Speaker 1: All right, let's kick off this deep dive with a
quick memory check, and you know, be honest with yourself here.
If I asked you to quote the evil queen from
Disney's Snow White, what pops into your head?
Speaker 2: Is it a mirror mirror on the wall?
Speaker 1: Who's the fires of them all? Or how about the
monopoly man rich uncle Pennybags? Picture him now? Does he
have a monocle like a fancy little eyeglass. Just take
a second, really try to see it in your mind's eye.
Speaker 3: And if you just felt that little jolt that yes, absolutely,
that's what she says. Or of course he has a monocle, well,
then welcome, Welcome to the really fascinating and sometimes pretty
unsettling world of the Mandela Effect.
Speaker 1: It really is that eerie feeling, isn't it When loads
of people, i mean large groups, remember something so vividly
one way, but then you look it up and the facts,
the actual record, tell a completely different story. It's not
just like forgetting. It's this shared conviction, the certainty about
something that well apparently never.
Speaker 3: Was exactly And the name itself Mandela Effect comes from
Fiona Brum, a paranormal researcher back in two thousand and nine,
she realized she had this incredibly strong, detailed memory of
Nelson Mandela dying in prison back in the nineteen.
Speaker 1: Eighties, which of course he didn't. He passed away in
twenty thirteen years after being released. But the really wild
part was when she shared this online, right, That's.
Speaker 3: What kicked it all off. She found tons of other
people who had the exact same false memory, not just vaguely,
but like vividly, remembering news reports, maybe even televised funeral
clips that never actually happened.
Speaker 1: So that's what we're doing today. We're definitely going to
touch on those famous examples. Everyone talks about Berenstain, bears
and all that, but we want to go deeper. Our
real mission here is to explore the why why do
these happen? And maybe even more exciting or unsettling, depending
on how you look at it, the when when did
reality or our memory of.
Speaker 3: It change exactly? We're asking, are these just quirks of
human psychology, maybe amplified by the Internet, or you know,
could they be hinting at something much much bigger, something
about reality itself. Will be pulling together perspectives from well
everywhere neuroscience, cognitive psychology, but also getting into quantum physics,
even philosophy looking at how we understand time itself. So yeah,
prepared to have maybe a few perceptions challenged today.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this first piece then, because while it
feels like a weird glitch, maybe something external psychologically, it
often comes down to this idea of false memory.
Speaker 2: Right, that seems pretty key.
Speaker 3: It's a crucial distinction to make upfront. A false memory
isn't the same as just forgetting. It's not lying either.
It's when you recall something that's either totally false or
maybe a really warped version of something true. And here's
the kicker. The person experiencing it genuinely believes it's true,
absolutely convinced.
Speaker 1: Like your brain just wrote a movie scene and you're
sure you saw it happen live.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it. Yeah, any good
mess with all sorts of memories, like general knowledge stuff,
a famous quote, a logo, or even personal things you
might swear you had pasta last night when actually it
was Taco's. Your brain wants a complete story, so if
there's a gap, it might just you know, invent a
plausible detail and then believe it wholeheartedly. No intent to deceive,
just a creative brain smoothing things over.
Speaker 1: So it's not just random blips in individual brains. We
see these patterns, these same false memories popping up again
and again. What are some of the really classic ones
that show how common this is.
Speaker 3: Well, besides the snow white mirror and the monopoly man
we started with, the big one is often the Berenstain Bears.
So many people were absolutely certain it was spelled Berenstein
with an ei in.
Speaker 2: I remember that waye.
Speaker 1: I was convinced it was ei in right, or Darth Vader.
Speaker 3: Almost everyone quotes Luke, I am your father, but the
actual line in the movie is no, I am your father.
Subtle but different, and maybe the most visually debated one
is the fruit of the loom logo. Ask around. So
many people will swear, absolutely swear there used to be
a cornicopia, that horn shaped basket thing spilling out the fruit.
But there wasn't, never, not one in the logos history.
It's amazing how many of us share these exact, same
incorrect memories. You might even be having a few aha
moments right now thinking about these.
Speaker 1: It definitely feels like this whole phenomenon, or at least
our awareness of it, has just exploded recently, like maybe
the last ten twenty years. Does the Internet play a
role in making it seem so widespread?
Speaker 3: Oh? Absolutely, the Internet's been a massive amplifier. Think about it.
Forums like Reddit have entire communities, huge ones dedicated just
to the Mendela effect. People share potential false memory, others
chime in saying me too, and suddenly it feels incredibly validated.
It gets reinforced instantly.
Speaker 1: So it spreads faster and seems more real. Because so
many people agree online.
Speaker 3: Exactly, misinformation or in this case, shared misremembering, can spread
like wildfire. It gets repeated, shared, discussed, and pretty soon
it feels like established fact within certain online bubbles. It
becomes part of a sort of digital collective memory, whether
it's accurate or not.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense, and it leads right into how
our brains actually work, doesn't it. Because they're not like
perfect video recorders capturing everything faithfully.
Speaker 3: Not even close. Some researchers use the analogy of a
brain being like a ZIP drive or maybe lossy compression
like for a JPEG image. It doesn't store every single
pixel perfectly. It saves the gist, the important bits, and
then when you recall the memory, it kind of reconstructs it.
It fills in the blank space on patterns associations. What
usually happens, like.
Speaker 1: If I remember a living room, my brain might just
automatically add a sofa or a lamp, because well, living
rooms usually.
Speaker 3: Have those precisely, even if you didn't specifically notice them
at the time. Your brain prioritizes making a coherent, sensible
story over logging every tiny raw detail. It's about efficiency mostly.
Speaker 1: So it's not just what we saw, but what our
brain expects to see. And I've heard that things like
suggestion and just hearing something over and over can seriously
mess with this reconstruction process too.
Speaker 3: Oh, they're incredibly powerful. Psychologists use something called the DRM
paradigm Deez Roderger McDermott to show this. They'll give people
a list of words all related to say, sleeplike, dream, bed, awake, rest, tired,
but they deliberately leave out the main word sleep. Then, later,
when asked to recall the list, a surprisingly large number
of people will confidently say sleep was on it, even
though it wasn't. Their brain just infers it because all
the other words point so strongly towards it.
Speaker 1: Wow, So your brain adds things in automatically. And what
about just hearing something repeatedly that.
Speaker 3: Taps into the illusory truth effect. It's this weird quirk
where the more you hear a statement, even a false one,
the more likely you are to start believing it's true.
It just starts to feel familiar, and our brains often
mistake familiarity for accuracy that.
Speaker 1: Sounds potentially dangerous, like something advertisers or politicians might use.
Speaker 3: It's used all the time. Unfortunately, repetition can be incredibly
persuasive bypassing critical Sometimes, and closely related is how questions
are worded. This can massively influence memory. Elizabeth Loftis did
famous studies on this back in the seventies.
Speaker 2: The car crash one.
Speaker 3: That's the one people watch videos of car accidents. If
they were asked how fast the cars were going when
they smashed into each other, they gave much higher speed
estimates than if the question used the word hit, just
changing one word, just one word, and even more striking.
A week later, the smashed group was significantly more likely
to falsely remember seeing broken glass in the video, even
though there wasn't any, The word itself planted a false detail.
Think about how that applies to the Mandela effect. Asking
did Nelson Mandela die in prison in the eighties right
is much more likely to elicit a yes than asking
how and when did Nelson Mandela die?
Speaker 1: So our emotions must play a big role too. Then,
if something feels emotionally resonant, maybe we're more likely to
remember it the way it feels it should have been.
Speaker 3: Absolutely Emotional states act like a filter or maybe even
a lens, distorting memory. Highly emotional events where subjects we
feel strongly about are particularly vulnerable. Take the Mandela example again.
His struggle was so significant, so emotionally charged, for so
many that the narrative of him dying tragically in prison
might have felt more fitting or powerful to some people's
internal story than the actual, more complex reality.
Speaker 1: But why do these false memories often feel so vivid?
If it's just bias or filling in gaps, why the certainty?
Speaker 3: That's where confabulation comes in. It's not just inserting a detail,
it's constructing a whole memory, often with sensory details and
emotional weight, that feels completely real, but is factually incorrect.
The brain isn't trying to lie. It's trying to create
a coherent narrative. If it has to invent details to
make the story work, it does so, and then it
bleaves its own invention. It's committed to the story.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, knowing all this, the suggestion, the repetition emotions confabulous.
It really makes you question things, doesn't it? Like how
reliable are our own cherished memories or even news headlines
we read?
Speaker 3: It absolutely should make us more critical consumers of information. Yes,
and perhaps a bit more humble about the certainty of
our own recall. The big takeaway isn't just that memory fails.
It's that memory creates. Our brains are actively building our
reality moment by moment, based on input, expectations, biases. It's
a construction zone, not a library archive.
Speaker 1: So drilling down into the brain itself, what's actually happening
physically when a false memory forms or gets recalled? Is
there a specific part that's like glitching out?
Speaker 3: It's less about one part glitching and more about the
complex process having vulnerabilities. Think about the stages encoding, getting
information in storage, keeping it, and retrieval getting it back out.
Errors can happen at any stage, but retrieval is often
a key culprit for false memories. Structures like the hippocampus
crucial for forming new explicit memories, and the prefrontal cortex
involved in retrieval organization checking facts are.
Speaker 1: Central, and things like stress or tiredness can affect these parts.
Speaker 3: Definitely, age, stress, lack of sleep, even substance use can
make the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex less effective, increasing susceptibility
to memory errors. But here's what's really mind bending. Brain
imaging studies show that retrieving a true memory and retrieving
a false memory can activate the exact same brain regions.
Speaker 1: Seriously, so the brain itself can't tell.
Speaker 3: The difference from its own internal perspective. It seems not always.
The feeling of remembering can be identical whether the memory
is accurate or kimfabulated. It genuinely feels like you're accessing
a real event. It's not like a missing file. It's
more like confidently pulling up a file that's been subtly
corrupted or rewritten, but your system tells you it's the original.
Speaker 2: Okay. Wow.
Speaker 1: That covers a huge amount of the psychological why. But
like you said, for a lot of people, this just
doesn't feel like only a memory glitch. It feels bigger,
which brings us to the really mind bending stuff. What
if it's not just our brains? What if these aren't
misrememberings but echoes, echoes from somewhere else.
Speaker 2: This is where we shift.
Speaker 1: From the why of our internal world to the when
of maybe external reality.
Speaker 3: Shifts precisely, this is where the conversation moves into territory
that's more speculative, definitely more thrilling for many involving physics
and philosophy. The core idea here is that these shared
false memories might not be errors at all, but accurate
memories from a different reality or timeline that we've somehow
shifted from or that's bleeding through. It's a radical idea,
but one that resonates deeply with those who experience the
Mandela affects strongly, and.
Speaker 1: The go to explanation there is usually the multiverse, right,
the idea that our universe isn't the only.
Speaker 3: One that's probably the most popular framework. Yeah, and there
are actually several different scientific concepts that could theoretically support
a multiverse. One is eternal inflation. This comes from cosmology.
The idea is that the rapid expansion after the Big
Bang inflation might not have stopped everywhere. At the same time,
it might still be happening in distant regions, constantly spawning
new bubble universes, potentially infinite number and forever inaxit to.
Speaker 2: Us, and these other universes could be different.
Speaker 3: They could have slightly different laws of physics, different fundamental constants.
So in one bubble, maybe Berenstein is the correct spelling.
Maybe the queen did say mirror mirror. The implication for
the Mandela effect is maybe you haven't misremembered. Maybe you're
remembering a fact from a slightly different bubble universe you
were previously in or are somehow connected to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a big concept.
Speaker 1: Are there other multiverse ideas from science?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yes. Quantum mechanics offers the many world's interpretation. This
suggests that every time a quantum measurement is made, or
essentially any event with multiple possible outcomes happens, the universe splits.
Every possibility gets realized in its own, separate, parallel universe,
So there are countless universes branching off constantly containing every
conceivable version of history, including ones where Mendela died in
prison or logos look different.
Speaker 1: So infinite versions of me making slightly different choices according.
Speaker 3: To many worlds. Yes, though crucially in this interpretation, these
universes don't interact. You can't jump between them. It just
provides a vast landscape of possibilities. Then there's the idea
stemming from infinite space. If the universe is truly infinite
in size, then just by sheer probability, the way particles
can arrange themselves must eventually.
Speaker 1: Repeat, meaning exact copies of us somewhere out there.
Speaker 3: Theoretically, yes, infinitely far away, there could be identical copies
of Earth of you living out identical or slightly varied lives. Again,
likely too far to ever interact, but the possibility exists
within an infinite framework. And a more recent, really mind
bending one is the mirror image universe theory. It speculates
that maybe the Big Bang creating two universes ours moving
forward in time, and an exact mirror image moving backward
in time from the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: Whoa backward in time?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's highly theoretical and explaining things like dark matter
but it adds another layer to how reality and time
might be structured in ways we don't fully grasp.
Speaker 1: So connecting all these multiverse ideas back to the Mandela effect,
the theory is that somehow people might be slipping between
these realities or information is bleeding through.
Speaker 2: That's the link.
Speaker 3: That's the proposed link. Yes, that the shared false memories
are actually true memories from an adjacent reality. It's a
very compelling narrative for many, but we have to be clear,
the scientific community is largely skeptical. The big hurdle is falsifiability.
We currently have no way to test for or disprove
the existence of these other universes.
Speaker 2: Can't run an experiment basically exactly.
Speaker 3: And then there's Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest
explanation is usually the best For many scientists. Psychological explanations
for the Mandela effect are simpler and rely on known mechanisms,
whereas invoking multiverses as huge complexity without yet any direct evidence.
So while theoretically fascinating multiverses remain firmly in the Roman
speculation for now.
Speaker 1: Okay, stepping away from multiverses, but staying with altered reality.
What about the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we're living
inside a giant computer. Could Mandela effects be glitches in
the matrix.
Speaker 3: That's another popular theory. Yeah, popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom.
The idea is that if civilizations can reach a point
where they can create ancestor simulations, it's statistically likely we
are in one. Within that framework, Mandela effects could absolutely
be interpreted as glitches, bugs, or maybe even deliberate updates
or patches made by the simulators.
Speaker 1: Like changing a line of code that affects everything exactly.
Speaker 3: There's that analogy from computer science that pops up on
forms like Reddit Imagine realities. Data is stored efficiently. Instead
of writing Berenstain bears millions of times, you store it
once and just reference it. If a programmer or whatever
runs the simulation changes that single source instance to Berenstain,
then every reference updates automatically globally. That could explain why
so many people notice the same change seemingly overnight. It's
a neat, if slightly terrifying analogy.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that addresses the collective shifts maybe, But what
about those moments when an individual feels their reality has shifted.
You mentioned trauma earlier. Let's hear Win on the quantum
trauma reality shift idea right QTRS.
Speaker 3: This framework tries to connect profound personal experiences, specifically trauma
or near death experiences, and ease to a subjective feeling
of shifting realities. It's looking for the when on a
personal level, we know clinically that severe trauma can trigger
dissociative states derealization where the world feels unreal, or depersonalization
feeling detached from yourself. These are profound shifts in.
Speaker 1: Perception, and PTSD involves actual brain changes.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, long term changes, things like a hyperactive amygdala
fear center and often reduced volume in the hippocampus memory.
The brain physically adapts or maladapts to the trauma. Research
has even found specific brain wave patterns linked to dissociation,
like a strange three hertz oscillation and NDE research has
reported these surprising bursts of gamba wave activity right around
the time of clinical death.
Speaker 1: So extreme stress literally changes brain function and structure. How
does qters connect this to quantum shifts? That seems like
a big leap.
Speaker 3: It is a leap and it enters very speculative territory
involving quantum consciousness theories like the orcerror theory proposed by
Penrose and a Hamrof. These are not mainstream views, let's
be clear, but the ideal within qtrs is this, if
consciousness has some quantum component operating within the brain's microtubules,
perhaps the intense bioelectrical chaos of severe trauma or an
NDE could disrupt these delicate quantum processes, like creates so
much noise that it forces a sort of reset or
collapse of the person's quantum state, leading to a fundamentally
altered subjective experience of reality afterward. It's like shaking a
snow globe so hard that the scene inside rearranges are there.
Speaker 1: Like real world examples or studies that hint at this
kind of profound sudden change in people after crises.
Speaker 3: Well, there's anecdotal evidence. Researchers have documented cases of quantum change, sudden,
dramatic and lasting shifts in personality values in worldview, often
triggered by a CHRISI or peak experience, and NDE survivors
frequently report radical life changes, feeling like they've returned to
a different world or a different version of their life.
Some literally say things like things felt different or I
woke up in an alternate reality after recovering. It's not
proof of timeline jumping, of course, but it shows that
the mind can undergo incredibly profound subjective shifts triggered by
extreme events.
Speaker 1: And I guess this resonates with some spiritual ideas too,
like the world being an illusion or intense experiences triggering awakenings.
Speaker 3: It certainly does concepts like Maya and Hinduism and Buddhism.
The idea that the perceived world as allsory aligns with
the notion that our everyday reality might not be the
only or ultimate one, and phenomena like Kundalini awakening often
described as triggered by intense physical or emotional strain leading
to radical shifts and consciousness parallel the qtrs idea of
trauma inducing a fundamental change of perception.
Speaker 1: Okay, So circling back to the collective shifts in the
big WIN question, if it wasn't just individual trauma, is
there specific event people point to? I know, Sern comes
up a lot in these discussions.
Speaker 3: It comes up constantly in Mandela fact communities. Yes, the
Large Hadron Collider at CERN, particularly when it was first
turned on around two thousand and eight and subsequent high
energy experiments. The theory, or perhaps the speculation, is that
by smashing particles together at such unprecedented energies, CERN might
be doing something something to the fabric of reality itself,
maybe creating micro black holes, maybe interacting with other dimensions,
maybe just subtly altering space time in a way that
causes these ripples, these Mandel effects across our collective reality.
Speaker 2: For Mattie, CERN is the prime suspect for when things
started feeling off.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating, if unproven theory. Okay, this has already
bent my brain quite a bit, but let's push it
one step further. What if the issue isn't just memory
or even parallel realities, but time itself. What if time
isn't this fixed linear thing we assume it is. Now
we're really diving into the deep end. Philosophically speaking, there's
a significant philosophical argument, most famously associated with Jamie mccaggart,
that time as we commonly understand it, this flow from
past to present to future, is actually incoherent, maybe even unreal.
Speaker 2: Unreal. How can time be unreal?
Speaker 1: We experience it constantly, clocks measure it.
Speaker 3: McTaggart's argument is complex, but it boils down to contradictions
in how we talk about events being past, present in future.
He argued, these descriptions the a theories of time are
essential to our concept of time, but they're logically inconsistent. Therefore,
he concluded, time as we perceive it might be an illusion,
a construct of our minds trying to make sense of
a potentially timeless or differently structured reality.
Speaker 1: Okay, my head hurts a little, but doesn't science, like
Einstein's relativity deal with time.
Speaker 3: It does, but in ways that actually support the idea
that time is an absolute or constant. That's the fascinating part.
Physics itself shows time is variable. Time dilation is a
proven phenomenon. Clocks run slower for objects moving at very
high speeds compared to station once the famous hafil keating
experiment flew atomic clocks around the world and showed they
disagreed with ground based clocks, exactly as relativity predicted.
Speaker 2: So time literally slows down if you move.
Speaker 3: Fast, yes, and it also slows down near massive objects
due to gravity. Time runs slightly flow closer to sea
level than on a mountaintop near a black hole, this
effect becomes extreme. An outside observer would see time essentially
stop for someone falling in Wow.
Speaker 2: Okay, and what about that train example?
Speaker 3: Right, the relativity of simultanety. If someone on a moving
train bounces a ball straight up and down, they see
it go straight up and down, but someone standing outside
the train sees the ball travel in a parabola, moving
up and down and forward with the train. Both observations
are valid within their own frame of reference. They experience
the same event differently in space time, so everyone experiences
time at their own relative rate. There's no single universal now.
Speaker 1: So if time isn't this fixed universal river, if it's
stretchy relative maybe even as mctiger argued, fundamentally unreal. How
does that connect back to the Mandela effect?
Speaker 3: Well, it potentially opens the door wide open, doesn't it?
If time itself doesn't follow one simple constant rule like
we assume, if it's more malleable or perhaps illusory, then
the idea of reality shifts, timeline alterations or information bleeding
across temporal states becomes perhaps less outlandish. If the very
medium in which events occur is fundamentally weird and variable.
Maybe the Mandel effect isn't just a glitch in our
memory of time, but a glimpse into the strange nature
of time itself. It makes it less about psychology and
more about the fundamental physics and metaphysics of existence.
Speaker 2: What a journey the steep dive has been.
Speaker 1: Seriously, we've gone from cartoon bears and movie quotes to
the nuts and bolts of memory, then out to multi
versus simulation theory, quantum trauma, and even questioning time itself.
The Mandela effect really is this rabbit hole that touches
on so many huge questions about consciousness and reality.
Speaker 3: It really is, and as we've seen, there's no easy
answer of compelling psychological explanations read in how our brains
actually work, how memory is constructive, fallible, easily influenced. But
then you have these persistent shared experiences that make people
feel something bigger is going on, leading to these fascinating
is speculative theories about reality shifts, alternate timelines, maybe even
glitches in a simulation.
Speaker 1: The debate continues, and just on a practical level, understanding
how easily our memories can be shaped, how fallible they
are is just so crucial today, you know, in this
age of constant information, misinformation, deep fakes, knowing our brains
build realities is key. But beyond the caution, I hope
this exploration also sparks some wonder pondering these ideas from
physics and philosophy. It really does suggest that reality, our
perception of it, might be way more bizarre, more flexible,
more mysterious than we usually think.
Speaker 3: Absolutely so, maybe a final thought for everyone listening to
take away and chew on considering that your brain is
actively constructing your reality every second, based on imperfect senses
and valuable memory, and considering that science itself hints at
possibilities like multiverses or nonlinear time, how truly certain can
you be, really that the reality you remember, the one
you're experiencing right now, is the only one. Or maybe
what if the Mandela effect isn't just about what we misremember,
but about what perhaps we're collectively becoming aware of,