General
New study seeks to explain the ‘Mandela Effect’ – the bizarre phenomenon of shared false memories
Imagine the Monopoly Man. Is he wearing a monocle or not?
If you pictured the character from the popular board game wearing one, you’d be wrong. In fact, he has never worn one.
If you’re surprised by this, you’re not alone. Many people possess the same false memory of this character. This phenomenon takes place for other characters, logos and quotes, too. For example, Pikachu from Pokémon is often thought to have a black tip on his tail, which he doesn’t have. And many people are convinced that the Fruit of the Loom logo includes a cornucopia. It doesn’t.
We call this phenomenon of shared false memories for certain cultural icons the “visual Mandela Effect.”
People tend to be puzzled when they learn that they share the same false memories with other people. That’s partly because they assume that what they remember and forget ought to be subjective and based on their own personal experiences.
However, research we have conducted shows that people tend to remember and forget the same images as one another, regardless of the diversity of their individual experiences. Recently, we have shown these similarities in our memories even extend to our false memories.
What is the Mandela Effect?
The term “Mandela Effect” was coined by Fiona Broome, a self-described paranormal researcher, to describe her false memory of former South African president Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.
She realized that many other people also shared this same false memory and wrote an article about her experience on her website. The concept of shared false memories spread to other forums and websites, including Reddit.
Since then, examples of the Mandela Effect have been widely shared on the internet. These include names like “the Berenstain Bears,” a children’s book series that is falsely remembered as spelled “-ein” instead of “-ain,” and characters like Star Wars’ C-3PO, who is falsely remembered with two gold legs instead of one gold and one silver leg.
The Fruit of the Loom logo has never had a cornucopia. Wikimedia Commons
The Mandela Effect became fodder for conspiracists – the false memories so strong and so specific that some people see them as evidence of an alternate dimension.
Because of that, scientific research has only studied the Mandela Effect as an example of how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. There has been very little research looking into the Mandela Effect as a memory phenomenon.
But understanding why these icons trigger such specific false memories might give us more insight into how false memories form. The visual Mandela Effect, which affects icons specifically, was a perfect way to study this.
A robust false memory phenomenon
To see whether the visual Mandela Effect really exists, we ran an experiment in which we presented people with three versions of the same icon. One was correct and two were manipulated, and we asked them to select the correct one. There were 40 sets of icons, and they included C-3PO from the Star Wars franchise, the Fruit of the Loom logo and the Monopoly Man from the board game.
In the results, which have been accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Sciences, we found that people fared very poorly on seven of them, only choosing the correct one around or less than 33% of the time.
For these seven images, people consistently identified the same incorrect version, not just randomly choosing one of the two incorrect versions. In addition, participants reported being very confident in their choices and having high familiarity with these icons despite being wrong.
Put together, it’s clear evidence of the phenomenon that people on the internet have talked about for years: The visual Mandela Effect is a real and consistent memory error.
The correct version of Pikachu is the one on the left (a first one). Most participants in the study not only chose a wrong version of the popular cartoon character, but they also chose the same wrong one – the Pikachu with the black tip on its tail. Wilma Bainbridge and Deepasri Prasad, CC BY-SA
We found that this false memory effect was incredibly strong, across multiple different ways of testing memory. Even when people saw the correct version of the icon, they still chose the incorrect version just a few minutes later.
And when asked to freely draw the icons from their memory, people also included the same incorrect features.
No universal cause
What causes this shared false memory for specific icons?
We found that visual features like color and brightness could not explain the effect. We also tracked participants’ mouse movements as they viewed the images on a computer screen to see if they simply didn’t scan over a particular part, such as Pikachu’s tail.
But even when people directly viewed the correct part of the image, they still chose the false version immediately afterward. We also found that for most icons, it was unlikely people had seen the false version beforehand and were just remembering that version, rather than the correct version.
It may be that there is no one universal cause. Different images may elicit the visual Mandela Effect for different reasons. Some could be related to prior expectations for an image, some might be related to prior visual experience with an image and others could have to do with something entirely different than the images themselves.
For example, we found that, for the most part, people only see C-3PO’s upper body depicted in media. The falsely remembered gold leg might be a result of them using prior knowledge – bodies are usually only one color – to fill in this gap.
But the fact that we can demonstrate consistencies in false memories for certain icons suggests that part of what drives false memories is dependent on our environment – and independent of our subjective experiences with the world.
Authors: Deepasri Prasad, Ph.D. Student in Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College and Wilma Bainbridge, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Chicago
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A British woman purchased a portrait of a young girl from a charity shop and now asserts that the picture is cursed, reports mirror.co.uk.
Zoe
Elliot-Brown, aged 36, spotted an artwork by an unfamiliar artist at
the Hastings Advice Representation Center in St Leonards-on-Sea, East
Sussex, a month ago.
Simultaneously, the seller cautioned Zoe
about the painting possibly being cursed, revealing that a prior
purchaser of the same artwork had returned it to the store with the
statement “it ruined my life.”
Out of curiosity, Zoe captured an
image of the painting on her smartphone and shared the photo with her
68-year-old mother, Jane Elliot-Brown. Her mother seemed to be entranced
by the painting.
Instantly,
she began urging Zoe to acquire the painting. Yielding to her mother’s
persuasion, Zoe paid £20 for the artwork. However, as soon as she
introduced it into her home, strange occurrences commenced taking place.
As
Zoe entered her home and positioned the painting in the living room,
their dog named Cilla leaped up and started growling at the artwork.
Cilla deliberately kept her distance, refraining from approaching the
picture. Subsequently, Zoe’s mother’s health took a sharp decline. She
began experiencing alternating spells of fever and chills, requiring her
to wear four sweaters to keep warm.
Concurrently, Zoe’s mother
seemed to be captivated by the painting. She continuously gazed at it
and even caressed the painted girl’s cheek. During the night, she heard
peculiar knocks emanating from the room where the picture hung, despite
the room being unoccupied.
Zoe managed to persuade her mother that
the painting held negative energy and was cursed. However, Jane
staunchly defended the painting, reluctant to part with it.
“I’ve
never seen my mother yearn for something so intensely. She was
entranced by it, but not in a positive manner. She guarded it. She
frequently gazed at it. She ran her fingers over the painted girl’s
cheeks and polished the surface, although the painting didn’t require
polishing.”
“Each time I mentioned disposing of the painting, she
became exceedingly irritable. It transformed into a sort of family
heirloom for her, something she began cherishing.”
“My mother
flatly refused to get rid of the painting. I think it’s a bit like the
magic power of the Lord of the Rings ring. It definitely works in an
attractive and charming way, it seems to pull you towards it.
“My mother became a bit like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings,” says Zoe.
Jane
herself says that it seems to her that the painted girl is very unhappy
and she stroked her to comfort her. She also does not attribute the
deterioration of her health to the purchase of the painting.
At
the same time, she admits that there were several cases when someone
seemed to knock on the door, and when she opened it, there was no one on
the threshold.
One day, Jane became so ill that she fainted right
in the bathroom. Zoe called 911, but her mother refused to go to the
hospital and was eventually left at home.
One morning, Zoe entered
the living room and saw her mother standing and stroking the painted
girl on her cheeks. And the mother could not remember how she ended up
in the living room and what she did at night.
“It
was strange behavior, especially for my mom. She couldn’t remember
anything from what happened last night. My mom is still very weird and
distracted and doesn’t want to discuss it.”
And then something
even more frightening happened. Zoe and her friend Ben went for a walk
on a hill during a thunderstorm and suddenly saw a “creepy black figure”
that suddenly appeared in front of them.
They do not know if this
is related to the painting, but they immediately ran back in fear.
Deciding to get rid of the cursed painting, Zoey eventually took it and
took it to the same shop where she bought it.
And when she drove
up to the store, she saw that in one of the tires of the car, brand new,
someone stuck a screw. She gave the painting to the seller, but then
changed her mind and took it back.
She
didn’t want someone else to buy the painting and get hurt because of
it. Now Zoe wants to give the picture only to someone who understands
damn things.
Now the painting is kept in Zoya’s house in a box filled with sage (it is believed that sage helps against evil spirits).
She also hung sage in every corner of the house, although Zoya’s mother was very unhappy with this.
“I
thought knowing my luck some idiot will go and get it and try and burn
it and I don’t really want to be left with the remainder of whatever the
hell has been going on. Technically I was the last owner. [I want it]
dealt with properly. […]”
A mysterious wild man, nicknamed by the locals “the wolf man”, was
photographed in the forested mountains of the Harz, in the center of
Germany. The man was completely naked and held a spear in his hand.
The
savage was accidentally noticed by two tourists who were walking
through the forest, not far from the city of Blankenburg in
Saxony-Anhalt, and examined the ruins of an old castle.
“When we
reached the caves in the sands, we saw this wolf-man. He stood high in
one of the caves and held in his hand a long wooden stick that looked
like a spear.
“He didn’t take his eyes off us, but he didn’t say
anything. He looked dirty and looked like a prehistoric man from the
Stone Age, like pictures in a history book,” Gina Weiss, 31, told Bild
newspaper.
According
to Weiss and her friend Toby, they observed this man for about ten
minutes. The naked man appeared to be in his forties and reportedly
these tourists were not the first to have seen him in the area.
It is assumed that he has been living in the forests near Blankenburg for about five years.
Authorities say they have received numerous reports of a person wearing a wolf’s skin or wolf costume over the past five years.
In
March 2023, a frightened eyewitness even called the police because he
thought that a wolfman running next to him wanted to attack him. In
other cases, people have seen how a savage is trying to make a fire or
building a hut out of branches for himself.
At the same time, it
is quite cold in this area in winter and it is not clear how this person
managed to survive here for several years.
According to Alexander
Beck, head of the local fire brigade, this savage clearly has the
skills to live in the wild and adapt to the changing seasons of the
year.
Where this man came from is unknown. There are many theories, from the hermit to more mystical versions such as time portals.
However, there are those who believe that all this is just some kind of prank to scare tourists or some other purpose.
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