Originally published at: New scientific paper shows the Mandela Effect is real | Boing Boing
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Alternate reality bleed through. You’re remembering the correct picture- you just slipped through to a very adjacent reality.
That is not really your beautiful house.
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Obviously, because we are living in a simulation and carry residual memories of past iterations. It’s so clear! (/s)
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I don’t understand what you mean about the Berenstain Bears. Is it that the bears themselves weren’t named Berenstain? Because they were definitely called “The Berenstain Bears”.
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It’s the spelling. Most people think they were the Berenstein Bears.
Which illustrates the most likely explanation for the effect. We all have the same cognitive biases (I like to call them mind grooves - we get stuck in the same grooves).
“Luke, I am your father” is a much more obvious quote than the real one.
“Berenstein” is a much more obvious spelling.
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But many people remember them being called The BerenstEin Bears, is the thing.
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This is like that video clip where people claim to have seen a gorilla while they were watching a group of people passing a basketball between themselves. But there never was a gorilla
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I can see how the Mandela Effect is people misremembering certain details about something and then, through discussion with others, reinforcing that.
But I know I thought it was nice Jaws found someone like him when Dolly smiled and revealed a mouth full of braces in Moonraker.
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Except the really freaky thing for me is that I distinctly remember puzzling over the pronunciation of “Bernstein” when I was a little kid - was it pronounced with a long “i” or a long “e”? So it’s not just the spelling itself, but a whole complex of memories associated with it, that are supposedly suspect. Not buying it. 
And the Fruit of the Loom logo 100% had a cornucopia in it back in the day. I’ll die on that hill.
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Quoting the Darth Vader quote accurately loses something. The “no” adds nothing when taken out of context and the quote doesn’t stand up on its own. Replacing the “No” with “Luke” more accurately reflects people’s memory of the meaning than an accurate quote and makes the kine work better as a “quote” taken out of context. Often the best lines in a film are the best because of the context not because of the words.
A similar example is “Play it again, Sam” communicates the significance of the moment better than the actual line “play it, Sam” which is a better line in the context of the actual film where “again” would be a bit on the nose.
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This is pretty much the conceptual focus of the plot of “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat”, X-Files, S11.E4.
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but seriously, things went completely sideways when the Cubs won the World Series. My theory is that is the point when we switched timelines.
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Not too long ago, I read about how the Mandela Effect was scientifically proven to be real.
But now I’m wondering if I’m mis-remembering that…
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Yeah, it did.
Not ‘a hill,’ and I’m not ‘dying’ anytime soon; but that one is a real memory AFAIAC, because I distinctly recall trying to draw it when I was about 4 or 5, and I remember not knowing what ‘the horn’ was actually called.
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There darn well was a gorilla, too! I saw it with my own eyes! (Don’t recall anything much about any people playing with a basketball - you probably misremembered that.) 
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“New scientific paper shows the Mandela Effect is real”.
The paper is new, the research conclusions are not new. Research showing that false memories are a very real phenomenon has been going on for almost 50 years.
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Yeah - “reconfirms” would be better than “shows” in that headline.
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Huh? No, it just means misconceptions get passed around in society. No new study was required to know that.
“The Mandela Effect” is just standard misinformation that humans have always passed around without thinking much about it, but given an interesting-sounding name that gets people all excited.
Furthermore, our memories are modified every time we access them. So you might have had the correct spelling of Berenstain Bears in your memory from seeing a book when you were little. However if someone you trust tells you it was spelled Berenstein, your brain modifies that image in your memory to match the new spelling. This is why human memory is garbage and shouldn’t considered trustworthy for anything important.
Again, none of this is new. We’ve known all this for a very long time.
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Yeah, right. Next you’ll be telling me this is not my beautiful wife.
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You likely recall drawing a cornucopia with fruit at school/preschool/kindergarten/home around Thanksgiving. I know that’s where my brain got the cornucopia connected to the Fruit of the Loom logo.
All of these have pretty obvious explanations. Names ending in stein are common. Names ending in stain or steen are not (I’ve come across people surprised to learn it’s not Bruce Springstein). The name of the effect itself, Mandela, is likely the result of people confusing Nelson Mandela with Steve Biko.
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