Does Pikachu have a black bar on the tip of its electric tails? Have you ever spelled Looney Tunes as Looney Toons? Some people have thought so, this misattribution of memory is often known as the Mandela Effect.
Mandela Effect is a term coined by Fiona Broome after she found out about the passing of a certain South African President. In present-day, the Mandela Effect is attributed to the feeling of remembering a false or incorrect detail of a specific object, thing, event, or person that the person believes is true. Examples of famous Mandela Effects span from written scriptures, Star-Wars, Snow-White, Berenstain Bears, and even the Statue of Liberty.
Modern-day science has attributed Mandela Effect to be the work of collective false memories, which are amplified via an echo chamber. Due to the social nature of humans and the limitations of our memory, the brain can create false details, fabricate events and block out memories. These false memories are correlated with the Mandela Effect’s definition and may be an underlying cause of this phenomenon.
The point of the Mandela effect is to obtain confirmation or confidence about a memory or the lack thereof. This could span misconceptions, misinformation, missing parts or colors, and more. Often as social creatures, humans would feel more comfortable being a part of a majority or a small group of like-minded individuals. This circles back to the point of the Mandela effect, which is to confirm an uncanny coincidence or occurrence of one’s memory of specific events, objects, and cultural traditions.
The Mandela effect originates from the idea that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the year 1980, with some people remembering that there was news coverage of his death. This is juxtaposed with the fact that Nelson Mandela lived into the 2000s dying in 2013 after he had become the acting president of South Africa spanning 1994 – 1999. A paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome coined the term after finding out that Nelson Mandela lived into the 2000s.
This phenomenon is often referred to as false memories and can be generated by a lot of outside factors. A few of these outside factors can be traumatic experiences, language, group thinking, and dreams. This is often due to the brain trying to rationally process specific events and presuppositions. False memories are often adjacent to the phenomenon or occurrence of Dejá Vu.
Mandela effect is a weird phenomenon that teeters on the edge of the paranormal and the pseudo-physical theory of the multiverse. Whether it is just a random widespread occurrence or it is something more cosmically charged, the Mandela effect is something that is both weird and exciting.