“Luke, I am your father” – The Mandela Effect

Whether it’s “Harry, pull the car over” or “ Beam me up, Scotty ”, there are many pop culture quotes and things in our memory that we naturally assume are famous sentences or events.
But our brain is playing tricks on us, because the sentences just mentioned never appeared in “Derrick” and “Star Trek”. Welcome to the strange world of the Mandela Effect!

What is the Mandela Effect?

In the field of esotericism, the Mandela Effect is often seen as “proof” of parallel universes or of a “glitch in the matrix”: Many people believe they remember things that never happened. The effect is not a supernatural phenomenon, but simply our unreliable brain.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013, was briefly in the headlines in 2010, but was a topic of discussion on the Internet for much longer. cancel his participation in the opening ceremony of the World Cup in Johannesburg because his great-granddaughter died in a traffic accident.

In many discussion forums, users were astonished: Wasn't Mandela already dead? Didn't he die in prison in the 1980s? Some even said they remembered the headline, and the longer the discussions went on, the more people thought they remembered his death.

But these are not memories from a parallel universe, but rather a negligence of our brain. Harvard neuroscientist Steve Ramirez studied in depth how memories - real and false - are formed in our brains.

Ramirez explains that along with remembering an event, we also store information about how the event made us feel—even the sights, sounds, and smells associated with the memory. All of this relevant information is brought together in an area of ​​our brain called the hippocampus.

And therein lies the problem: our memories are not accurate recordings of past events that can simply be replayed. The moment we remember something, the memory is supplemented or falsified by new information - and our brain does not distinguish between memories whether they were from 10 years ago or whether a detail has just been added.

This also very often leads to the closely related “ False Memory Syndrome ”: participants in an experiment were told that they had had their photo taken with Bugs Bunny in Disneyland, they were also shown a (fake) photo of it, and a lot of participants believed it then to remember it exactly and said other things about it.
However, Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character, not Disney - so such an encounter could never have happened.

Famous examples of the Mandela Effect

"Luke I am your father"

In the famous scene from Star Wars – Episode V, Darth Vader says: “ No, I am your father ”.

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We hope we haven't spoiled anyone. 😉

“Harry, pull the car over.”

The sentence does n't appear , but Horst Tappert as "Derrick" actually said the sentence " Harry, get the car " in a single episode, which Tappert himself couldn't remember until he saw a repeat .

Harald Schmidt often used the phrase as a running gag on his show in the 1990s, which left the impression that it was a typical phrase, and many had no doubts about it, after all, Derrick's assistant Harry was always second in the collective memory anyway, who did the menial work for Derrick.

Pikachu has a black tail tip

Many people remember Pikachu with black ear tips and a black tail tip, like in these pictures:

But that's not true: Pikachu's tail was and is always yellow. The false memory probably comes from the fact that the black ear tips are (correctly) remembered and therefore the tail tip should also be black.

Febreeze room spray

Sure, everyone knows Febreeze, the room spray, right?

Incorrect! The room spray is called “ Febreze ,” the image above is edited. The incorrect spelling was probably collectively memorized because the second e is pronounced longer than the first.

The Monopoly man with a monocle

Do you want to make a cosplay of the Monopoly man? This is simple: a tailcoat, top hat, mustache, a monocle and a bag full of money:

Also wrong! The Monopoly Man never had a monocle. The Mandela effect probably comes from the collective idea that men with mustaches, tailcoats and top hats always wear a monocle (which is often seen in pictures, series and films).

Conclusion

The Mandela Effect can also be traced back to a collective experience: During his time in prison, Nelson Mandela became a kind of cult figure: there were songs and stories about him, he was a symbol of the freedom struggle in Africa... he was talked about as if he were would have already died even though he was “only” in prison. But this gave rise to the collective thought of his death in the 1980s.

What we can learn from the Mandela Effect: Our brains are not infallible. Our memories can be distorted surprisingly easily. We often only remember the “good old days” very selectively and ignore everything negative from back then. The 80s were so great? Sure... if you completely ignore the arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union, RAF terror, forest dieback, the Chernobyl disaster, drug problems and modern talking.

But don't let your beautiful memories spoil you... because they can often be a refreshment for the soul, whether unknowingly glossed over afterwards or not.

Further sources: The World , Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus

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Yes.
That's correct. On June 27th, Dormouse Day, the weather freezes and then stays that way for seven weeks... Nonsense! – Everyday myth: The dormouse farmer’s rule