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The Mandela Effect: False Memory

I think the Mandela effect explanation is fairly straightforward. Humans' memories are extremely fallible; we often don't fully pay attention; even when we do pay full attention, we fill in blanks or see what we expect to see and vice versa. Many psychological experiments have shown this to be the case (e.g. the basketball players and the gorilla).
 
Coal said:
Nice theory, got any evidence?



That's very possible as a stand-alone statement. For example in the UK, people are ranting about imagined gender issues while real problems beset the UK like the slow edging away of free heath-care, the essentially two-tier education system and the over representation of the upper tier in the running of the country, how zero-hours contract are making it almost impossible for some people to have a full time job and make commitments to renting or buying a house, and so on.

It's the strategy of "having everyone ask the wrong questions so the answers don't matter," aka the "Pynchon strategy".
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I wouldn't call gender issues "imagined", and I would class them as a "real problem".
 
Min Bannister said:
That is an interesting idea but they would also have had to gone into my dictionary which I had had for many years and changed the word "dilemna" to "dilemma". (When I first found out about this I went straight to it as a trusted source.)
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I suspect this is more an issue of dyslexia. It is easy for even a mildly dyslexic person to miss one of the arches of an "m" and mistake it for an "n". The etymology of dilemma is Greek, "di" meaning "two" and "lemma" meaning "premises" makes the whole issue moot as far as I am concerned. I know I had a primary school friend who always misspelled it dilemna even after having been corrected. Blame Lenny.
 
AlchoPwn said:
I suspect this is more an issue of dyslexia. It is easy for even a mildly dyslexic person to miss one of the arches of an "m" and mistake it for an "n". The etymology of dilemma is Greek, "di" meaning "two" and "lemma" meaning "premises" makes the whole issue moot as far as I am concerned. I know I had a primary school friend who always misspelled it dilemna even after having been corrected. Blame Lenny.
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I am not even mildly dyslexic though. It seems the most likely explanation of course but I still find it fascinating that apparently so many people have the exact same problem. I don't have the Shazam thing but the shared experience of that fascinates me too.
 
AlchoPwn said:
... Consider the possibility that there are hackers going into the old movie databases and manipulating things to fuck with us like the Ministry of Truth in 1984. "Those who control the past control the future" etc. ...
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The fourth episode of The X-Files' season 11 aired last night, and this was its central theme.
 
Min Bannister said:
I am not even mildly dyslexic though. It seems the most likely explanation of course but I still find it fascinating that apparently so many people have the exact same problem. I don't have the Shazam thing but the shared experience of that fascinates me too.
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i am not, and have never been remotely dyslexic either - in fact I work as an English language teacher. I too seem to have an admittedly dim, yet persistent, recollection of the word `dilemma` being the sort of word you might avoid using because it was a difficult word to spell - on account of the silent `n` it contained.

This shared delusion is hard to account for in linguistic terms because a silent `n` in the word is counter -intuitive. (Sure, there are other words with a silent `n` in them, but they're different: `autumn`, column`...and so on. Perhaps you might want to throw `alumni`*at me - but I would have encountered that word long after I'd met `dilemma`).

The common incorrect spelling of words are usually phonetic ones i.e someone spelling a word the way it sounds. Thus `definatley`.( There are even some who have claimed a memory of this spelling as being a Mandela!) This one is easily sorted, however: `definitely` comes from the word `definite` which in turn is a derivation of the root word `finite`. No `a` in any of that.

It's mighty straNge!

* and it's not silent anyway!
 
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the italian language used to have no j, i think it has inherited a few words now
 
Dr_Baltar said:
The only place I've ever seen dilemma spelt with an 'n' is on this thread.
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"Dilemna" has been one of the (millions of) running jokes on the Kermode and Mayo film podcast for a few years now - they both thought it was spelt that way until they were put right.
 
Zeke Newbold said:
A batch for the New Year, and there's plenty food for thought herein. Most of it would come under the category of Interesting Stuff You Just Happened Not to Know About - black chickens, blu(ish) lions and the rainbow coloured mountains of Peru, for example....but Captain Picard's crystal? And the feeding tube going up Regan's nostril in The Exorcist?

I'm in two minds about that presenter: a flashy jerk or entertainingly self-deprecating in his surprise at the world?
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Agreed - lots of this interesting in its own way, but we're getting further and further from what people would think of as the "Mandela Effect". Just because I learn something new, it doesn't follow that up until then, I'd been living in an alternative universe where it never existed!
 
An episode in the new run of The X-Files focuses on the Mandela Effect.

Is a Darin Morgan episode so has that tongue in cheek vibe, quite amusing in places.
 
I saw the video for Chain Reaction today and remembered that I have a Mandela moment for it. A few years ago I saw this video for the first time, possibly since it came out and I was pleased because I wanted to see the fabulous blue fishtail dress Diana Ross wears in it. I was really shocked then to see that the dress is actually red. My husband remembers it as being red. I think there might be an explanation though as he pointed out that the silver dress she wears later in the video shows up sort of blue in places. I think I must have mixed the two dresses together in my mind and come out with a light blue fishtail dress.
 
Well - here's a rebuke for the A-Team Van. A contemporary catalogue for A-Team related toys. It clearly shows the A-Team Van being silver and black - not just black.

28vzm2d.jpg
 
Kingsize Wombat said:
clearly shows the A-Team Van being silver and black - not just black.
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TBH I think this one picture diffuses whatever "Mandela Effect" disputes there are about the color scheme of that van since this single picture shows both the gray-red-black variant and the black-red-only variant (labelled "J" in the pic).

To my mind, it was black with a red flash and no gray/silver. A lot of toys aren't precisely "on model" for the show/movie they relate to. Designers think kids don't care / won't notice, I guess. Perhaps some of the time they're right. Perhaps some other times they end up polluting the erstwhile kids' with confused adult memories of the character/car/whatever having possessed some variation that actually only existed in a cheap toy.

FWIW, I love this "Mandela Effect" concept. It's so much fun to imagine and so subjective - so incredibly hard to argue with people's memories. But I rather doubt there's any underlying truth to it.
 
Kingsize Wombat said:
Well - here's a rebuke for the A-Team Van. A contemporary catalogue for A-Team related toys. It clearly shows the A-Team Van being silver and black - not just black.

28vzm2d.jpg
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Here's a photo from the set of the original series. It looks "silvery". I am noticing there are toy cars in full black with the red line.

A-Team-Van-Ready-for-Action.jpg
 
allicorn said:
TBH I think this one picture diffuses whatever "Mandela Effect" disputes there are about the color scheme of that van since this single picture shows both the gray-red-black variant and the black-red-only variant (labelled "J" in the pic).
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No - It brings into focus one of the roots of the problem. There were both kinds of toys out there - and there still are.
FWIW, I love this "Mandela Effect" concept. It's so much fun to imagine and so subjective - so incredibly hard to argue with people's memories. But I rather doubt there's any underlying truth to it.
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Agreed. I'm only discussing it because it's fun. I too remembered the van being all black - but I don't have a problem admitting that my memories can be faulty. And I do think this whole thing is just people's false memories. Nothing else to see here.
 
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Kingsize Wombat said:
Well - here's a rebuke for the A-Team Van. A contemporary catalogue for A-Team related toys. It clearly shows the A-Team Van being silver and black - not just black. ...
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The version used in the TV series was grey or silver over black, with a red dividing strip.

The version used in the (later) movie was a charcoal grey so dark it appeared as black as the black, with a similar red dividing strip. The movie version often appears to be all-black with a red stripe.
 
In the catalogue pic above...

When did they have a hard-top version of Face's Corvette?

Anyway, Wikipedia reckons "The van was commonly said to be all-black,[citation needed] but the section above the red stripe was metallic gray."
 
GNC said:
You mean Kojak didn't have a bloke with a gun continually hanging out the back window of his motor on TV?
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I had a Kojak toy car with a guy hanging out the back window with a gun.
Got it for christmas in the middle of the 70s I think. And here it is! Photo from the internet.


vintage-1975-corgi-290-kojak-buick-regal-diecast-toy-car.jpg


 
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Weird they forgot to put in Telly Savalas actually driving the vehicle.
 
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