Memories, like the corners of my head

My memory is not what it used to be.

Then, again, it never was.

Somehow this winter I’ve wandered the internet chasing through rabbit holes about memory. The news is not good. According to various studies, human memory as not as reliable as we would like to believe. In fact, our memories can be changed merely by the way people ask us questions about what we have seen or heard.

Example #1: Show a film of two cars colliding to various individuals. Afterward, ask them several questions about the filmed collision. Ask them to judge how fast the cars were traveling when they collided. But ask other people who saw the same film how fast the cars were traveling when they crashed. Those who hear the word “crash” in the question generally will remember the cars moving faster than those who hear the word “collide.”

Example #2 is similar. Ask people to study a photograph of two cars that have collided. After taking away the photograph, ask them several questions about what they saw. Ask if they remember seeing broken glass by the cars. (There was no broken glass in the photograph.) Those who are asked about the cars that crashed are more likely to remember broken glass than those who are asked about the cars that collided.

Example #3: Show individuals a group of photographs of various people. Afterward, ask them questions about the photographs. When you ask how tall the basketball player was, the average answer will be several inches greater than when you ask others how short the basketball player was.

Can it be that we were both so simple then?

Most people are willing to admit that their memory is less than perfect. Some people go to great lengths to deny faults in their memory. Fiona Broome is an extreme example of this tendency. She was surprised to hear that Nelson Mandela was still alive in 2010 because she remembered his funeral taking place in the 1980s. When she asked other people about Nelson Mandela, a few others agreed that they thought he had died in the 1980s. Rather than confessing that their memories were wrong, Broome affirmed that they were remembering the death and burial of Nelson Mandela correctly—they had somehow traveled from an alternate reality to this reality while keeping a few memories of the former reality.

I am not making this up! The Mandela Effect is considered proof of alternate universes and jumps between them. Billy Graham’s funeral is remembered by some people as having already taken place in past years. They have vivid memories of television and internet coverage of his funeral, and they insist that this funeral must have happened in an alternate reality. In addition to funerals, people remember variant spellings of certain names and different corporate logos that have never existed. There’s nothing wrong with their memory, they say—they are merely victims of the Mandela Effect.

I remember noticing twenty years ago that most people misspelled the Berenstain Bears. But some people insist that, when they were younger, the name was spelled Berenstein. They insist that their bologna’s second name is M-E-Y-E-R, whereas I thought the commercial of the little boy singing about his bologna’s name would help people remember that it’s M-A-Y-E-R. There has always been a “k” in Chick-fil-A, no matter what people say they remember. And the United States has never had more than fifty states, even though some people remember learning that there are fifty-two.

Apparently the Mandela Effect has also relocated New Zealand, which some people claim used to be west of Australia. I have had the same experience with Japan, which I picture being much closer to Taiwan than to Korea. But I don’t believe in an alternate universe where island nations are relocated.

As if the Mandela Effect was not already far-fetched, some people go a step further and insist that the Mandela Effect is the result of CERN’s experiments to understand subatomic particles. If I follow the argument correctly, the work with high energy particles has either caused alternate worlds to begin existing or has increased unintended travel between alternate worlds. People really believe these theories, and somehow they also believe that the world of Berenstein Bears and New Zealand west of Australia is a better world than the one we live in now.

At least I think I remember someone making that claim. J.