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11th June 2016, 11:15 PM | #41 |
I say nay!
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I mentioned this to my spouse and she told me she had a faulty memory regarding the show 'Sex And The City'which she though was Sex In The City'.
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12th June 2016, 05:28 AM | #42 |
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Many people confabulating trivia is the Mandela Effect then?
All right, so if we want to give a name to this specific type of cognition error, we can. Now, on what basis can we conclude that it is increasing? Even if we can demonstrate unequivocally that it is increasing, the nest step would be to propose competing hypotheses to explain the increase. We're nowhere near lizard men of the matrix on this yet. |
12th June 2016, 12:02 PM | #43 |
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I think another thing that contributed to the Mandela Effect was a presumption about state leaders in the African continent. They are either there for life or imprisoned/murdered after a coup. Mandela voluntarily stepped down after his tenure to retire. His absence in SA politics post retirement lead people to assume that he had died.
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13th June 2016, 10:30 AM | #44 |
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There are famous people who I thought had died, but later I found they were still alive.
Example, I thought that Kelsey Grammer had died in 2008, so of course was puzzled when he continued to appear in films. As you may have guessed, what happened was that he had suffered a heart attack that year, and only partially paying attention to the news, I assumed that he had died. If other people had made the same error, this would be a mass mis-remembering similar to the Manedla effect. However, I was able to be rational rather than go on about alternate realities. |
13th June 2016, 05:16 PM | #45 |
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This. When I was in grade-school, there was as girl whose last name was Robertson. How exotic !!! The really pedestrian kids couldn't get past "Robinson" as in Swiss Family". Any name that is even slightly unusual will be gotten wrong frequently, with preference for the more common.
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13th June 2016, 06:11 PM | #46 |
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I had a similar experience when Australian horseracing identity Bart Cummings died in 2015, a short while I thought I had heard his death announced a few years earlier. Some quick checking showed that I was confusing the death of actor Bill Hunter (2011) who had played Bart Cummings in his last film with the death of Bart Cummings.
Again, my realization that something was not quite right led me to double check what I was remembering, rather than jump to claiming that reality had changed around me. |
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14th June 2016, 04:17 AM | #47 |
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Re the specific case of Mandela: perhaps people remember hearing about Stephen Biko. Like Mandela a big name in anti-apartheid activism, though with different organizations. He died from police brutality while in custody and had a big funeral attended by 1000's of people, including foreign diplomats.
Ten years after his death in 1977 the movie "Cry Freedom" about his life were made, starring Denzel Washington and focusing heavily on his death. I dimly remember news-spots on apartheid in the 80's that would mention Mandela's incarceration and also show pictures from Biko's funeral. An inattentive viewer could leave with the impression that it was Mandela who had died. |
14th June 2016, 07:49 AM | #48 |
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14th June 2016, 09:41 AM | #49 |
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I thought Ben E. King was dead, then he did a show at the Floral Pavilion in New Brighton, which I sadly missed, and then he actually did die not long after,
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14th June 2016, 01:15 PM | #50 |
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I googled '"Mandela effect" Biko' and found that this mechanism has already occurred to plenty of rational people. And (surprise, surprise) that the true believers will not abandon their dreams of parallel universes and steadfastly reject that they could have been confused this way.
To me this "phenomena" seems very US-centric. The two most prominent cases are: 1) A US series of childrens books are spelled slightly different. 2) A charismatic foreign leader, who as president steered his country through a tumultuous transitive period, actually died long before he became president. The proponents of the Mandela effect seem to honestly believe these two changes are of a similar level. Mandela's early death would vastly impact the last 20 years of South African history. But all these people remember is that Mandela died in the 80's, then apparently never heard about him again (or South Africa) until he actually died in 2013. |
14th June 2016, 01:46 PM | #51 |
Show me the monkey!
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Has anyone proposed a single universe where confabulation exists and also where people imagine other universes.
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14th June 2016, 05:57 PM | #52 |
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It is the same with many conspiracy theories, they only make sense if the world stops at the continental borders of the United States. That said, I tried your suggested Google search and amongst the first entries was a New Ager with some really loopy claims, such as this:
Quote:
That's right, our brains are quantum computers seeing all realities and that's why memories fade and change with time. |
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24th September 2016, 05:46 PM | #53 |
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Mandela effect: what do they expect from us?
In reading several people’s experiences with the Mandela effect, I started to wonder; what is the desired response from people who didn’t experience it?
Suppose I remember that Mandela was president of South Africa, but most everyone around me remembers that he died in prison. Not only that, but everything around me (TV shows, newspaper articles, history lessons, you name it) supports that. Obviously, I wouldn’t expect people to change their minds. I may remember that he was president, but if everything around me contradicts that, down to archival news broadcasts, then it would be folly to expect people to believe me instead. If I didn’t think that my memory was wrong (for whatever reason), and I was unable to get back to the reality I came from (side-note; do people try that?), what would I do? Well, I’d accept reality as I find it, and I don’t think I’d insist reality had changed. After all, what is more likely; that all of reality has changed, including everyone’s memories (excepting a small group), or that I am from a different reality altogether? (For the moment, let's exclude the actual answer; my memories were incorrect) All this is to say that “But it used to be different” doesn’t carry any weight. It’s an interesting story, but you’ll need more to convince me that MY memories (and most everyone else’s, plus all video and print) are wrong instead of yours. So, with that out of the way, my question is: Ideally, how do they want people to respond to their experience? I have considered asking them directly, but I have so little knowledge of that community that anything I'd say could be seen as condescending, thus depriving me of answers on principle (and rightly so, I think). By the way, my memories regarding Mandela line up with reality, and the above was purely an example. |
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25th September 2016, 05:27 AM | #54 |
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Can you give some background on this phenomenon?
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25th September 2016, 05:34 AM | #55 |
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Some people remember things differently than everyone else, such as the supposed death of Nelson Mandela in the '80s, but also more trivial stuff such as the name of the Berenstain Bears (they remember it as being "Berenstein").
There are different explanations given, but the common thread is the idea that things were really that way for them, and that it isn't faulty memory. |
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25th September 2016, 06:02 AM | #56 |
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I don't think there would be a "one size fits all" approach to all people.
There are plenty of people who realize that their memory may be faulty, or that their memory may be playing tricks on them. Those people would simply be convinced by showing them a wiki page, or media articles or broadcasts that show they're wrong. Though even then, of course, if somehow the stakes are high for them to hold to their previously held conviction, they may try to double down. I don't dare to go into how other people could be convinced. I'm more than a little skeptical about the namesake story of the effect. According to wiki:
Quote:
We have no evidence for Ms. Broome's claim other than her say-so. Maybe she did indeed ask 50 people at DragonCon about it and 2 others had the same faulty memory. Confirmation bias at best, I suspect. I'm not skeptical about the other prototypical example trotted around: the Berenstain Bears. I think it's totally believable that in shedloads of people, their memory "corrected" the really uncommon -stain spelling to the common -stein spelling, all independent of each other. |
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25th September 2016, 07:00 AM | #57 |
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I have to say I was confused by the OP. We had a thread about this a few years ago, and it was simply a discussion of mis-remembered(with certainty) items. I believe that my position was "hey, if you want to call it The Mandela Effect, have fun but it's been known for years and it's just normal human memory".
When did the lunatic fringe latch onto this? There's a bucketload of woo material on the inter toobz. Alternate reality, parallel universe, mind control plots, etc.... I may have heard the term in recent times and thought they were referring to the phenomenon of faulty memory. |
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25th September 2016, 07:46 AM | #58 |
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We already have a term and definition for this and it is confabulation. Somebody went and renamed it Mandela Effect.
We have another thread on this: http://www.internationalskeptics.com...d.php?t=307882 |
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25th September 2016, 10:43 AM | #59 |
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I've encountered four people who "remember" that the opera singer, Luciano Pavarotti was responsible for the death of princess Diana. Are their memories correct for them?
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25th September 2016, 10:49 AM | #60 |
So far, so good...
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By coincidence*, I finished reading H. Beam Piper's "He walked around the horses"
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18807 A fun perspective on this supposition. *Maybe Fiona Broome wouldn't call it coincidence. |
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25th September 2016, 12:10 PM | #61 |
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Every once in a while I'm watching TV and some older actor appears on a live show, and I'm shocked because I was sure he was dead.
It happens. |
25th September 2016, 12:15 PM | #62 |
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Rather than use the woo term mandela effect, why not simply use confabulation ? Or at least add it in your description ?
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25th September 2016, 12:16 PM | #63 |
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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. |
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25th September 2016, 12:16 PM | #64 |
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Also when a term used on snopes , that usually strongly hint at pure woo.
http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/ |
25th September 2016, 12:21 PM | #65 |
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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. And I agree.. I've called the effect "confabulation" all my life (or thereabouts), I guess "Mandela Effect" just sounds cooler to some. |
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25th September 2016, 12:45 PM | #66 |
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25th September 2016, 01:51 PM | #67 |
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"Rebranding" already understood phenomena rarely doesn't have an ulterior motive.
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25th September 2016, 06:12 PM | #68 |
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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. |
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25th September 2016, 06:39 PM | #69 |
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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. |
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26th September 2016, 04:12 AM | #70 |
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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.
Quote:
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... |
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26th September 2016, 05:00 AM | #71 |
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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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26th September 2016, 07:33 AM | #72 |
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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. |
26th September 2016, 07:47 AM | #73 |
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26th September 2016, 08:02 AM | #74 |
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26th September 2016, 09:09 AM | #75 |
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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.
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26th September 2016, 09:20 AM | #76 |
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I am certain it was the Berenstein bears - this universe even smells funny.
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26th September 2016, 09:20 AM | #77 |
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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. |
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26th September 2016, 09:29 AM | #78 |
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26th September 2016, 09:35 AM | #79 |
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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!? |
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26th September 2016, 09:38 AM | #80 |
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