this study, people were first asked to remember a list of words. Later, they were shown more words and asked if they had seen them before. Some of the words they were shown were related to the original list but had never actually appeared. Many people mistakenly remembered seeing these related words.
For example, if the original list included “citrus”, “apple”, “juice”, and “pear”, someone might wrongly believe they also saw the word “fruit”, even though it wasn’t there. This is similar to the Mandela Effect, as it shows how we can remember something that never really happened.
Closer to home, the Financial Times recently highlighted some examples. Remember that iconic scene in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice where Colin Firth, as Mr Darcy, strides dripping wet from a lake? Except… that never happens. He swims, yes. But the wet-shirt moment is total fantasy of many or perhaps just wishful thinking.
Or how about Walkers’ salt and vinegar crisps? They have always been green unless you’re one of the 38% who swear they used to be blue. And the KitKat chocolate bar, did it ever have a hyphen? Nope. But that doesn’t stop a third of the population from confidently insisting otherwise.
And then there’s Star Wars. “Luke, I am your father.” Wrong. It’s actually “No, I am your father.”
A strange rumour spread in Spain about the popular TV show ¡Sorpresa, Sorpresa!. According to the story, Ricky Martin was meant to surprise a fan by coming out of a wardrobe during the show. But when he did, he supposedly found her with her dog and a jar of jam in a very embarrassing situation.
Many people in Spain claimed they had seen this moment on TV, but it never actually happened. There is no footage or evidence of it.
Can millions of people have the same brain glitch?
Most of these are harmless. But what fascinates (and slightly unsettles) me is how confident we all are in our wrongness. How can whole crowds of people share the same wrong-memory and be convinced of something that simply didn’t happen.
So, is the Mandela Effect just a quirk of our squishy brains? Or are we living in some glitchy simulation where reality keeps shifting under our feet? I don’t know. But I do know this: if memory is all we have got to go on, we are in far more trouble than we think.
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to double-check whether the Monopoly Man ever wore a monocle.
