The Mandela "Effect" On Our Lives

The Mandela Effect has been a popular topic amongst the media for around 10 years. It occurs when a large amount of people believe that an event happened, when it actually did not happen. The Mandela Effect impacts us mentally, as many people all over the world are having memories of things occurring that never occurred.

To go deeper into the background of what the Mandela Effect is, It got its name from when Fiona Broome, a self-identified “paranormal consultant”, was convinced that Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s prison, even though he lived until 2013. Healthline also says that it was not just Broome who thought that Mandela died earlier than he actually did, and since multiple people thought the same as Broome, they concluded that the “Mandela Effect” was an actual thing.

Broome also believed in the multiverse theory. Broome's theory is that at all times there are multiple realities of each universe (the multiverse), and that within each universe there are variations of objects, events and people. So, memories of those "incorrect" shared moments are not really false – they are just instances where parallel universes crossed paths for an instant. Basically, Broome believes that the Mandela Effect is us living in a parallel universe. However, there are scientific and psychological reasonings behind why people felt this way.

While the phenomenon gets its popular name from Broome's example, the technical term for this is "collective false memory". Researchers have made something called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task paradigm, to induce false memories, where people read off a list of similar words. The article states, “After reading the list, researchers will ask the participants whether or not they recall a “lure word,” which is another related word not included on the list. This makes people recognize the lure word and think they read it, when they really did.

The brain likes to play a lot of tricks on humans. One example of this is from Rick Robinson who said, “In the case of the Berenstain Bears, “-stein” is a much more common word ending than “-stain”. Chances are that many of us never even noticed the actual spelling until it was brought to our attention.” A lot of what the “Mandela Effect” is, is our brain playing tricks on us, making us think something that sounds more right, but isn’t.

Another example of this is the misinformation effect. Kendra Cherry from 2017 stated, “The misinformation effect refers to the tendency for post-event information to interfere with the memory of the original event. Researchers have shown that the introduction of even relatively subtle information following an event can have a dramatic effect on how people remember.” This all ties into the false memories as well, where the people are remembering events that never happened.

Lastly, there are many life examples of the Mandela Effect that have impacted a lot of people’s ways of thinking. If you watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you probably remember the line,"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" You may be shocked to learn, then, that the line actually began with the phrase "Magic mirror on the wall" instead.