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Merged The MANDELA Effect.

I'll try to clarify my goal with the OP.

I'm not so much interested in changing people's minds on the subject. If I do ever meet someone who believes it, I don't think I'd be confident enough to confront it anyway, and online discussions rarely change the mind of the person I'm conversing with. I'm more interested in the response they expect from people who haven't experienced it.

People who are convinced that the Mandela Effect is a real thing which they have experienced, tend to share these experiences among each other (partly out of fear of being mocked). Occasionally, someone shares it more publicly.

I want to know what they expect from 'the rest of us', so to speak.

Do they expect us to say "well, I guess Mandela really did die, but we all misremembered it"?

Do they expect us to believe that they're in the wrong reality, and they need to get back to their own?

Do they want us to hand over the conspirators who changed everything around them?


That's what I'm not clear on. How would they like us to react to it? What do they expect? (that's not a rhetorical question)

As I said, I could ask them directly, but I don't want to poke a hornet's nest just yet.
 
I'm okay on the Mandela thing, but I am one of those who held the incorrect belief that Jaws' pigtailed girlfriend had braces.

Dammit... I can see it in my mind.

Absolutely untrue of course. :p


And I agree.. I've called the effect "confabulation" all my life (or thereabouts), I guess "Mandela Effect" just sounds cooler to some. :rolleyes:
 
I'm okay on the Mandela thing, but I am one of those who held the incorrect belief that Jaws' pigtailed girlfriend had braces.

Dammit... I can see it in my mind.

Absolutely untrue of course. :p


And I agree.. I've called the effect "confabulation" all my life (or thereabouts), I guess "Mandela Effect" just sounds cooler to some. :rolleyes:

I think the reason for the distinction is that some people refuse to accept that it's confabulation.

They call it an effect because they think it's a real thing, and not simply misremembering things.
 
"Rebranding" already understood phenomena rarely doesn't have an ulterior motive.
 
Funny, I don't remember this thread being here this morning... I MUST HAVE SLIPPED INTO AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE!!!

Seriously, I've found that some of my own memories don't line up with facts. For many years, I had a distinct memory of hearing a particular song in 1977 (I could even picture it in my mind, that I'd heard it in an apartment I lived in at that time), only to recently find that the song was recorded in 1984. I also was certain for awhile that a former acquaintance had died in 1987 (again, I could picture in my mind where I was when I heard the news); only recently did I find that the person had actually died in 1992.

It seems to me that the Mandela Effect is a form of solipsism; one is so uncertain that they can trust the reality around them, that they prefer an outlandish explanation over accepting that their memory is wrong. One prefers what one "knows" over the facts, somewhat like religious belief.
 
Many people of my generation were certain they remembered seeing the Biggs Darklighter scenes in the first act of Star Wars in theaters in 1977. People could describe them in vivid detail. Yet those scenes had been deleted from the film before it was ever printed and shipped to theaters.

What they were actually recalling, as it turned out, were still frames and a narrative description of the scene in the Random House Story of Star Wars book, which was hugely popular.

Confabulation. Conformation bias. Invented memories. It's a thing.
 
Until now, I didn't think there'd be people who actually think that things have really changed. I thought they had this idea that they came from a different timeline/reality, or something like that.

I was wrong. So, so wrong:

Reddit link

From the link.

Yes, my "specific memory" as you quoted it, could very well be wrong, thou my memory of it IS as real to me, as anything you "think" you remember as reality to you... Or... It could be, "close minded people" like you, don't have the ability to maintain memories of our previous timeline ...

I just don't know anymore.

I guess there really are people who think that they are right about their memory, that things have really changed, and that the rest of the world is wrong.

My brain hurts...
 
As Bram Kaandorp has just said, these people really do think that the "timeline" has changed, and yet somehow they have retained a memory of the way the world was before the change.

They are intrigued to find themselves in a science fictional Dickian altered reality for real, and since they are the only ones aware of the cosmic shift, they are perforce cast in the role of hero.

Now they are trying to band together with the select few other heroes, either to gain succour from like-minded community, or in order to move on to the next stage of resisting, forming a band of brothers in order to … find out who has hijacked reality, so they can bring down the forces of alteration and restore the one true timeline? Or whatever.

So, they don't really want anything from you. They are still searching for fellow travellers, and stumbling towards the noble battle that must surely come? Or perhaps they fancy themselves like a super private eye, picking up the thread of mystery?

Whatever. Some of them are scamsters looking to milk the gullible, of course, and they are hoping to string you along towards some sort of payoff for themselves. But the rest are just looking for a way out of their mundane lives with some real live action. Or mentally ill. Or they've never realised that science fiction is more fun if you read books instead of role-playing a half-baked fantasy.
 
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It seems to me that the Mandela Effect is a form of solipsism; one is so uncertain that they can trust the reality around them, that they prefer an outlandish explanation over accepting that their memory is wrong. One prefers what one "knows" over the facts, somewhat like religious belief.
You see this with some chemtrailers who insist that they remember that when were younger, before the spraying started in the 1990s, that skies were bluer, the clouds didn't take on the weird forms they do since and that there were no persistent contrails in the sky.

When irrefutable evidence of this is presented, some truly outlandish ideas are entertained to deny it. Copies of old movies have been removed from all archives and replaced with versions with digitally inserted contrails. Books and magazines about meteorology and cloudspotting that show and explain the contrails and clouds they insist didn't exist then are modern creations inserted into libraries, second hand bookshops, eBay, online archives, etc.

Anything but admit the obvious that their memories are fallible and incorrect and prone to being reinforced by the very belief they're trying to use it as evidence of.
 
As Bram Kaandorp has just said, these people really do think that the "timeline" has changed, and yet somehow they have retained a memory of the way the world was before the change.

They are intrigued to find themselves in a science fictional Dickian altered reality for real, and since they are the only ones aware of the cosmic shift, they are perforce cast in the role of hero.

Now they are trying to band together with the select few other heroes, either to gain succour from like-minded community, or in order to move on to the next stage of resisting, forming a band of brothers in order to … find out who has hijacked reality, so they can bring down the forces of alteration and restore the one true timeline? Or whatever.

So, they don't really want anything from you. They are still searching for fellow travellers, and stumbling towards the noble battle that must surely come? Or perhaps they fancy themselves like a super private eye, picking up the thread of mystery?

Whatever. Some of them are scamsters looking to milk the gullible, of course, and they are hoping to string you along towards some sort of payoff for themselves. But the rest are just looking for a way out of their mundane lives with some real live action. Or mentally ill. Or they've never realised that science fiction is more fun if you read books instead of role-playing a half-baked fantasy.

/thread
 
I watched a few YouTube videos on the Mandela effect before I decided they were just plain stupid. The best one was someone claiming that the "Brady Bunch Variety Hour" (the one with "Fake Jan") was proof of the effect because it's just too silly to have been a real thing.
 
I think I'll have to agree with that one, even though the phenomenon does still intrigue me.

I agree, but on a different level of interest. I'd love to see just when it went from people discussing a "name" or "tag" for a phenomenon that, as we've mentioned, most of us were fairly familiar with to Woo Central. When it originally came up, it was just an attempt to tag something with hip new name, I feel.

Any trivia fan could've named several of them.... We all know that "Play it again, Sam" never shows up in Casablanca. Ditto the mis-remembering of the closing of Gone With the Wind, or even the Darth Vader line. Yeah, they're all popular films but most people don't see them more than three or four times in their lives. The claim that you can "positively" remember something you heard thirty years ago just flies in the face of all evidence, particularly when you've seen thirty skit actors, nineteen mimics, your Uncle Lou, Rich Little and Frank Gorshin all misquoting the lines.

My interest is when that went from "Yeah, that's interesting" to "Wow, you're right, man. They're manipulating the matrix to make us believe that Bogey never said "Play it again, Sam".

Why? Something as complicated and expensive as the matrix and they're using it to trick us into a respellng of Berenstein? To what end? If I meet someone with the earlier use of "The Mandela Effect", I'll be happy to explain to them the stuff they can find showing just how fallible human memory is and how it can be manipulated. If I encounter someone who thinks that this sort of stuff is an indication of a warp in the matrix, messages from an alternate and/or parallel universe or memories from our past lives? I guess I'll just move away from them on the park bench like I did with the lady who wanted my advice on whether she should use opaque jars or clear ones to capture moonbeams.
 
I agree, but on a different level of interest. I'd love to see just when it went from people discussing a "name" or "tag" for a phenomenon that, as we've mentioned, most of us were fairly familiar with to Woo Central. When it originally came up, it was just an attempt to tag something with hip new name, I feel.

Any trivia fan could've named several of them.... We all know that "Play it again, Sam" never shows up in Casablanca. Ditto the mis-remembering of the closing of Gone With the Wind, or even the Darth Vader line. Yeah, they're all popular films but most people don't see them more than three or four times in their lives. The claim that you can "positively" remember something you heard thirty years ago just flies in the face of all evidence, particularly when you've seen thirty skit actors, nineteen mimics, your Uncle Lou, Rich Little and Frank Gorshin all misquoting the lines.

My interest is when that went from "Yeah, that's interesting" to "Wow, you're right, man. They're manipulating the matrix to make us believe that Bogey never said "Play it again, Sam".

Why? Something as complicated and expensive as the matrix and they're using it to trick us into a respellng of Berenstein? To what end? If I meet someone with the earlier use of "The Mandela Effect", I'll be happy to explain to them the stuff they can find showing just how fallible human memory is and how it can be manipulated. If I encounter someone who thinks that this sort of stuff is an indication of a warp in the matrix, messages from an alternate and/or parallel universe or memories from our past lives? I guess I'll just move away from them on the park bench like I did with the lady who wanted my advice on whether she should use opaque jars or clear ones to capture moonbeams.


I'm allowing that your instincts about strangers you meet may be better refined than many, as you are an open-minded and well-traveled man, thus experienced in strange encounters, but: such a woman may have been opening a gambit of playful poetic mystique with a dashing young man sharing a bench with her in the park! You'll never know if that could have been the start of a lovely day of adventuring with her, now, will ya!?

:p
 
My interest is when that went from "Yeah, that's interesting" to "Wow, you're right, man.

CERN, LHC, etc. The LHC was supposed to destroy the world by creating a black hole or something, and since that didn't happen, now it's apparently messing with the timeline.

But yeah, "The Mandela Effect" sounds a lot sexier than "bad memory".
 

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