Theories Of The Mandela Effect

When asked what the Evil Queen says to her mirror, most if not all people will say she says “Mirror mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” However, in the 1938 Disney movie, she says, “Magic mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” The long-standing question remains: why do so many people remember something that did not actually happen? This can be explained by the theory of the Mandela Effect, which is the memory of something that never actually happened. Possible explanations for the phenomenon that is referred to as the Mandela Effect is that it is a made up explanation for false memories or it is due to the “alternate realities” (“Ever Thought”). “The chaos that erupted the ranks of the ANC when Nelson Mandela

He is talking about the Broome’s hypothesis about alternate realities relating to the Mandela Effect. Ramirez believes the reasoning behind the Mandela Effect to be a fault from the brain called false memory. False memory can be defined when “people remember events differently from the way they happened” (Ever Thought). False memory can occur in several different ways. A very common way false memory occurs is false recognition. “Much like learning a list of words that contain closely related items – such as ‘bed’ and ‘pillow’ – produces false recognition of related, but non presented words – such as ‘sleep’” (Drinkwater). One’s brain will try to find a relationship between the words to help remember them, but in terms remember the wrong word instead, which can lead to the false remembrances of certain things. Ramirez extensively studied how our memories work in our brains. He explained that our brains store information from our memories in the part of the brain called the hippocampus. The brain work in the hippocampus does not just help us look back on past events, but it also “enables us to reconstruct the past” (“Ever Thought”). The hippocampus is also the part of the brain that helps one image their future. Ramirez says that our memory is far from a perfect remembrance of the event at hand, “...the second we recall a memory, our brain immediately begins the process of modifying it with bits and pieces of new information. Our resulting recollection is, by nature, impure: “Every memory is a kind of almost mild false memory” (Ever Thought). Ramirez sees part of the reason the false memory becomes such a popular idea is because “Sometimes when you have multiple people with imperfect memories confirm each other's bias about that particular memory, then it's more likely to kind of