The Mandela Effect: False Memory

[James_H]

We must have originated in different parallel universes - I've never seen or heard of "sentance" used anywhere!

@Tribble , you need to brush up on your spalling.

 

[escargot]

@Tribble , you need to brush up on your spalling.

That's epelling.

(Heh, Spellchecker wittily changed that to 'spelling'!)

 

[Mythopoeika]

Some teachers can't spell but react very indignantly when students point that out to them. Source: I was a student once.

As a kid, I delighted in correcting the teacher's spelling. One teacher called me 'the little professor'.

 

[Swifty]

As a kid, I delighted in correcting the teacher's spelling. One teacher called me 'the little professor'.

To your face at least .. one of my teachers was called Tim and, after he told us that and totally not meaning it as an insult in any way I smiled and said "My dog's called Tim! " .. it was supposed to be a happy revelation moment we could share but as an adult now I realise it wasn't a compliment to him at all which was probably why he was a bit of a bastard to me from then on ..

 

[Min Bannister]

One teacher called me 'the little professor'

Are you sure that's what they were calling you?

 

[Mythopoeika]

Are you sure that's what they were calling you?

Yes.

 

[Schrodinger's Zebra]

Hmm, I've just read through this thread and some of it seemed familiar in later pages and I thought to myself oh yes, I've already replied to it...

... but as I kept reading, I find I haven't yet replied to it. :buck:

*shrugs* anyway, my thoughts are this. I've read a lot of stuff online about the Mandela Effect (or the Mengele Effect as Mr Zebra and I like to call it since that X-Files episode ) and I believe that although a lot of them are very likely to be people misremembering things, or bad education, or people just learning something for the first time which they never knew before, I think some of them do have merit.

I'm talking about the ones where people have distinct and specific memories relating to something which is no longer the case, as opposed to just "oh I thought it was x but apparently it's y now."

For example, from here http://mandelaeffect.com/nelson-mandela-the-memories-so-far/

I believe CNN was the channel the TV was on. Nelson Mandela was mentioned as doing something, which caught both of our ears, I guess, because we both looked up and Nelson Mandela was there… walking around, present day. My mom and I both looked at each other, wide eyed and pale. I was like, “Isn’t he dead? I remember him dying….” And she said YES, and we were both discussing how on earth he was alive and no one else was shocked. We BOTH remembered the Oprah show, we BOTH remembered a specific concert that was live and shown on multiple channels… we both remembered that he died years ago in prison.

And I've read countless other examples, and not just of Mandela's apparent death, in which the person remembers in detail things about the incident, e.g. where they were, what they were doing, etc. etc.

I find it harder to believe that this is simple misremembering.

And as for all versions of books / videos / etc being changed - I read somewhere online (can't remember where) a really fun theory about that.

Imagine that we are all just a computer simulation as goes the theory. Then changing Berenstein to Berenstain simply requires the change of the value of a constant, i.e. a programmer somewhere just has to find this line of code:

and change it to this:

... and instantly everywhere in the universe which uses this constant, would now have the new value.

Nobody needs to break in, Milk Tray Man style, in the dead of night to fix individual dictionaries and atlases.

You're welcome.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Hmm, I've just read through this thread and some of it seemed familiar in later pages and I thought to myself oh yes, I've already replied to it...

... but as I kept reading, I find I haven't yet replied to it. :buck:

*shrugs* anyway, my thoughts are this. I've read a lot of stuff online about the Mandela Effect (or the Mengele Effect as Mr Zebra and I like to call it since that X-Files episode ) and I believe that although a lot of them are very likely to be people misremembering things, or bad education, or people just learning something for the first time which they never knew before, I think some of them do have merit.

I'm talking about the ones where people have distinct and specific memories relating to something which is no longer the case, as opposed to just "oh I thought it was x but apparently it's y now."

For example, from here http://mandelaeffect.com/nelson-mandela-the-memories-so-far/



And I've read countless other examples, and not just of Mandela's apparent death, in which the person remembers in detail things about the incident, e.g. where they were, what they were doing, etc. etc.

I find it harder to believe that this is simple misremembering.

And as for all versions of books / videos / etc being changed - I read somewhere online (can't remember where) a really fun theory about that.

Imagine that we are all just a computer simulation as goes the theory. Then changing Berenstein to Berenstain simply requires the change of the value of a constant, i.e. a programmer somewhere just has to find this line of code:
View attachment 10549

and change it to this:
View attachment 10550

... and instantly everywhere in the universe which uses this constant, would now have the new value.

Nobody needs to break in, Milk Tray Man style, in the dead of night to fix individual dictionaries and atlases.

You're welcome.

That's a fine idea. But search and replace doesn't always work...

 

[Yossarian]

All of the memories of Mandela's death can easily be explained as people misremembering news reports about the political situation in a country they had very little knowledge of. There's an awful lot of Americans claiming that they "remember" Mandela dying in the '80s, I very much doubt you'll find any South Africans with the same false memory, and probably very few Brits. If he's just a name you vaguely remembered, and hadn't thought about for twenty years, "I thought he was dead" isn't an unusual reaction - plenty of people have it when an elderly celebrity who's been out of the limelight for a few years passes away.

An earlier part of the post you quoted said;

" remember events after he died… like a really big Oprah episode, concerts in his memory, celebrities ALL wearing his prison numbers, etc."

There's a very simple explanation for that. There were concerts held in the early 2000s in various parts of the world called "46664" - Mandela's prison number - I was at the London show, and my strongest memory of it is Bono repeatedly singing that number into the mic, to the point that I didn't need to look it up to know it's Mandela's prison number more than a decade later. There was also the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute in 1988, another Nelson Mandela concert in London in 1990, and probably plenty more. For someone not particularly au fait with who Nelson Mandela was, misremembering a concert that was on TV once, many years ago, and called a "tribute concert" as meaning the person they were paying tribute to had died is far more likely than it being evidence of some kind of dimension-hopping.


People's "memories" of Nelson Mandela's death are either fuzzy or inconsistent - some say he was executed, some that he simply passed away while in prison, some say his wife became president after his death, some don't, the years and specifics differ. So you can either look at this and say that it's evidence of a wide range of alternate universes in which Nelson Mandela died at myriad different dates in myriad different ways, or see that none of the "memories" add up sufficiently well enough to support the hypothesis of a coherent "alternate timeline".

And, again, I would be amazed if anyone in South Africa had false "memories" of Nelson Mandela having died in the 1980s, or if anyone who attended any of the Mandela tribute concerts had the false memory of them being in tribute after his death. So then you'd have to account for why this alternate timeline has geographical restrictions.

 

[Zeke Newbold]

All of the memories of Mandela's death can easily be explained as people misremembering news reports about the political situation in a country they had very little knowledge of. There's an awful lot of Americans claiming that they "remember" Mandela dying in the '80s, I very much doubt you'll find any South Africans with the same false memory, and probably very few Brits. If he's just a name you vaguely remembered, and hadn't thought about for twenty years, "I thought he was dead" isn't an unusual reaction - plenty of people have it when an elderly celebrity who's been out of the limelight for a few years passes away.

An earlier part of the post you quoted said;

" remember events after he died… like a really big Oprah episode, concerts in his memory, celebrities ALL wearing his prison numbers, etc."

There's a very simple explanation for that. There were concerts held in the early 2000s in various parts of the world called "46664" - Mandela's prison number - I was at the London show, and my strongest memory of it is Bono repeatedly singing that number into the mic, to the point that I didn't need to look it up to know it's Mandela's prison number more than a decade later. There was also the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute in 1988, another Nelson Mandela concert in London in 1990, and probably plenty more. For someone not particularly au fait with who Nelson Mandela was, misremembering a concert that was on TV once, many years ago, and called a "tribute concert" as meaning the person they were paying tribute to had died is far more likely than it being evidence of some kind of dimension-hopping.


People's "memories" of Nelson Mandela's death are either fuzzy or inconsistent - some say he was executed, some that he simply passed away while in prison, some say his wife became president after his death, some don't, the years and specifics differ. So you can either look at this and say that it's evidence of a wide range of alternate universes in which Nelson Mandela died at myriad different dates in myriad different ways, or see that none of the "memories" add up sufficiently well enough to support the hypothesis of a coherent "alternate timeline".

And, again, I would be amazed if anyone in South Africa had false "memories" of Nelson Mandela having died in the 1980s, or if anyone who attended any of the Mandela tribute concerts had the false memory of them being in tribute after his death. So then you'd have to account for why this alternate timeline has geographical restrictions.

Absolutlely. Then add to all of that the fact that anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in police custody in 1977 and 20,000 people attended his funeral. Then also the fact that Mandela had surgery whilst in prison in 1985 - it's all stuff that could lead to later misunderstandings, particularly among people who were not exactly following African politics all that closely (which I suspect would be most of us in the UK and the states).-

I've always thought that the early-Mandela death aspect of this is the weakest link in this whole phenomenon and that it is regretable that it became the label for it. The`Berenstain Effect`, for example, would have been way better.

Still, though I do think(discarding the Mandela side of it) that there is a case to answer here: mass memories that differ from received history and things which seem to change in front of our eyes do seem to be for real -and if it all has a psychological explanation then some new kind of psychology is going to be needed.

And it's deeply entertaining!

 

[Schrodinger's Zebra]

All of the memories of Mandela's death can easily be explained as people misremembering news reports about the political situation in a country they had very little knowledge of. There's an awful lot of Americans claiming that they "remember" Mandela dying in the '80s, I very much doubt you'll find any South Africans with the same false memory, and probably very few Brits. If he's just a name you vaguely remembered, and hadn't thought about for twenty years, "I thought he was dead" isn't an unusual reaction - plenty of people have it when an elderly celebrity who's been out of the limelight for a few years passes away.

An earlier part of the post you quoted said;

" remember events after he died… like a really big Oprah episode, concerts in his memory, celebrities ALL wearing his prison numbers, etc."

There's a very simple explanation for that. There were concerts held in the early 2000s in various parts of the world called "46664" - Mandela's prison number - I was at the London show, and my strongest memory of it is Bono repeatedly singing that number into the mic, to the point that I didn't need to look it up to know it's Mandela's prison number more than a decade later. There was also the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute in 1988, another Nelson Mandela concert in London in 1990, and probably plenty more. For someone not particularly au fait with who Nelson Mandela was, misremembering a concert that was on TV once, many years ago, and called a "tribute concert" as meaning the person they were paying tribute to had died is far more likely than it being evidence of some kind of dimension-hopping.


People's "memories" of Nelson Mandela's death are either fuzzy or inconsistent - some say he was executed, some that he simply passed away while in prison, some say his wife became president after his death, some don't, the years and specifics differ. So you can either look at this and say that it's evidence of a wide range of alternate universes in which Nelson Mandela died at myriad different dates in myriad different ways, or see that none of the "memories" add up sufficiently well enough to support the hypothesis of a coherent "alternate timeline".

And, again, I would be amazed if anyone in South Africa had false "memories" of Nelson Mandela having died in the 1980s, or if anyone who attended any of the Mandela tribute concerts had the false memory of them being in tribute after his death. So then you'd have to account for why this alternate timeline has geographical restrictions.

I did say that the ones I'd read about were not just about Mandela's death - the one I quoted happened to be, that's all. The Mandela Effect, whatever it is, goes far wider than simply about him.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this one - I have personal reasons for believing in the possibility of multiple dimensions / timelines, and therefore to me the concept of things changing re: Mandela Effect, Mengele Effect , Glitches in the Matrix, whatever you want to call it - is not impossible. So I firmly believe that at least some of them are true (I have done a lot of reading into these subjects) and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Victory]

I see that Dr Legg is to be soon back in soap opera Eastenders.
Not only did I remember the character dying, but I remember the actor Leonard Fenton dying too!
I was mistaken.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...nton-92-set-return-Albert-Square-Dr-Legg.html

 

[escargot]

I see that Dr Legg is to be soon back in soap opera Eastenders.
Not only did I remember the character dying, but I remember the actor Leonard Fenton dying too!
I was mistaken.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...nton-92-set-return-Albert-Square-Dr-Legg.html

There was a character in Casualty who got one of the nurses to help him die, in an assisted suicide, because he was terminally ill. That's what came to my mind when I read your post, could you have confused the two?

As I recall Dr Legge was Jewish. For some reason that was important.

 

[Ermintruder]

Not only did I remember the character dying, but I remember the actor Leonard Fenton dying too!
I was mistaken.

Ditto. On all counts.

I shall speak with my SO about this, as they're pathologically-addicted to Eastenders, and know far too much about it.

 

[Andy X]

As a kid, I delighted in correcting the teacher's spelling. One teacher called me 'the little professor'.

 

[Xanatic*]

As a kid I remember seeing photos of the "cholitas" of the Andes mountains, wearing something like bowler hats and smoking cigars.
I recently found myself in the Andes mountains and saw many of these cholitas. Not a single one of whom was smoking. Have they all switched to nicotine patches or have I simply misremembered it all this time?

 

[Mythopoeika]

As a kid I remember seeing photos of the "cholitas" of the Andes mountains, wearing something like bowler hats and smoking cigars.
I recently found myself in the Andes mountains and saw many of these cholitas. Not a single one of whom was smoking. Have they all switched to nicotine patches or have I simply misremembered it all this time?

I seem to recall seeing a lot of them smoking in old photos I saw a long time back. I don't think you imagined it.

 

[escargot]

Today I've been reading about the redevelopment of the site of Strawberry Field, the children's home where John Lennon used to go to play as a kid. He wrote a song about it called, I thought, Strawberry Fields. That's 'Fields', plural, with an 's' on the end. I remember that song from my own childhood and it was definitely Fields. Seems I've been wrong all these years!

Oh, 'old on - be still my beating cognitive dissonance-ridden heart. The PLACE is Strawberry Field, the SONG is indeed Strawberry Fields. With the 's'. Now I'm confused.

 

[Austin Popper]

Today I've been reading about the redevelopment of the site of Strawberry Field, the children's home where John Lennon used to go to play as a kid. He wrote a song about it called, I thought, Strawberry Fields. That's 'Fields', plural, with an 's' on the end. I remember that song from my own childhood and it was definitely Fields. Seems I've been wrong all these years!

Oh, 'old on - be still my beating cognitive dissonance-ridden heart. The PLACE is Strawberry Field, the SONG is indeed Strawberry Fields. With the 's'. Now I'm confused.

I still don't really "get" that song, though I like it and I've heard it a zillion times. I've heard it 'splained a few times, but it still sounds like some pleasant nonsense from a dream or something. That's fine.

 

[Kingsize Wombat]

I still don't really "get" that song, though I like it and I've heard it a zillion times. I've heard it 'splained a few times, but it still sounds like some pleasant nonsense from a dream or something. That's fine.

Perhaps my all time favorite song. Certainly my favorite Beatles song. And as Lennon was a major fan of Lewis Caroll, "pleasant nonsense" was right up his alley.

From what I've read, both John and Paul had decided to write a song about childhood places. Lennon wrote about Strawberry Field(s), McCartney chose Penny Lane. And these two songs appeared on the same single.

Both psychedelic masterpieces IMO - but I think you can tell that Lennon at that stage inhaled a bit deeper and more frequently. And that's why you can't, you know, tune in. But it's all right.
That is, I think, it's not too bad.

 

[EnolaGaia]

... The PLACE is Strawberry Field, the SONG is indeed Strawberry Fields. With the 's'. Now I'm confused.

The difference in labels ('Field' versus 'Fields') seemed odd to me back in the Sixties. I'd heard the song multiple times before seeing a record or record cover showing the name of the song, but I'd already read that the song was something of an homage to a place called Strawberry Field.

At first I speculated Lennon either meant 'Strawberry Field's forever' (one place; eternal) or 'Strawberry Fields forever' (extolling the original, plus all similarly nostalgic locales, under one name).

According to this 2016 account:

... In a 1968 Rolling Stone interview, Lennon said that he was trying to write about Liverpool and had “visions of Strawberry Fields… Because Strawberry Fields is just anywhere you want to go.” (Note that the song title is “Strawberry Fields,” but the actual place is called “Strawberry Field.” Lennon would later admit that this was a stylistic choice - “Fields” simply sounded better than “Field.”)

SOURCE: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/03/beatles-strawberry-fields-forever-meaning/

 

[Vardoger]

Not saying I believe in the Mandela effect, but this video got a few questions which needs to be answered.
It's interesting and absolutely worth watching to the end. There are photos of Jackson 5 from the 60s where there are six band members, meanwhile Randy Jackson only joined the band in 1972. He was born in 1961 supposedly. In an interview in 1974 Randy Jackson says he's 8 years old.

 

[Swifty]

Not saying I believe in the Mandela effect, but this video got a few questions which needs to be answered.
It's interesting and absolutely worth watching to the end. There are photos of Jackson 5 from the 60s where there are six band members, meanwhile Randy Jackson only joined the band in 1972. He was born in 1961 supposedly. In an interview in 1974 Randy Jackson says he's 8 years old.

Interesting stuff .. here's a bit more on the life and times of Randy Jackson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Jackson_(The_Jacksons)

 

[Mythopoeika]

He was born in 1961 supposedly. In an interview in 1974 Randy Jackson says he's 8 years old.

1956.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Jackson

Oh right, that other Randy Jackson.

 

[Ermintruder]

This reminds me of the amazing dance moves of Michael Jackson...

 

[Swifty]

This reminds me of the amazing dance moves of Michael Jackson...

It's a good job alamy stock photo have put subtle watermarks on this picture otherwise someone could steal it and then could claim that it wasn't the property of alamy stock photo.

 

[Mythopoeika]

This reminds me of the amazing dance moves of Michael Jackson...

Hee hee...

 

[Quake42]

I see that Dr Legg is to be soon back in soap opera Eastenders.
Not only did I remember the character dying, but I remember the actor Leonard Fenton dying too!
I was mistaken.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...nton-92-set-return-Albert-Square-Dr-Legg.html

Yeah I was pretty sure that both character and actor had died. Guess we were wrong. That or an alternative dimension has bled into ours. Again.

 

[Vardoger]

Yeah I was pretty sure that both character and actor had died. Guess we were wrong. That or an alternative dimension has bled into ours. Again.

Strange how the Mandela effect only seems to affect small stuff, not something big like WW2 or the US Space Program.

 

[Tribble]

Strange how the Mandela effect only seems to affect small stuff, not something big like WW2 or the US Space Program.

The US had a space program?