Mandela Effect Speech - What is it? And examples. PDF

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What is the Nelson Mandela Effect? Where did it come from? Examples? Reasons why our brain works that way?...

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The Nelson Mandela Effect Presentation:

Have you ever brought up a memory from your childhood to your parents, only to be told that this event never actually took place? Or have you ever thought that a celebrity died a long time ago only to find out they were still alive? You were experiencing something called the Mandela Effect.

The Nelson Mandela Effect is what happens when someone has a clear memory of something that never happened in this reality. I personally have experienced this sensation many times, from personal memories, and big events that made the news.

Today, we’re going to explore an article explaining the Nelson Mandela Effect, written by Arlin Cuncic and published on the 11th of August 2021.

The name comes from Nelson Mandela, who was a political activist in Africa. He fought against the horrible apartheid system in South Africa and was incarcerated from the 60s to 1990. Some people claim to remember him dying in prison in the 1980s, in reality, he was released from prison, helped overturn apartheid, and went on to be the president of South Africa for five years. He eventually died in 2013.

This shared false memory phenomenon was dubbed “The Mandela Effect” by self-described “paranormal consultant Fiona Broome, reference to her false memory of the death of Nelson Mandela.

Another similar example of the Mandela Effect is the canonization of Mother Teresa. People from different countries have the distinct memory of seeing Mother Teresa being canonized during her lifetime, sometime in the 1990s, by

Pope Paul II. In reality, her canonization didn’t occur until September 4th, 2016, 19 years after her death.

It’s important to keep in mind that the many-worlds interpretation was developed to explain the results of physics experiments and not the Mandela effect. Nonetheless, Broome believes that her shared memory isn’t actually false, and that she and others who remember a different past were actually in a parallel reality with a different timeline that somehow got crossed with our current one. For example, If you saw Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back, you probably remember Darth Vader uttering the famous line, "Luke, I am your father." You might be surprised to learn, then, that the line was actually, "No, I am your father." Most people have memories of the line being the former rather than the latter. Don’t believe me, have a look: (play video) Another example is that people remember the band Queen’s song, “we are the champions” ending with, “no time for losers, cause we are the champions of the world.” But it’s final lyric actually is, “no time for losers, cause we are the champions…”

Play video… As you can see, “of the world” was never sang, although majority of us probably remember it being there. You think you were alone? Think again, in the next slide, you’ll see 4 well known celebrities, reacting to the ending of the song”

Even the famous phrase from Walt Disney’s Snow white and the seven dwarfs isn’t safe from misremembering. The evil queen never said, “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” She actually said “Magic mirror on the wall…” Same goes for example 4, you may know the universe that gave us memorable characters like Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Tweety Bird as Looney Toons. However, Warner Brothers produced the series as “Looney Tunes.”

What about example 5, you remember a robber emoji, one facing the front and one facing the side? Yeah well, it never existed. And the last example; perhaps people are confusing him with Mr. Peanut, the Planter peanut’s mascot (who also wears a top hat and carries around a cane like the Monopoly Man). But there are a number of concerned citizens who can’t seem to grasp how the Monopoly man is monocle-less, when they’ve distinctly remembered him wearing one.

WHAT IS CAUSING THIS COLLECTIVE MISREMEMBERING? Modern phsycological theory holds that memory is constructive, not reproductive. That means our brains build memories on the fly out of pieces of information, as opposed to playing memories back like a recording. Because of that, our memories can be distorted by bias, association, imagination or even peer pressure.

In the article, they gave two possible explanations:

Alternate Realities One theory about the basis for the Mandela effect originates from quantum physics and relates to the idea that rather than one timeline of events, it is possible that alternate realities or universes are taking place and mixing with our timeline.1 In theory, this would result in groups of people having the same memories because the timeline has been altered as we shift between these different realities. You aren't alone if you think this sounds a little unrealistic. Unfortunately, the idea of alternate realities is unfalsifiable, meaning that there is no way to truly disprove that these other universes don’t exist. This is why such a far-fetched theory continues to gain traction among the Mandela effect communities. You can't prove it's not real, so you can't totally discount the possibility of it. For many people, the excitement of a bit of mystery to everyday life also likely comes into play.

False Memories A more likely explanation for the Mandela effect involves false memories.2 Before we consider what is meant by false memories, let's look at an example of the Mandela effect as it will help us to understand how memory can be faulty (and may lead to the phenomenon that we are describing). Who was Alexander Hamilton? Most Americans learned in school that he was a founding father of the United States of America but that he was not a president. However, when asked about the presidents of the United States, many people mistakenly believe that Hamilton was a president. Why?

If we consider a simple neuroscience explanation, the memory for Alexander Hamilton is encoded in an area of the brain where the memories for the presidents of the United States are stored. The means by which memory traces are stored is called the engram and the framework in which similar memories are associated with each other is called the schema. So when people try to recall Hamilton, this sets off the neurons in close connection to each other, bringing with it the memory of the presidents. (Though this is an oversimplified explanation, it illustrates the general process.) Sometimes the Mandela Effect is so strong that it overtakes reality. People remembered a character from the movie “Gremlins”, as being named “Spike”. In actuality, the character was named “Stripe” but bending to the Mandela Effect, in November 2016, a t-shirt featuring the character “Spike” was released for sale....