What are your experiences with the Mandela Effect?

Gianni R@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 51 points –

See title. For those who don’t know, the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remember something differently than how it occurred. It’s named after Nelson Mandela because a significant number of people remembered him dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he actually passed away in 2013.

I’m curious to hear about your personal experiences with this phenomenon. Have you ever remembered an event, fact, or detail that turned out to be different from reality? What was it and how did you react when you found out your memory didn’t align with the facts? Does it happen often?

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Who the fuck remembers Mandela dying in prison??? The man was resilience itself!

Like 12 idiots on the Internet who then decided to never shut the fuck up about it.

I know!

He was constantly in the papers in the 1990s, major figure, every mac madra knew he was alive, where do they get this shite.

Yeah, I never understood that either. He was the president of South Africa from 1994-1999. Yes, he kept a lower profile in the 2000s, but I remember even as a kid/teen seeing articles and photos of him in the news. Bizarre.

Now the Berenstain Bears one, I understand. At the same time, I just chalk that up to spelling. For what reason would I need to know how to spell "Berenstain?"

Now the Berenstain Bears one, I understand. At the same time, I just chalk that up to spelling. For what reason would I need to know how to spell “Berenstain?”

I had one like this where I was shocked to learn there was never a band called Chumbawumba; they are called Chumbawamba and have been all along.

Next you're gonna tell me their hit album was called "Tabthamping" instead of "Tubthumping!" Where does it end?!

Honestly though, I thought the same!

Enough people that there's this effect named after this happening

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The Berenstein Bears one and the Fruit of the Loom not having a horn are the ones that have me questioning reality and my childhood.

There is a theory that the Fruit of the Loom one is actually a viral marketing thing. Like the company scrubbed it on purpose and is playing into it to build brand recognition.

I vaguely remember noticing the fruit of the loom logo change which makes it weirder for me

Same here. It had the cornucopia. Then it didn't. "weird" I thought. Then 5 to 10 years later I was reading the hunger games and needed to look up what a cornucopia actually was. "a horn usually containing fruit - oh - like the fruit of the loom logo" Then 2 years ago learning it never existed at all, and we all hallucinated it, there have even been paradies of it. It's fucking weird.

Yeah, that's definitely the one that I have going on for me. Life is weird.

Edit: The proof I mentioned is just 2 images of shirts with the cornucopia in the logo. I'm not so sure anymore about what I said previously.

Its proven that there was a cone in the logo, the company is just acring like that for marketing reasons

Link?

here's an old article mentioning the cornucopia: https://imgur.com/a/Au42qr8

but reading some more about it, it seems like my previous comment is actually false. There are also 2 images of shirts with the cornucopia, which convinced me eaelier, but that's only 2 images against a mountain of evidence.

This is the one that my 🧠 still won't let go.

yeah my dad always used to buy the fruit of the loom sweatpants for us, and I'm pretty sure I saw that cornucopia. but it really seems we are mistaken. brains generally are a pretty shit source of information, after all.

omg.... but..but.. I.. I remember the logo... changing.... oh god.

Berenstein is classic though.

I remember there was an AskLemmy question on the Mandela effect, but a week later we all realized it was just a dream.

Somehow I had always thought it was Klu Klux Klan instead of Ku Klux Klan. I'm not sure where I got that or if anyone else thought the same thing though.

similarly: some people say "visa versa"

That's an expecially bad one! (I knew a lawyer who said that lol)

The romans pronounced it "uike uersa" or "wike wersa" (two syllables for each word). The letter "c" was always a k-sound, and "v" was like our "u", it was the same letter for a long time. So another example, if you want to say "Veni vidi vici" the historically accurate way would be "Weni widi wiki".

How do you know?

It's been thoroughly researched by linguists. The main source is the pronounciation guides written by the romans themselves. They describe how to trill the R's and how to say diphtongs etc, and compare latin pronounciation with the letters of other languages, mainly greek.

When i got into monster hunter 4 ultimate(the one with a good story) i was told that Deviljho, a voracious monster that will eat anything mid combat to recover its stamina, will eat its own tail if you cut it. Everyone believed it, no one tried to capture it on camera because of the hardware limitation(no "clip that", no shadowplay).

Turn out, millions of Monster Hunter fans remembered wrong because it's a hoax.

I fully believed that until a Reddit thread disproved it.

That gen 1 of Pokemon didn't have compound types (i.e. Pokemon with two types). In reality they did

Ghost types are only weak to psychic in that game because they are poison types too. Ruined me for generations swearing psychic was super to ghost.

But...gen 1 doesn't have dual type...right?

Venusaur is Grass/Poison.

Charizard is Fire/Flying.

Of course it does. I remember a lot of people thinking Rock types were immune to electric attacks because nearly every rock type in red and blue was also a ground type.

I've never heard that before and find it baffling.

Bulbasaur comes out of the gate with two types.

Charmander becomes Charizard with two types.

The first (or second) non-starter you encounter is Pidgy with two types.

The required Viridian Forest had Weedle with two types and if you only got a Caterpie, that becomes Butterfree who also has two types.

The number of two type Pokemon that you can catch at the start of the game is massive. Probably about half?

I argued with my partner so hard about this.

Then we looked it up.

I was soooo wrong. And I was the one who got Blue and Red when they came out.

I get the "feeling" of a mandela effect far more frequently than i can solidly know for sure. I guess my first experience was decades ago as a child. I recall staring at a Bernstein bears book, and being oddly transfixed by tye fact that the spelling of the title did not match that of the authors name, literally inches apart on the same page. Later i experienced a schrodenbug or two (which i think is the same phenomenon), and one really solid social ME were a church ceased to exist (or got merged into a neighboring church). After the first few, now I fully admit I am WAY too quick to believe odd circumstance is a ME, and usually find myself reluctantly disproving that to myself with notebook/journal entries... only to later wonder how they might change too.

None but I live in New Zealand and have met a lot of strange people online who think our geographic location has changed.

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Shazaam!

Wait isn't there a movie like this but it's Shaq as the genie. Kazaam.

Heh yup! That’s part of the effect, a whole generation potentially conflated Shaq’s movie with a movie that was never made. Scroll down the link I posted, they mention it. So bizarre.

Sinbad made this movie, 100% it happened.

Lol I got into a pretty heated argument with a group of friends, half of whom definitely remembered the movie and even started recounting some of the plot. The other half had no idea what the hell we were talking about.

So fess up - which half were you siding with Bertram?

Oh I definitely remember seeing the movie. I even remember the VHS dust jacket on the shelves of Blockbuster. But who the hell knows lol

Dude yes!!! I remember that same jacket! Thanks for preserving my sanity for another day Bertram, hero.

I could have sworn Signs was a legitimately good movie when I saw it as a kid but I rewatched it recently and it’s absurdly bad. The acting is terrible and the cinematography is nonsensical. Roger Ebert gave it a full four stars. I’m convinced there’s a universe I grew up in where it was good and it’s the same one Ebert is from.

Eh. That's just part of growing up. I've read the Shanarra chronicles 3 times: as a teen, a 20s, and 30s. Each time I noticed different things and interpreted events differently.

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I could've sworn sprite didn't have lime in it in Australia, yet I can find no evidence of it ever being made without lime

The last word on this whole thing is this series of videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVYNbe1fsUk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLA_ZK8HX6o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6-HbM0Rezg

I just found out that you can't take someone's lead in order to behave like they are behaving, you can only follow their lead.

I thought that taking someone's lead, "I'm taking their lead", is an actual expression, while apparently it is not.

It may not be the original idiom, but it’s definitely something people say. If the core expressions are “(I) take the lead” and “(you) follow my lead,” that lends itself easily to a merge: you take my lead. It’s not as common as the originals but it’s definitely out there. It will stick around because it’s really easy to unambiguously infer what it means in context.

I agree that it's used, I'm sure that if we looked in movie scripts or novels, we would find examples of that phrase, but I can't find a single dictionary that agrees that the phrase is a legitimate phrase, and that's what really boggled my mind.

Boggled and boondoggled over here.

Just looked up "take my lead" on playphrase.me to check, it shows up in a couple movies, even a Star Wars.

"Take his lead" is on there too in a couple movies, nice.

Thanks, that's a cool site I've never heard of.

Taking someone's lead sounds like a British saying indicating the opposite of following someone's lead. It sounds like you're taking someone's leash in your hands and directing them where to go.

I'm not sure, but that makes sense.

I'll have to take your lead on that.

"Take the lead" is certainly an expression used in the UK to denote guiding people, as in "I'll take the lead". I assume both come from ballroom dancing.

I'm sure it's used elsewhere but it may also simply be a conflation of the two.

Yeah, taking the lead I think is a pretty common expression, meaning that you'll take the initiative, but I've used " taking their lead" to mean that another person has taken the lead and someone else is following them.

Which is apparently not real at all, but I only became aware of this because another Lemmy put up a TIL post that explained how they thought that was an expression and discovered after using it their entire life that it was not in any dictionary.

Just like me

I had some Berenstain Bears books as a kid and I remember noting at the time "huh, weird name but okay". So like, I don't get why people think it was "Berenstein"? It looks wrong, but it's always looked wrong.

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I could’ve sworn Jim Beam whiskey was Jim Bean. A friend of mine had a poster of a whiskey bottle on his wall that I stared at every time I was there. He was a minor at the time and didn’t drink, so I always wondered why he had it up. Years later I saw a Jim Beam bottle and had a Mandela moment. The Berenstein Bears and Mandela dying in jail were things I believed, too, but I think the whiskey one is one I haven’t heard from anybody else, yet.

I had to go look it up to double check you weren’t trying to pull a fast one; I was 100% sure it was Bean.

Here's one I just experienced, was watching Star Wars: A New Hope and my brother asked me if I remember C-3PO every having a silver leg. I told him no, hes always been all gold. Next scene we watched his right leg from the knee down was all silver. Like wtf never have I noticed that before, I said meh maybe it was a Lucas later edit. Revenge of the Sith comes on the TV next and C-3PO's leg is so vibrantly silver that I could not even comprehend not noticing that contrast in past viewings.

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I genuinely remembered there were 5 main characters in the Little Einsteins cast, even though there were only 4.

I guess I was imagining random weirdness.

For me its the the Yellow sign on the Standoff Map in Call of Duty Black Ops 2.