Time is degrading how people remember the past
December, 2017
Sean Vanderaa
Sean Vanderaa
Nelson Mandela died in prison.
But he didn’t. He died in 2013, long after being freed. Darth Vader said, “Luke, I am your father.” But he didn’t. He actually said, “No, I am your father.” All of these misconceptions have a common basis. They are all a part of what has become known as the Mandela Effect. “The ‘Mandela Effect’ is what happens when someone has a clear, personal memory of something that never happened in this reality,” states the Mandela Effect website run by Fiona Broome, who believes that other dimensions are leaking into our own and altering our recollection of the past, giving people memories of things that actually never took place. Her theory originated in 2010 after she discovered at a convention that she and many others shared the same memory that Nelson Mandela, the president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, had died in prison, when in actuality he had died in 2013, 23 years after getting out of prison. This occurrence led her to discover other streams of memories that were in fact wrong. Another example of the Mandela Effect is the misspelling of a popular kids book in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s title is The Berenstain Bears but many recall the name being The Berenstein Bears with an e rather than an a. “I’ve experienced the really popular [false memories] like when I saw that the cover of the Berenstain Bears wasn’t the Berenstein Bears, I was completely shocked” Julia Walsh, a senior, said. As well, the television series Sex and the City is often recalled as actually being named Sex in the City, and yet at no point was the show ever titled that. All of these instances can be classified as “false memories,” but the way that they come about is different from what Broome is claiming. Although the theory that false memories come about due to other dimensions leaking into our own, it is far from the truth. According to Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist and human memory expert, our memory is prone to change and is often full of false memories. “We can’t reliably distinguish true memories from false memories. We need independent corroboration,” Loftus said in her Ted Talk, How reliable is your memory? These false memories are easily changed, because simple interactions can alter our minds to perceive something as true that isn’t. “We get misinformation not only if we’re questioned in a leading way, but if we talk to other witnesses who might consciously or inadvertently feed us some erroneous information, or if we see media coverage about some event we might have experienced, all of these provide the opportunity for this kind of contamination of our memory,” Loftus said. These false memories can lead to many problems in one’s day to day life, but the main problem is with eye-witnesses whose convictions lead to the false-imprisonment of hundreds. “The circumstance where false memories are most problematic are in cases involving eyewitness identifications. They are notoriously unreliable and eyewitness errors are thought to be the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. In other words, eyewitnesses who pick the wrong person out of a lineup can send an innocent person to prison,” Steven Frenda, PhD, said. Since false memories have the ability to imprison an innocent person, they are more than likely able to change our perceptions of TV shows and book titles as well. There are three conflicting theories as to how the Mandela Effect comes about. One is that there is an alternate dimension that is leaking into this dimension and changing the past. Another is that this is just a simulation. “I believe it could be from another dimension but I also kind of believe in the theory that we could be in a simulation and that these could be glitches,” Walsh said. The third theory is more rooted in science, and is that it is simply our brain struggling to or making false connections to the past. The human’s memory system doesn’t record an entire event or moment, but rather holds parts of an experience. This leaves it susceptible to change from other information or events that it thinks correlate. “Memory doesn’t operate like a video recording device, where we record information about what we see and then later play it back in our mind. Instead, it’s more like a reconstruction of what we saw or experienced using many sources of information—it’s vulnerable to error and suggestion, and it can change over time sometimes without us even noticing that it changed,” Frenda said. Not only can memories be recalled differently than they actually were, but fake events can be implanted into our memory. In studies conducted by Loftus and her colleagues, they discovered that entire events could be planted into participants’ memories. They did this by showing fake pictures and descriptions of scenarios and making the participants believe they had been there. Afterwards, they were even able to recall small details from the events as if they had actually occurred. These experiments showed that it was possible to insert memories of imaginary experiences such as being lost at the mall or being attacked by a vicious animal. Since our brains are so susceptible to being influenced and have been shown to have trouble remembering events with accuracy, it is not surprising that memories such as those regarding Nelson Mandela’s death and titles such as the Berenstain Bears are false. Therefore, instead of the cause being an alternate dimension leaking into our own, it is more likely that our brains are simply incorrectly remembering the past. View on Issuu |