• Question: do you belive in the mandela effect and do you have any more evidence?

    Asked by anon-181546 on 11 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      Well, from my understanding, the Mandela Effect is a collective mis-remembering of an event. The original person who created the term believed it was due to pseudo-scientific (i.e. not real scientific) theories. However, Psychologists know, fake memories happen all the time (which is why eye-witness testimonies are not very useful – because people suck at remembering events!) According to Psychologists, the Mandela Effect can happen due to lots of people having similar fake-memories (e.g. perhaps after Mandela went to prison, time went by, some people simply forgot about him, then years later if he came up in conversation, those people may say ‘didn’t he die?’ – I am sure we all know of some actors/actresses that we aren’t sure are alive or not – then boom, a fake memory made). A really interesting article was written in The Conversation, if you are interested!:

      http://theconversation.com/the-mandela-effect-and-how-your-mind-is-playing-tricks-on-you-89544

    • Photo: Nathan Clarke

      Nathan Clarke answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      This effect generally refers to the topic of “false memories”, which is when someone remembers something that didn’t happen. This is obviously very important to understand in things like court cases. Part of our ability to remember is called “recall” and this could be impacted by how a question is asked. For example, these two questions are similar, but the first might ‘bias’ the response of whoever answers it:
      1) do you remember a car accident?
      2) do you remember the cars smashing into each other yesterday?
      The second question is a little more suggestive.
      The other important part of our memories is ‘encoding’ or the actual process of remembering. This is really linked to attention. There’s a lot of scientific work on this, but we’re really not very good at taking an accurate memory of a scene. It’s more like our own personal story than a photograph of what actually happened. Watch this and see how well you remember how many times the basketball was passed 😉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

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