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 in fact 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. 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 largest high-energy physics laboratory in the world, 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.
In the 1970s, extensive research was carried out at the University of California on false memories and the effects of disinformation. False memories are memories of things that we have never really experienced. The results obtained in several studies from different countries showed that the suggestion during psychoanalysis was effective in half of the respondents. But who then implements these false memories and how?
The Mandela Effect can 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 disinformation. 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.
More and more people in the world notice with amazement that what they remember does not match what they suddenly learn. This applies to many areas of life and is called the "Mandela Effect" because most mismatched memories appeared in people after Nelson Mandela's death in 2013. Back then, hundreds of thousands of people wrote on the Internet that they remembered his death in a prison in South Africa in the 1980s.
Some thought they had fallen victim to a scam when they suddenly heard on television that Nelson Mandela had "died again". Psychologists have not been able to tell where from suddenly so many people had almost the same detailed memories. Beyond the collective madness, then there was an explanation that these "false memories" were the result of some phenomenon at the quantum level. For example, jumping to a different universe than the one in which Mandela died in the 20th century and a series of charity concerts were played in his honor all over the world.
The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon related to the so-called collective memory. It happens that a great many people remember certain events not in the same way as the official history claims. Then people swear that they have seen certain things with their own eyes or that they have learned about them in schools and universities. The amazing thing is that the same convergent accounts are sometimes reported by thousands of people at the same time. It seems that the most convenient explanation would be to assume that this is a strange collective insanity.
Often the Mandela Effect also applies to geography. A surprisingly large number of people clearly remember that some countries had different shapes, sizes and even positions on the map. The best example of this is New Zealand. Some people say it is in the wrong place.
Technically, New Zealand is southeast of Australia, but there are surprisingly many people who claim to remember how they were taught that they were in the Northeast. Some also question the distance that separates Australia and New Zealand, amounting to 1900 km. Many people say New Zealand was closer to Australia, much farther south.
A similar case is with another island, Sri Lanka also known as Ceylon. It is located in the south-eastern part of India. Some people remember its location completely south, at the very bottom of the Indian Peninsula.
Plus, many people remember that the island of Cuba was much closer to Florida than Mexico, but that's not the case. Mexico is 214 km in a straight line and 228 km to Florida. Similarly with Japan, many say it was once closer to China and farther south than it is now near Russia's edge.
By far the strangest and most heavily debated story among the theorists of the Mandela Effect concerns the Norwegian Arctic Archipelago called Svalbard, which is an area under Norwegian administration. It is a large land of 60,000 km2 with a rich history dating back to the 12th century with its own culture and traditions. The problem is, for a lot of people, all of this shouldn't be there. They claim that there is an archipelago on the maps that was not there before.
But the Mandela Effect also applies to other things. There are a huge number of people who swear that the United States has 51 states, or even 52 states, instead of the current 50. Many people swear that they remember a version of the story where Puerto Rico was a state, not an associated territory with the United States.
For the followers of the Mandela Effect, it all points to some mysterious shift between different realities. This assumption is based on a concept known as the "multiverse" which proposes that there are infinite parallel universes coexisting with ours in infinite permutations. In some of these alternate dimensions the difference may be very slight, in others it may be dramatic.
The causes of the Mandela effect are unknown. It can only be a psychological phenomenon, a kind of collective hallucination, but if some of us do remember things collectively, it can also be evidence that in some physical laboratory something went wrong and we jumped into another reality without even noticing it. . Perhaps only the brains of some people have retained these other memories.
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