Some believe they remember when South Africa's civil rights leader, Nelson Mandela, died in prison in 1985. People mourned him, his wife gave a memorial speech. Everything was in the news. Many people remember that it happened. But it turns out that in fact Mandela was released from prison in 1990, and even led the country from 1994 to 1999, and died relatively recently, in 2013. This weird premonition of an event that technically never happened is what we call the Mandela Effect.
We owe the discovery and name of the temporal effect to Fiona Broome, who discovered in 2010 that her false memories of Mandela's death were shared by a large number of people. Broome explained such a radical discrepancy between memories and reality using the theory of the Multiverse - a hypothetical set of all possible real parallel universes, believing that collective memories are not truly false and that she and other people remembering the past were actually in a parallel universe with a different timeline which intersected with ours in an amazing way. But how do scientists explain the Mandela effect?
After Fiona Broome discovered in 2010 that a huge number of people remember Nelson Mandela's nonexistent funeral, a lot has changed in the world. Shops suddenly started to be called differently. Some corporate logos suddenly started to look different. The names of famous dishes and sweets such as chewing gum were spelled differently. The favorite characters in the movies spoke differently, and the songs ended in a new way, not like they used to. This is because the Internet, thanks to its unique ability to bring people together, quickly introduced the Mandela Effect as a cultural trend.
One popular theory is that all these quirks happened after the 2008 Large Hadron Collider was launched at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland near Geneva. It is the world's largest high-energy physics laboratory, and its activation may have caused a split in the timeline. Of course, proponents of this theory have absolutely no evidence, but some believe that there are infinite universes closely related to ours, and we are moving from one universe to another because our timeline is in a state of continuous flow.
While traveling between universes looks attractive and is especially liked by filmmakers and science fiction writers, the Mandela Effect is difficult to explain in terms of quantum mechanics. In fact, as many scientists note, the answer lies in the complex structure and operation of human memory.
False memories are memories of things that we have never really experienced. Results obtained in several studies from different countries showed that suggestion during psychoanalysis was effective in half of the respondents. But who then implements these false memories and how?
The Mandela Effect may be driven by suggestiveness or a tendency to believe what others believe to be true. Surprisingly, the mere fact that a person perceives false information can discredit the authenticity of memory already "written" in the brain. So according to experts, most of Mandela's effects are related to memory errors and social misinformation. The fact that many of the inaccuracies are trivial suggests that they are the result of selective attention or wrong conclusions.
Note that all of the above explanations do not mean that the Mandela Effect cannot be explained by the Multiverse theory. In fact, the concept of parallel universes is consistent with the work of quantum physicists. But until the existence of alternative realities that may interfere with our timeline is established beyond a reasonable doubt, psychological theories seem much more plausible.
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