Shared False Memories and The Mandela Effect

Mercantile in Manhattan. Stuff You missed in history class has a show right before us, so you can really double down, learn more and buy your tickets today at New York Comic Con dot com slash NYCC hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Robert, do you remember this movie? This is how a Lot of

Stuff to Blow Your Mind? Episode to begin? But do you remember this movie that had Sinbad in it from the nineties where he played a genie. Uh, you're you're you're discussing the film Shazam. Yeah, but I don't think Sinbad is actually in it. I just think a lot of people remember Sinbad being in it. It turns out it's Shaquille O'Neill who raised and it's Kazam as opposed to show exactly. Yeah, this is uh, this is a

big deal. This is This is one of those cases where the joke, the conspiracy theory, all of it sort of wrapped together, like ends up actually taking shape because I believe it's a college humor came around and eventually put out like they got Sinbad. Is that right? I didn't know this. Okay, they got Sinbad. They filmed him in like a scene from this movie, and they put all these filters over it to make it look like it was retrieved you know, video footage from a VHS

tape from the nineties. Okay. Yeah, And essentially what we're talking about here is actually, and I hesitate to say, this a phenomena that many people report. Uh, and it's all connected and bundled under terminology referred to as the Mandela effect. Yeah, it basically comes down to something that is an alleged shared false memory where it gets it gets more complicated than that. We're going to discuss it.

But the idea is that you'll have multiple people sharing a false memory, generally of something from sort of you know, obscure pop culture, but in some cases like world history, that that everyone has the same mistaken notion in their mind, and then they suddenly say, hey, why do we why do we all believe this thing that simply is not So you can go to Synbad's filmography on IMDb and clearly that he was never in such a film. It's

not listed. I mean you can, you can. You can get into situations where, all, right, there are films that are not maybe not listed on IMDb because they never reached a stage of completion, but people claim to have remembered seeing it or seeing trailers for it. So it would for that to be the case for it to have legitimately existed in some form or another, like they would have had to have seen it or at least

sen a trailer. Right. Well, but I think you're spending too much time thinking about the possibilities here, because I think it's pretty obvious that it's just the people who thought that they had seen Shazam with Sinbad are actually originally from an alternate reality. Oh yes, well, there's there's that argument, or that a time traveler traveled back in time and changed time and we're all remembering it now

only because of the Sinbad. They traced the like the butterfly effect, and they said, if we can stop the Shazam movie from existing, then we'll um will prevent say, World War three exactly. Now, those of you out there might think I'm being a facetious jerk right now, but actually that is a explanation for this effect we're talking about again, the Mandela effect. You're gonna have a hard time finding legitimate academic research done on this topic, but wow,

it is all over the internet. Like when I started doing research on this yesterday, every listical site had a twenty two instances of the Mandela effect that you won't remember something like, Yeah, you'll find reddits where people are arguing back and forth about the various ridiculous conspiracy theory explanations like oh, it's it's a glitch in the matrix.

We're already in a computer simulation, and this is because somebody you know, hit delete on Shazam by accident, or or yeah, where it's the we've drifted over into an alternate reality. Then the only difference is that there's no Shazam movie in this universe. Yeah, and I also want to make it clear to like, we're not here to make fun of the idea of alternate realities or time travel. Those are actually topics that we are going to cover in the future on this show. But we're going to

cover them from an actual research angle. Yeah. The computer simulation angle came up recently in an episode that I did with Joe about growing a universe in a bottle, creating university. Uh, the thing. But but a lot of this comes down to Aucam's razor. Right, what is the what is the most reasonable explanation that we can we can take, you know, if we're if we're forced to draw Aucam's razors from its sheath, which of course this is named for William of Ockham. Uh, then it's it's simple.

It's the simple notion that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Right, So, should we assume that there are multiple realities and we're shifting among them, that should we assume that we're living in a computer simulation, or should we assume based on what we know about memory and uh and how infallible it is and how malleable it is, that that is where we can place all the blame for this shared misinformation. Yeah.

This is especially interesting coming on the heels of our alien abduction two parter that we did, because we talk a little bit in those episodes about the science behind inserting false memories and how easy that actually turns out to be. There's been a lot of research done on that, and this seems to be similar, but just on a much smaller level. Right, instead of remembering that you were

abducted by aliens, you remember a movie that Sinbad didn't make. Yes, Now, well let's go ahead and get just the name out of the way, because we are saying Mandela effect, not Mandola, which was would sound more esoteric and mysterious. But now

Mandela as in Nelson Mandela. Right. Yeah. So the popular example, actually more popular than the sin Bad example, is that some people seem certain that they remember Nelson Mandela dying in the nineteen eighties, and they think they saw his funeral on television, or more specifically, they remember that he died in prison, as opposed to you know, dying later after he like WHI which I have. I have a hard time relating to this one because I distinctly remember

like news footage about his relief getting out of person. Yeah, me too, Yeah he actually died in So what's going on here? Well? It this seems like a case of false memories, right, just like we talked about in those alien abduction episodes. But some people do wonder if they're remembering something from an alternate reality or if a time travelers slightly altered our presence. So Robert and I were like, this is a kind of fascinating topic. Why don't we

dive into this and see what the research says. Um Most commentators out there, I want to be clear about this, suggest that these are examples of false memories that are just shaped by similar factors that are affecting multiple people. Okay, but the main proponent of this is a person named Fiona Broom. Uh and that that sounds like a witch name. It's like like a made up witch name. But Fiona Broom is a quote paranormal consultant who dubbed this the

Mandela effect. She claims that perhaps thousands of other people have the same experience and She points to speculation of alternate realities as an explanation, and then as I dug deeper, I found out that this actually all occurred in our backyard here in Atlanta, at our local sci fi comic book fantasy uh convention slash party dragon Con. Interesting. Yeah, so it was at dragon Con in two thousand and ten. She was in. She was there, apparently, she was a guest.

They have a paranormal track where people talk about things like this, and uh, she was in the V I P. Suite and a security person mentioned to the other people in the room, hey, do you remember when Nelson Mandela died in the eighties? But then he just died like actually, and this was in two thousand ten. Sorry, he hadn't even died yet. He just said, remember when Nelson Mandela died in the eighties and he was still alive and

nobody else remembers that. And she was like, I remember that too, And out of that conversation was born this whole thing. Another example, she says, also comes from Dragon Con. She was there and someone insisted they remembered a Star Trek episode that, according to one star of the show, was never filmed, So there was a person in the audience who clearly remembered seeing this episode, but it had

never actually been filmed. Maybe they had read about it in so much detail that they thought they had seen it they they false remembered it. Anyways, the quote from from fion A brooms site. She actually has a site. I think it's the Mandela Effect dot com or dot net or something like that. She's a book coming out. This is profitable and she says on her site, these aren't simple errors in memory. They seem to be fully constructed incidents or sequential events from the past. They exceed

the normal range of forgetfulness. So she's saying this is something beyond just our our memory being fallible. Well, I I strongly disagree with that. Well, and we'll discuss I do too. You know what's funny is like on our show, I'm usually the one who's most willing, well maybe not most willing out of the three of us, but I'm always like I want to give these people a chance, Like I want to give their idea a chance. Let's let's, you know, kind of poke at it and see how

it works. But immediately with this one, my reaction is just like nope, like that that just doesn't sound like a thing. I feel like you're just making something up. Well, the thing is like that. There's basically a statement that that she's making something amazing is happening, and it's blank. I agree with the first part of that statement, because something amazing is happening, But the what's amazing about it is what it reveals about our memory and how we

influence each other's memory of events. Now I do I do have to say, I really wish we could rename this the Shazam effect, etcetera Mandela effect, because when you call it a Mandelo effect, and I'm sure our South African listeners will agree it, it betrays a sense of

historical ignorance. And you know, I don't want to be to judge you with that, but because I think that the relatable example of this that I can relate to is, for instance, there's a period about a year or two before Gene Wilder's actual death that I kind of had in my mind that he had died, uh, which you know,

he just wasn't acting in anything. He just kind of you know, I think for the last ten or fifteen years of his life, right, yeah, yeah, I think he just got super choosy with his projects, and you know, I didn't wasn't really that into doing it anymore, which is fine, he has everybody had every right to to do that. But for some reason, you know, when it comes to the existence of celebrities, somehow my mind kind of clicked it off that oh, he's an older guy.

He must he died or something, you know. And granted that was allowed to happen because I like Gene Wilder, but I'm not a Gene Wilder super fan. I'm not the kind. I wasn't checking his IMDb profile every day for up upcoming projects. Your ram wasn't backing up information about what was going on with Gene Wilder currently if there was any media reportage on it, right right, So kind of like in the in my my rear view mirrors or you know, in my peripheral cultural vision, the

the the the timeline of Gene Wilder had ended. And so I I think what's happening with Nelson Mandela's case is that for many people, uh you know, maybe African South African politics especially is not something that bere zeroed in on. It's happening in in their peripheral vision. It's happening based on what is you know, climbing up through the news cycle to to greet them. And therefore the timeline of Nelson Mandela ended, you know, in his incarceration.

So and I think it's fair to say that it would be extremely rare to find this effect in South Africa. Like I would imagine that citizens of South Africa are probably very aware of how long he was in prison, when he passed away, when he was you know, in charge of the country, etcetera. Like there isn't this uh sort of like weird cognitive distance from it, right, Um, So let's go through some other examples here. We talked about Shazam and Sinbad, and we've talked about the Mandela one.

What about the Barren Stain Bears. Oh, yes, this one of course relates to the spelling of the Barrensteine Bears is in the Barrensteine Bears children's book series, whether it's spelled Barren Stain or Barren stein Stein. And uh, you know, it basically comes down to an argument over what how

how to pronounce the name right right? Yeah? And it's also like, like I think this one just is like a simple instance of misspelling and also cognitive bias, right, and that like we're more used to Stein being in names than stain being in name, so our brain sort of self corrects if you see it as stain and turns it into Stein. Right. Uh. There was another one like this that I saw floating around where people were like, this is gonna blow your mind. You're ready for it.

The peanut butter isn't Jeffy peanut butter. It's just jeff peanut butter. And I was like, okay, fair enough, Like I did, like in the back of my head, I did think of it as Jiffy peanut butter. But I think that's just because the word jiffy is probably used more often and it's probably like search to the surface of my memory data bank than the word jiff which most people use now to describe like an image file type. Yeah,

now one. I don't think this is a widespread example, but this one came up recently on Twitter Comal and Johnny shared his amazement that Dan Ackroyd and then Dan a Chroid of The Ghostbusters that his name his last name is spelled a y k r O y d and there's no like c uh c k going on in there and uh, and I when I read that, I was like, you know, I kind of just that's odd as well. You know, I've I've certainly seen his name plenty of times, but for some reason, I just

kind of thought there was a C in there. Yeah, me too. And I definitely didn't think there was a y at the beginning. I mean, there's two wise in his name. I didn't think there was a a y exactly. Like That's another perfect one where it's like, how many Dana Chroid movies have I seen? But how closely am I paying attention to the spelling of his name versus just how I think it should be spelled on how it sounds. Yeah, members of the Acroid family, I'm sure

how do not have this this effect? Right? So I've got an example here actually from the research that is much smaller and that it doesn't pertain to pop culture and won't be as broadly felt, but it's a really good example of how this takes place. Okay, at a town clock at the Bologna Central Railway station, which was damaged in a massacre in nineteen eighty. When they surveyed people, nine percent of them falsely remembered that this specific town

clock had stopped working since the bombing. Actually, what had happened was they repaired the clock immediately after the attack, but then they manually stopped at sixteen years later in commemoration. These are people who lived in the area, but they had basically erased the sixteen years between the bombing and it being turned off where it was working. And again, it's just how memory works, I think more than it is an example of all these people sliding into an

alternate dimension. Now, one fun personal example of this that I that I have to share concerns the Konami video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Top Gun, the second mission. Yeah, vaguely remember this, Okay, so it's tied into the Top Gun movie. Yes, but it was very much It was a loose kind of a sequel because you're presumably still Maverick, You're still Tom Cruise, and you're going up in these little dog fights against progressively more

difficult like Soviet dog fight. Okay, I was thinking it was like goose Iceman. No remembered in the first one, I know, but maybe you fight as ghost. Well, this is the thing I was. It's at some point in

the past like ten years. I was reminiscing about this game with my friend Dave, and I was joking to him that that at the end you fight Goose, because there's this reveal that Goose didn't die in the first one, that the Soviets, uh, you know, fished him out of the water and they brainwashed him into a you know, a Soviet agent, and so now he's just like You've

Winter Soldiers and uh. And I joked about it, and then I think, I think Dave kind of, you know, thinking back on it, kind of believed that it was real, and I kind of, since I don't think about Top Gun to all the time, I kind of fooled myself a little bit. So we talked about it later and he was and he would he would ask like, was is that isn't Goose the villain and Top Gun two? And I think, yeah, I think I think he is. And then I have to remember, oh, wait, I made

that up. That was just a joke. Well, so did this come back up again recently because they announced Tom Cruise announced that they're actually doing a Top Gun too. I know, I I feel like I feel like I got the script done. Well, yeah, I feel like it'll

be a personal betrayal. If Goose is not the Winter Soldier villain of Top Gun two, well, Anthony Edwards, if you're listening, please plead with Tom Cruise once you get Winter sold I know he wants then, So for me, I don't have a lot of examples of this with I Just when things like this happened, I just often say like, oh, there goes your memory, right, Like, there are definitely moments, especially as I'm getting older, where I'm

like acutely aware. It's funny to use that term, but I'm very aware of how my memory is starting to fail, not in like a like an Alzheimer's type way or anything, but just in like things like this that I don't really keep close to the surface, I tend to forget over a long period of time. Right. It's like the first you know, several decades of your life for about accumulation, and then you run out of room and stuff just

can yeah, exactly. Like sometimes my wife will be like, I can't believe you don't remember this important event that happened, and I'm like, well, look, I've got three hundred pages of D and D manuals up here, Like I'm gonna have to start deleting loads in order to keep all this other information. So yeah, I mean it happens. My

memory is fallible. I'll misremember an actor who was in a movie for an since, or maybe I'll think an older celebrity is already dead, like your instance with Gene Wilder. Happened to me. When Martin Landau died recentthing. I was like, what didn't that guy already die like ten years ago? But you know, and I feel bad, But then I'm like, well, he just hasn't been working for a while, right, The last thing I remember him and was probably ed Wood.

So you know, I definitely get spelling and pronunciation of things wrong, as many of the listeners of the show now. But I've never felt like there's anything going on here beyond the fallibility of my recollection. But let's you want to take a break, and then when we come back, let's get into some of the theories surrounding this before we hit the science. Okay, we're back, so what are let's go. Let's cover like the broad gamut of I guess wild theories as to what's going on here with

what is called the Mandela effect. All right, Well, as we already mentioned. There's the alternate reality multiverse view of it. There's the the idea that we're in a computer s relation that some far future civilization has decided that the best way for us to live is to live in

a simulation of an earlier, more simple time. You know what's interesting to me about that is like when you take like philosophy one oh one in school, right, you learn about Descartes and his whole argument with himself centuries ago about whether or not his brain was actually in a jar being tortured by a demon and reality was just all fake illusions. It's essentially the same thing, just

a different framework. Yeah, it's actually a topic with don't I discussed on the recent episode Order Out of Chaos how to create a universe? It's it's it's a fascinating area of sort of thought experiment and discussion. Uh. And there's some there's some interesting arguments on both sides, but you know, it's it's again, it's one of those cases where when we're looking at at an alleged phenomenon in

our world, what what hypothesis entails the fewest assumption about reality? Yeah, and you can see how like you know, you go back and you look at that Decartes stuff, and he pretty firmly was able to ground his argument and say, well, the world is actually real. I'm not braining a jar, but you can see how in our present day circumstances, because so much of life is simulated via entertainment or computers, right for most of us, um that it would be easy to fall back on that and be like, well,

wait a minute, what if none of this is real? Well, it's interesting that a lot of this relates to thinking about the human mind and human experience in terms of a computer, because they're analyze the real error. I think, because we tend to think of our mind as as as like video footage and a surveillance, uh, you know, a system or just a computer record of what has occurred and uh. And then when we pull up an actual computer record of what has occurred Sinbad's IMDb profile,

for instance, we say, WHOA, what's going on? My database doesn't match with this database? But I but we're resistant to completely throw out our own database, not realizing that the memory, of course, is full of flaws and holes and false memories and uh and false flourishes. Uh. As we will discuss there is something inherently egocentric about the argument that it's like, no, I have to be the

center of things. Even though these other records are different from my internal record, they must be wrong and it's clearly not me. It's like, am I wrong? Or do we live in a computer simulation? I'm I'm I'm going with the computer simulation. And again, like I would love to say, men, if there's evidence out there that we

live in a computer simulation, send it our way. And I mean, I know people actually have brought this up to us before and said, you guys should do an episode on it, But like that seems to be something that has more evidence to it elsewhere than me not remembering a sin bad boo. I'm going to use this the next time I forget something at the grocery store and my wife says, hey, did you pick up the SEC and such? How we go, Well, do you see we live in a computer simulation? I think we're just

this this is essentially turning into excuses for our wives. Well, okay, before we go too far down that road, how about we revisit a stuff to blow your mind favorite, which is a psychologist Daniel Schackter in his book, The Seven Sins of Memory. Yes, the Seven Sins of Memory, How the mind forgets and remembers. It's a it's a fabulous book. I recommend anyone who isn't more interested in deeper dive here check this out. Um. Now here's an interesting memory tidbit.

I cannot, I honestly cannot remember if I have seen Daniel Shackter speak on this live at the World Science Festival, or if I've merely seen a video of him speaking about this. Um, I think I saw him live, but I could be mistaken. Yeah, that's happened to me before, for sure, especially like when you go to conferences and you can watch the events from like your hotel room, sometimes on the TV as it's happening. Yeah. Yeah, So I'm not certain, but this might be a you know,

a false memory as well. But he basically takes the way our memory works and the way that we form false memories, and he breaks them down into seven different categories. I've hit this on the on the show before, and I think I've we've done it recently in the Alien Abduction. So I'll try and be quick with it here. But there's transience. This is the weakening, weakening or loss of memory over time. There's absent mindedness. So this just has

to do with attention in memory. And I think we can already see how these line up with say the Shazam example. You know, transience, it's been a while since the nineties. Absent mindedness, maybe you didn't care that much about sin bad movies to begin with. And then there's blocking. This has failed attempts to recall tidbits of memories. So you're trying to remember a film that came out of the night. Maybe you're trying to remember Kazam, and then

you end up, you know, blocking it something. Maybe you saw a Kazam and you're trying to to forget yes, And then there's a misattribution. This is we crawled. We recall an authentic memory, but aspects of it are misattributed, and that of course is key into what we're talking about here. Suggestibility. This is the power of suggestion, the ability for someone else to make a suggestion about what you should recall, what you do recall, and affect your memory.

So an example of this would be like you saw Kazam with Shaquille O'Neil, but then your friend was like, wouldn't it be cooler if Sinbad was in that movie and then twenty years passed and you remember Sinbad being

in that movie? Yeah. Or for instance, this came up just the other other night with my wife and I because we sat down to watch the latest episode of Rick and Morty, which is The Defenders Part three, and they're the characters are talking about their previous adventures with the Defenders, but they haven't actually shown them on the TV show. It's just off screen adventures. Yeah. But my wife asked me, she said, is that a previous episode?

Did we see that one? And? Uh? If I had insisted that we we had, If I thought we had, I could have probably made a pretty strong case because I'm the one who fills their head with useless TV information. But I was able to to to sort of see through it and say, no, no, no, they're they're doing a bid here. There is I've read about this. I haven't actually seen this, but it's essentially like Rick and Morty are part of like a group like the Avengers

sort of. Ok. Yeah, and they there have been past adventures, but they don't actually factor into any previous episode. Alright, So then there's bias. This is just you know the power of biased to influence memories. There's persistence, the failure of of the memory system that involves the unwanted recall of information that it's just that is disturbing. Again. Maybe

you're just trying to forget that because them movie. Yeah, I mean it sounds like the kind of film that you know, if one if it existed and one saw it, you might want to do you know, the only reason I know about that movie is because of a podcast, that podcast How Did This Get Made? Which is all about comedians. Yeah, they just watch bad movies and talk about them, and I remember they're conversation about how bad

that movie is stronger than I remember that movie ever existing. Man, we're still waiting for a shock to make that great film. You never saw Steal, No, I didn't. I felt I think I felt part of it. I want to see a film adaptation of Shack Fu. Yeah. So those are the seven sins of memory. Some of those are going to be more important than others as we move forward. So one of the key things to keep in mind is that that that you can have binding failures in

what's called memory binding. So this is where a false memory can certainly emerge on the individual level, So we're gonna we're gonna focus on individual false memories before we get into the idea that we can share them. So memory binding is the gluing together of various components of an experience into a hole. Okay, a binding failure at the time the event occurs in action or object is not properly bound to a particular time and place, and these can cause the actual actions and objects to bind

together incorrectly. But they can also dragon events that we've merely thought about or imagined. So one example that the checked always brings up is this, this real life example of a woman who was assaulted and there was a TV on in the room and she she was able to it because his binding failure, which she put the face of the individual on the TV, the face of

the attacker. Now, another example he brings up is a particular experiment where he took younger and older adults and they were shown one object and then asked to imagine a similar object. So they were dealing with like magnifying glass and then a lollipop, uh, and then two dissimilar objects. And older adults were more likely to say they'd actually seen the lollipop that they were asked to imagine instead of the magnifying glass that they actually saw. Oh that's interesting, okay.

And I would imagine like an empirical test like this would probably have like measurable amounts of time in between the memories, right and now. Another this is another big one too, is the misset attribution for the source of memories. So people regularly say that they read something in the newspaper, they saw it on the news, when actually a friend told them, or they saw it in an advertisement or something.

So in In one particular study, and this is one that Shafter was involved with in the N four with hard Book and McLaughlin UH, participants with normal memories UH were shown to regularly make mistakes of thinking they had acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper when actually the experiment it's the experimenters themselves had supplied it. I have a similar study to talk about related to that later

in the episode. Yeah, I think this one is especially I mean, this goes beyond contemplations of of Shazam and whatnot, because you know, clearly we're in an age now where we have a lot of misinformation that is out there, some of it intentionally confusing, you know, can intentionally u crafted to mislead individuals, and so even you know, it's easy to see how people would get their memories crossed, especially with all the information that's coming out you're on

various social media accounts. Yeah, I think that this is a really good example of why media literacy is so important and understanding how media is made, like whether it's your newspaper or Wikipedia or your podcast that you're listening to, right, Like, like having a general idea of how that information is coming to you, so you can judge for yourself whether or not that is worth storing a memory of, right And and I think our go to with newspapers for

the longest time, maybe that's starting to fade now, was Okay, I can trust that if it's printed on that kind of paper and that and it's in that big font, that's a true thing. Right. But then the dangerous part is when it's days later and you have this this fact or this viewpoint rolling around in your head and you have to ask yourself, did I did I get that from the New York Times? Did I get that

from Reuters? Or did I get that from inquirer, from inquired or just or somebody on Twitter who's just very alarmist and and and therefore should I build anything on that? Should I build any of my thoughts on that foundation? Yeah? Absolutely, Yeah. We are definitely in a period of time where it's very it's it's easier for this stuff to happen, I think, and like I think it's sort of contingent upon all of us to train ourselves to be able to sort of what would be the term here cut the wheat

from the cheff. Now. Another memory error that is worth the focusing on here again for the individual false memory formation is uh that of a memory conjunction error. So a memory conjunction error is is common and this occurs when we incorrectly combine parts of previously experienced memories to create an entirely new memory. For example, such an error has occurred when when people are remembering the you know that they see the word toothache after viewing the words

toothpick and earache instead. I've had this occurring and referring to notes or you know, they're just going to be two particular words in a sentence and then they end up forming together and do a different word. We had that. Okay, this week, here's a little behind the scenes for your listeners.

So the other episode we're recording this week is about Cleo Dynamics, and both Robert and I, you know, we spent hours doing this research ahead of time, just staring at these notes, typing them out, reading article after article after article, and reading that word over and over again, typing that word over and over again. And yet I could not get it to stick the landing in my brain,

Like even after eight hours of reading about it. My wife came home and said, well, what were you researching today? And I was like, uh, ker fluffle Dynamo. I don't know, Like it couldn't It wouldn't stick for some reason. So it's Cleo dynamics. And I kept combining it in my head with Kell Deldonis, which has come up in the past concerning like the future re virtual sex. Well that's the other thing too, is that you and I and Joe are just constantly absorbing so much information that it's

hard to get all of it to stick, right. Like I think a lot of people when they meet us assume that we have all like nine episodes we've done like at total recall in our main and it's hard. You know, sometimes that stuff I only remember like the main, Like I don't know three or four points of an episode six months later. Yeah, indeed, it all just become sort of a confused jelly in there. Uh. Now, as we've stressed many times on the show, merely recalling a

memory also entails reconsolidation of that memory. So each memory is a thing of soft clay, and by touching it we alter its form. The memories you handle the most are sometimes the one you can trust the least. And uh, and then this is an important to note to our brains work that don't work this way for you know, no reason. Reconsolidation can aid in learning. Its strengthens neural connections and allows the formation of new associations. Like essentially

it's about updating your knowledge of a thing. But you know, the way the human mind works, and the complexity of the of the of the modern human mind is that you can update existing information with false information, with purely emotional information, and it just changes it over time. Uh. And it and it also can occur just sort of based on when you were absorbing other information. So there's an article in Ian magazine on this on the Mandel effect from Caitlin A. Mont and she brings up the

example of Alexander Hamilton's. So here's the here's this is all pre Hamilton's the musical. I'm not sure to what extent that would change this, but for a lot of people, you went to school, you learned that Alexander Hamilton's was a founding father of the US but never a U S president. But a study on false memories from this was published in Psychological Science titled Recognizing the Presidents was

the Alexander Hamilton's President. This looked at who most Americans identify as presidents, and the subjects were more likely to incorrectly select Hamilton's but not several other actual former presidents. Hamilton's simply became encoded at the same time as the other presidents wired together. Ben Franklin is similar to this.

That's another one where like you learn about Ben Franklin at the same time as you learn about the founding fathers and the first presidents of the country, and and and then twenty years later, as an adult, your brain just kind of wires it all together and goes, wait, he was a president, wasn't he and then somebody goes, oh,

come on, no, he wasn't you know. Yeah, well, I mean even you know, there was a time I remember we where we had to in school memorize all the president the United States in order, and you know, maybe you even had a visual aid there with little pictures of all these guys, and and I didn't retain that completely. I so I don't know to what extent I could set here and and get a one when I have, you know, presidential history exam, so I can understand how

this kind of thing happens. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, That's one of those things where like when you when you're little and you're learning that stuff in school, you're like agonizing over being able to actually remember all however many of them there were, and now here in the present day, it's just kind of like when is there ever a moment when it comes up where it's like, if you don't know when Grover Cleveland was president, then it's going

to be like an absolute, uh, you know, life threatening scenario. Yeah. Well, our American history education tends to be kind of rushed and and even and even then, if you're going back and doing deep dives, you're doing deep dives into certain sections of history, so you know, the formation of the country, the Civil War, Uh, you know, the twentieth century history, etcetera. And they're still gonna be holes and and also just

something less newsworthy, less interesting phases in presidential history. But to bring it back to Shazam. Uh, it's easy to walk through the various ways that a vague pop culture or historical memory could get twisted around in your mind. So you remember that there was that film called Kazam. It starts shack and shack plus Kazam kind of sounds like Shazam, which is the name of a comic book character. So it's not just a completely new nonsense word shazam.

This is like a major comic guy. Right. Yeah, they're actually making a Shazam movie pretty soon. The rock is going to be in oh man. But it's uh so Shazam. Here's here's a fun memory fact for you. A lot of people thought the name of the character with Shazam for a very long time. The name of the character is actually Captain Marvel. But he says Shazam to turn from a little boy into like the Superman figure, right, oh man, it's that that his current power. He's really

a boy. Oh yeah, he's always been like a little ten year old kid, and and his power is to turn into like a like a magical superman. Yeah. Oh my goodness. So this movie, we're gonna have some child that turns into the Rock. I think the Rock is playing the villain in this, but I'm not sure. Yeah, but it might be a child turns into the Rock. Which, by the way, that's the premise of the new Jumanji

movie coming out too, that a child turns into the Rock. Yes, yes, well, I think the bottom line though, is you're telling me there's still a chance that Sinbad could play Shazam and an actual film. I think so, yeah, yeah, I mean I don't see why this can't happen. Now. Another aspect to all of this is the idea that the character is a genie and uh, and the genie is, of course, the creature of that emerges from Arabic mythology Sinbad the

actor his name is Sinbad. Sinbad of course also emerges from from from folk tales and mythology of of the the Arab people, right, yeah, tales of a thousand and one Nights, I think, and the timeline is right for this. You know, it's the nineties, you have various films and hopping, you know, sort of the clinging on films that come off out around the same theme. And it's the sort of film that you probably wouldn't have seen, the kind of thing that just a trailer came out, you heard

about it, you didn't watch it. The false memory kind of gets stored away incorrectly. Yeah, I gotta say, Sinbad is one of these guys, and look, Sinbad, if you're listening, this is nothing into you, buddy. But I just don't really have any memory of anything he actually was in, just a memory of him being a pop culture figure, right, Like I think he was in that Cosby show spent off a different world. But other than that, I don't remember anything he was in. Oh, I feel like he

was in. Like, here's here's a potential. If you told me, hey, Sinbad was in Stallone's Judge Dread movie he played one of the other judges, I would be tempted to believe you, even though I've seen the film and and and actually I think prefer it to the most recent Judge Dread film. Yeah, I love the new Dread film the New Dread film. The New Dread film was was was very entertaining, but um, I feel like I feel like both of these films get something wrong about the the the actual comic book.

Oh yeah, absolutely that it's a satire. Yeah, so I really I really need those two films to sort of come together into one film and and maybe it will in your memory after a couple of years. I need I need talking robots and and Italian nanny's and uh and aliens. I need all the wacky stuff in there to really buy into. Yeah. Alright, So at this point, I think we've we've given you a good idea of how the false memory of Shazam or what have you can emerge. But what we're gonna get into after this

next break is then how do we share it? How do we end up in this weird scenario where we're talking to other people and and and reminiscing about things that simply were not so alright, we're back. So, okay, we've got a little bit more from that Eon article to discuss here about false memories leading us into what's actually happening. Amatt argues that that a lot of this, you know, it's going to come down to two issues. One is definitely the case suggestibility, which we'll get to.

But then there's also confabulation. So confabulation is the brain's attempt to fill in missing memory gaps by adding fabricated facts and experiences. This is tied to various neurological disorders like stroke, brain injury, Alzheimer's um corsa cough syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia. But here's the thing too, it can happen to healthy

individuals as well. Yeah, I have a note here about how the term is used clinically confabulation, and it refers to memory defects that are experienced when patients have brain damage, but it also applies to everyday events, like when we embellish the truth while recounting events. For instance, she brings up one particular case. So there's a there's a editor with the name Epic Journeyman who apparently was key and and and you know, being I guess, ah, you know,

spokesman for the idea that that Shazam existed. And he worked at a video store in the nineties and he had to watch multiple copies of film several times to verify that the you know, the tape wasn't damaged and they could actually rent it again or they or have a rent or complained they'd have to like watch it through. And UH, so in this case, he was he was he was engaging in this repetitive unpacking of memory. And she says that this, uh, this is a situation where

confabulation seems to be more frequent. So that's a possibility that that's that's what occurred with this particular individual. But then to draw in uh shacters um commentary not not particular to uh Mandela syndrome or what have you, but just memory in general. He talks a lot about flashbulb memories. So these are memories of events, you know, very emotional events, such as nine eleven, uh and UH, and they're stored in the amygdala, an emotion processing center of the brain

that is particularly involved in fear. So uh. The basic situation here is that the a magdala focus is so heavily on emotions that it doesn't store all the details of an event it. But because our emotions are so involved in recalling flashboat bald memories, we remain confident about them, and this confidency uh spills over into poorly remember details.

So the example here is when you have people who and this has been tested and studies, the idea that when asked, people say, oh, yeah, I remember what I was eating for breakfast, when when eleven occurred, I remember what shirt I was wearing, you know, my shoes, and that you see examples of this in other you know, very emotional events. Uh, the idea that it's just you know,

etched in the stone of memory. But but when when we've been able to check up on that, we find that that's not the case, that the brain is is filling in the blanks and these flash bold memories. Yeah. I mean when I think back to nine eleven, what I was doing that morning, I don't remember what I had for breakfast. I don't remember what I was wearing, but I like distinctly remember being at my job, the radio being on in us listening intensely to what was happening.

And then at the time I lived in Boston, when I looked out the windows there were fighter jets flying overhead because the planes have flown out of logan, and I remember all those things distinctly. But I'm remembering those memories right like it's like I'm looking at like a like a movie file. Uh, and it's slightly distorted, right

or blurry. So all these examples we've discussed so far, these might not explain everything, but I think they're enough to create certain individuals who are who are very confident in their memory of something, even though that memory is false, and then it just has to be planted in the heads of others. And luckily we're quite susceptible to that

sort of thing. So we've already talked about misinformation, be it you know, a deliberate misinformation campaign on social media, or me telling you know, making something up and telling somebody about the boss of a of a video game. And in these cases it's been it's been shown in and studies it misinformation can actually compromise the fidelity of an existing memory. Uh. This is the reason leading questions are so frowned upon in journalism and objectionable in a

court of law. If you're asking the question, that is kind of inserting the answer into the individual's mind. Yeah.

If you ever want to be more terrified by our justice system, be on a jury for like a couple of days and then go into the deliberation room and see how well you and your fellow jurors remember everything that was presented to and how you recollect it back to each other, because it's it's scary how everybody remembers things a little bit differently, and then the jurors can kind of start like convincing one another that they remembered

something the wrong way necessarily or the right way. Yeah. Yeah, I mean a lot of it relates could just basically boils down to comments and suggestions made when a person is trying to recall a past experience. And you know, this ties in with some of what we talked about with alien abduction or or allegations of ritual satanic abuse where an individual, you know, and it's even more complicated.

It's a very young individual, but they're being questioned about what happened and if their seeds being planted uh in that questioning while they're trying to recall, then it can it can alter the memory. Yeah, when we talked about that at length, uh in the alien abduction episode. There's all kinds of factors that can lead to faulty memories. Right, We're talking about everything in distortions from bias to association, to imagination sometimes even peer pressure. Right, So like the

jury example, I was just giving. That's because our memory is constructive, not reproductive. We think of it as being reproductive, but it's not. The brain actually builds memories out of various pieces of information and then it plays them back like a recording. And this is why when you're discussing a memory, we often say here on the show, we have to say, you're not remembering what happened, You're remembering the last time you remembered it, last time you watched

that file, that recording, right and real quick. Some more notes on false memories that we covered in alien abduction, So false memory implantation. It's important to recognize that this does happen in hypnotherapy, but most hypnotherapists are earnest about their desire to help patients. But experimental psychology has actually shown it's it's pretty easy to implant false memories in

an individual's mind. So there was a study where researchers were able to implant false memories of getting lost in a shopping mall and participants when they never had been lost in the shopping mall. And then in another two thousand one study, they showed that even when events are unlikely such as alien abduction. They can be implanted as false memories. This leads to suggestive information being presented to the participants and that can increase the plausibility or implausibility

of an event to them. So take for example, a newspaper, right, yeah, I mean there have been numerous studies that have back this up with restart showing the suggest can influence how we perform a memory tasks, how we learned tasks are product preference response to supplements and medications. Even so, the placebo effect comes into play. One example personal example that comes to my mind is so growing up, when my family would have boiled eggs, like hard boiled eggs, my

mom would always enjoyed putting mustard on them. And I don't think I actually put mustard on it. I mean I wasn't like yuck, but I didn't do it. And then at some point, like in grade school, I had to write a story, and I wrote a story about someone who put mustard on an egg and and my my mom got to read it. And then at some point my mom was like, oh, you really like mustard on your eggs. Let me get mustard out for you.

And and it ends up with me loving putting mustard on my eggs, like like it made it happen, like somehow the false memory got implanted in my head and then became a reality. But I know that I didn't always love mustard on on my egg This is a ridiculous thing to spend an time disgusting, but it's I think it's a mile in a mild example, and I imagine everyone else has these mild examples as well, where the idea gets implanted in your head and becomes the reality. Yeah.

I think actually that's a really good like area, like a fertile area for researching on. This is like things that we have convinced ourselves that we like or don't like food wise the course of time. And then of course with childhood memories, there's a lot of this too where you have to ask yourself, do I remember this or was I told that this happened by my parents

and now I remember it being so right? Like your parents say, boy, you hated Brussels sprouts, And the next time Brussels sprouts show up on your plate, You're like, wait,

do I like these are not? Yeah? Yeah, Well in nineteen there is this other study McNally and Clancy researched memory function in women who believed that they had recovered memories of sexual child abuse, and they found that such victims were actually more likely to create false memories of non traumatic events in the lab, so not false memories of their abuse, but of non traumatic events than the women who had always remembered being sexually abused. Uh, and

that women and also women who had never been abused. Right. So this is actually what led to them studying alien abductions because they were like, we can't implant false memories of sexual abuse in these people. That's unethical. We need to come up with something that that we're pretty sure didn't happen, but they that we can maybe trick them

into thinking happened. What about alien abduction? Yeah, Now, another study on false memory implantation comes from Darren Strange, Marianne Gary, Daniel M. Bernstein that's Bernstein, not Burned Stain, and d Stephen Lindsay and it's titled Photographs cause false Memories for the news. This is the newspaper when I was telling you about. In this study, participants were tested to see if false memories were more prevalent when images were used

in conjunction with words rather than when words were used alone. Okay, So participants would look at ten newspaper headlines for four seconds each. Sometimes the headlines were real, sometimes they were fake, and after each viewing, they were asked to rate, on a scale of one to five how confident they were

that they actually recognized the story. Now, when a picture was next to the headline, participants were way more likely to remember a false event as being a real thing, and on the true events, the participants were totally comfortable reporting when they did not remember it at all. So that wasn't a factor here. It wasn't like these participants were scared to admit they didn't know anything. They would

admit to it if they didn't remember something that actually happened. Now, the data here supports the idea that images can cause false memories, and according to this, memories seem to need a support system to make them personally believable to us. What provides that support pictures? As we searched through our memories, we're looking for cues and we provide evidence for our memories so we can make sure they're accurate with these images.

So this is even scarier, especially when you take into account you and Joe talked about this in the Uncanny Valley episodes about how easy it is to replicate uh images, And now we're getting closer to replicating video of things people didn't actually do or say, right, Like, I just actually related to what you guys had talked about in

that episode. I just saw a video the other day that somebody did a c g I Barack Obama and had him saying things that he didn't really say in real life, and it was it wasn't quite there yet, but you know what I'm saying, Like, we're gonna get to a point where that can be floating around out there. And again, media literacy is important. You need to be able to determine is this something that I can trust to remember my to ensure my memory is accurate, or is this something I need to like judge on a

different system. Yeah, it's interesting this we're discussing the ability to use the Internet and modern technology to fact check ourselves, because I think that's where a lot of the the situation of the Mandela effect emerges from, because we've always had, you know, false information kicking around in the back of our head, you know, and memories that have been become

skewed over time. But with the with with the Internet at hand, with for instance, IMBB at hand, we've been in the position to just instantly look ups and Bad's biography and see what's on there, and and so we're forced to confront a lot of our our our false memories and then discuss them with each other. But is i AMDB community built the same way like Wikipedia? Oh yeah. I don't mean to imply that IMDb is infallible, but

it is a pretty good source. And and if you do not see a film that you remember on there, then then it's a pretty good sign that something's up. I'm just imagining this reditor guy that you were talking about earlier, like constantly going in and editing IMDb and

Wikipedia on Sinbad's pages and like adding Shazam there. Well, about I guess ten years or more ago, I remember there being a few cases of films that don't exist in IMDb that then fraudently put there, and they are always a lot of fun because they had weird descriptions. I haven't looked into this recently, but I I don't know that there's anything like that anymore. I would love to hear if there are any known false films in IMDb or if that's something that has been completely removed

through oversight or just the hive mind of the people involved. Yeah. I get the impression just overall from Wikipedia that the act the community is so active that like I don't know, they're they're paying attention, and they're able to sort of for the most part, keep things factual. I I know, for the most part when I visit Wikipedia. This is one of the reasons why we don't do our research

based on Wikipedia. It is a good place though to go find sources, uh for further research, but for instance, like almost always, if there's an article that's in dispute, it's got one of those uh what do you call them? Like there there's like a header up on top that lets you know, hey, some of the information in this article is up for dispute right now. Um now Strange, this is Darren Strange, which is an interesting name for

a psychologist, right right. Uh. Strange had other colleagues and went on to publish another experiment in two thousand and eight. This showed that it's easier to implant false memories and people for an event that supposedly happened when they were two years old rather than when they were ten years old. And basically this shows that our childhood memories are sparse and they lack detail, so we filled them in with

distortions from other information. So going back to our food example, right, like things our parents tell us that we did or we believed or we felt, uh you know up until I don't know, maybe age five or something like that. Right,

and then you sort of take that on as fact. Yeah, you know, I think this, Uh, this gets a little bit into the the power of creepy pasta because there are certain creepy pasta tales to sort of play on this, the idea that hey, everybody remembers this, right, Yeah, and uh and then goes from their crafting some form of fiction that reminds me, we're coming up on October. We're gonna need to pull out a creepy Pasta episode again

this year. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if there's hopefully there's there's fuel for one at least one that's gotta be yeah part four. There was that whole TV show that came out after we did the last Yeah. Uh. So there are other studies to support mass distortions of memories. As well, and we're not gonna go through all of them, but here's two more that I want to give you.

First is, in two thousand five, Stephen Lewandowski and his colleagues showed that Americans were more likely than Australians and Germans to falsely remember that actual weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. So that's pretty interesting, like like your your memory distortions can be based on your national identity. And then another study in two thousand seven showed that when we look at doctored photos of past public events,

that can distort our memories. So tying back into that newspaper study, you have to really be careful about which you believe now, because it's so easy to use photoshop essentially right now, there's other examples where two people witness the same event and then they discuss it. One person's memory can contaminate the other, kind of like how you did with Top Gun the video game, Top Gun two the video game. Um, let's tackle quickly the two big

Mandela effect ones though. Okay, so we've got Barren Stain versus Barren Stein bears. Okay, maybe the explanation is just simply that names ending in stein are more common than names ending in stain. But because we have this prior association, we think it's Barren Steaen or Nelson Mandela's death. Frankly, the only two moments people in America, for the most part, seemed to be familiar with Mandela are when he was

imprisoned and when he died. And so it's possible that they're piecing together a false memory from these disparate pieces of information. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, So leading us out here, what if? What if this? What if this Mandela effect? Stuff that's sprinkling up and we're we're considering it now, and I think we've gotten past the point that, like you and I are pretty sure this is an alternate dimensions at play. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm

pretty positive. What if it's a good thing? What if this is a necessary thing for the human mind. In a paper for Frontiers in Psychology from twelve, Adam D. Brown, Nicole Curry, and William Hurst argued that there's growing evidence that the reconstructive process of memory, which includes its distortions, might provide us with great cognitive flexibility. So this helps,

for instance, support the construction and maintenance of your identity. Subsequently, the malleability of an individual's memory can then transform shared collections and a group. And then through social interactions, we try to take out distinct individual memories and make them converge together with other people's memories, and from this emerges

a collective memory, which establishes our collective identity. So maybe all of this isn't as much like a flaw in our programming as it is like a like a tactic,

a strategy that the human mind uses as a social animal. Yeah, when you realize that your memory and recollection is not just this iron chain, you know, reaching back through time behind you, there's there's something liberating in that, Like you can realize that you have a certain amount of control over your own memories, over your own identity based on those, and you're not just a you know, a slave to

what has come before. Yeah, yeah, very much. So, all right, audience, Look, I'm dying to hear what your examples of the Mandela effect are, because if there are twenty two up there out there on buzz feed, I'm sure our audience has got even more than that. So let us know what some of your examples are. Let us know what you think, did we come down a little too hard on the alternate realities theory? Or should we do an episode on

alternate realities in the future. Maybe we will. Yeah, and if you want to check out all the episodes of the podcast, you want to check out videos, blog, post, et cetera, head on over to Stuff Table your mind dot com. You'll also find links out to our various social media accounts. That's right, We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. We also have our brand new Facebook discussion module up for people who want to chat with each other about the show in particular, or you can maybe

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