My Personal Mandela Effects

Just to warn you: much of this is going to sound seriously delusional.

You could be forgiven for scepticism about Mandela Effects (MEs) and there is a case for confabulation. My approach to other people who report widely held collective memories which differ drastically from those of others is to try to adopt an active listening approach rather than something which might be seen as closer to a scientific one, because often the claim that the world has almost flawlessly shifted around them and therefore that evidence is no longer available to test their beliefs means that it would be unfair to apply the scientific method. There’s rationality and there’s the scientific method, and the two are not the same. This means that certain positions which could be rationally believed but not tested are not only excluded from science, as they should be, but also deprecated because they can’t be fitted into science. That’s different from them not being true.

My definition of the Mandela Effect is that it’s a widely held memory discrepancy. One group of people, often not in prior contact with each other, agree that a certain observable thing, often a memory, was not the way another group of people remember it to be. It’s named after the common experience that many people appear to remember that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, which led to a successful revolution to overthrow apartheid. In “fact”, Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, became president of South Africa and died in 2013. There is an element of the idea that one is entitled to one’s own facts about this, and it’s easy to illustrate examples of how this might happen with agreement between the people who are “wrong”. I always think of the Welsh placename Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch with the four consecutive L’s towards the end. It’s a difficult name to remember and if one knew little about the Welsh language and therefore couldn’t make sense of what it means, one could easily remember that there was a different number of L’s at that point, and it’s also possible that a large number of people might remember it that way.

I want to make a couple of observations in this post about the nature of my own MEs and what the existence of MEs might suggest about the nature of reality. Some people believe they have

Imagine for a second that a ring of ants is crawling, almost vertically, down a white mug with a red handle on one side and a blue one on the other. At the top, they will have approximately the same experience although most printed designs on the mug would lead to some discrepancies which, however, could be reconciled by interviewing the ants about their experience. Yes, these are unusually anthropomorphised ants. When they reach the level of the handles, some of them will crawl over the red handle, some over the blue one and some will continue to walk over the main body of the cup. When they reach the bottom, unaware of their different paths, they will have different memories of the past. Some of them will remember crawling over a blue surface, some over a red one, and some over a white one. Nonetheless, all of these memories are accurate.

We are living at a time of particularly strong connectivity between people and new opportunities to compare experiences. We assume that the worlds of other people are somewhat similar to our own. However, it isn’t clear that knowledge, as it were, forms a united whole or that there is an objective world out there to be observed. There are, for instance, discrepancies between how leech experts and other annelid experts classify leeches and discrepancies between psychological and educational approaches to learning. Maybe they’re all true. Maybe the world is not a simply-connected surface like a plane or a sphere, but, as it were, has “handles”. This would lead to an underlying truth about the nature of reality becoming obscure.

Belief in the Mandela Effect is easily stigmatised and it’s also true that many people who do believe in it have other unpopular opinions. However, delusional people often tend to have few false negatives in their belief systems. Someone might falsely imagine they are a targeted individual, but if their partner really is cheating on them they’re more likely to notice. Likewise, there may be a load of discredited and unusual beliefs also held by people who believe in the ME, but to argue that this makes the ME itself dubious could be a form of the ad hominem fallacy. I’ve gone into my detailed arguments on the ME here and in several other places on this blog. What I don’t do is link these beliefs of mine to anything else which is widely held but poorly supported. I realise this leaves me out on a limb, but I’m used to that. My views on panpsychism do as well. So be it.

The signal to noise ratio with respect to MEs may be very low and I deliberately avoid considering most of the pop culture ones such as Isaiah 11:6. It could even be argued that my own MEs are that only by name because they are not very widely held. The situation is in fact that I share the beliefs I’m about to mention with two other people I know face to face. One of them is someone who lived in the same village as me when I was a child. The other is someone who lived two counties away from me, whom I first met when I was nineteen and we only realised we had the same discrepancies during the ‘noughties. In both cases, the person concerned mentioned the discrepancies to me before I mentioned them to them and there was also a permanent written record of the discrepancies I made in the early 1980s written down in a notebook in a sealed box in the loft of my parents’ home which as far as I know nobody else has seen. Therefore, the possibility that my memories were modified by the interaction or my own recall is not plausible, and the possibility that either person who shares them was playing a prank is also pretty unlikely. I’m not aware that either of them was ever in the attic of my parents’ house and nor can I think of any reason why either of them would be.

These are the memories:

• A domestic robot was developed between 1971 and 1975 which was able to do simple household tasks and read text aloud.
• A much simpler robot, resembling a planetarium projector, was installed as an exhibition in the London Science Museum. It was able to follow movement, heat and light, and was run using cultured mole neurons as a controlling device.
• In 1977, a method was devised to assess children’s intelligence at the age of eleven which involved the use of magnetic devices to scan their brains and they were then sorted into selective and non-selective schools on the strength of the results. This led to a scandal when it emerged that there was no evidence to support its accuracy.
• Domestic recycling was routine by 1972.
• A technique was developed to neutralise toxic waste and convert it into two components, one like wet sand and the other a clear liquid, which was then used in municipal building projects. After a few years, people began to suffer severe health problems such as cancer from exposure to the waste, which was in fact not neutralised at all. I think this was supposed to be an alternative to landfill. It also led to a scandal when it became clear how many people had died or fallen ill as a result of this practice.
• The northern part of Wisconsin and Michigan broke away from their respective states in the late 1970s and formed a new fifty-first US state.

There are a number of oddities about these memories. One is that they don’t closely resemble the usual MEs because they have major consequences, which are of course not evident because they “didn’t happen”. For instance, two of them involve national scandals which had a big impact on thousands of people. In fact, several of these are linked by something like a major popular campaign. After some investigation, it turned out that there has been a movement to carve out a new US state from northern Michigan and Wisconsin, although this wasn’t widely known in the UK and doesn’t correspond to the fact that I saw newspaper headlines and magazine articles about this actually happening, in early 1979. The toxic waste and 11+ scandals share this feature, and it makes it all the more difficult to resolve. Then, the domestic recycling and toxic waste MEs are both connected to waste management. Finally, there is a link involving neurology between the Science Museum robot and the 11+ scandal, and a robotic link between the first two MEs I mentioned.

The question is then what to make of these links. The existence of scandals doesn’t seem to be a causal connection, although if there were to be a concerted attempt to suppress memories this would explain that. However, that way madness lies. It’s basically Targeted Individual territory, so I have to reject that idea for its sheer delusional status, and I also know that TIs correlate perfectly with people with delusional disorders in well-designed studies, so I can reject that explanation as referring to an external reality. The “planetarium robot” is oddly specific because it mentions the species of animal from which the nerve cells were, unfortunately, derived. I was reminded of all this by the news I wrote about here, but this is something happening in the mid-’70s when it was presumably not yet possible to grow mammalian brain cells in vitro, let alone organise them to the extent that they could control a robot. Distasteful though it is, cockroach brains have been used for this kind of thing, but again fairly recently.

What does it mean that there are thematic links? I can think of three possibilities and I’ll mention the boring one first. The boring one is that my mind, and those of the other two people, made connections on a similar theme regarding robots, neurology, waste management and political scandals. The last one is somewhat odd for children to be thinking about, but the scandals didn’t happen until the 1980s. A second possibility is that this was some kind of fake news project directed at children which led to us getting that impression which was somehow not available to adults, perhaps through ‘Newsround’ on children’s television. Possibly just a prank. However, I don’t perceive this as being entirely received through such channels. Memory is of course unreliable. The third possibility is the most intriguing and the closest to some of the most popular speculations about how MEs happen. The first three are all to do with information processing, either by machines or biological means. There could have been a single scientific discovery or technological innovation which led to all of them. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (now known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI) signals were first detected from human subjects in the late 1950s, and imaging was achieved in 1973. The scan in question might in any case have been done by electroencephalogram, in which case it could’ve been achieved much earlier. But there’s an interesting further connection here.

Commonly, people who believe in MEs as significant beyond being mere misremembering or confabulation see them as evidence that we’re living in a simulation or moving between parallel universes. I’ve discussed the simulation argument elsewhere, and I reject the idea of people moving between parallel universes because I don’t think personal identity is sufficiently cohesive for that to be possible. I do, however, believe that unusual brain states of certain kinds can lead to “crossed wires” between different versions of a person in different timelines and consequent acquisition of memories which have occurred for one of them but not the other. Although it’s difficult to imagine how significant quantum effects can occur in the warm, wet and rather large objects which constitute our brains, this still feels like the best explanation to me, and in fact I think the content of my memories supports this. If there is actually an alternate timeline nearby where brain science was advanced enough in the 1970s for the apparent false memories to have happened, it seems likely that there would be more people with unusual brain states of that kind in that timeline which would effectively lead to memories of it being transferred.

Yes, I am aware that this is an utterly bizarre explanation, but its weirdness makes it appeal to this brain. The initial reason I wrote these anomalies down was to use them as a basis for a creative writing project, as by that point I’d become aware that they didn’t appear to correspond to reality and therefore were suitable for use. I think I can still do that regardless of the plausibility of my explanation, and maybe if I do, I will find other people who also have these memories.