Feature by Ayan Gupta
It was in 2009 that a lady named Fiona Broome coined the phrase, “The Mandela Effect” while attending a conference.
She talked about her realistic and very certain memories of how the South African president Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s.
But this was an odd recollection to have since, at the time, Nelson Mandela was alive and well, as everyone else in the conference knew.
But Fiona and thousands of others had very vivid memories of Nelson Mandela dying in an African prison.
Fiona started blogging about this false memory. And hundreds of thousands of people from all around the world commented about how they had experienced similar false memories.
The most common examples were of people remembering “Jiffy Peanut butter” and “Loony Toons” when the real characters were in fact “Jif Peanut Butter” and “Looney Tunes”.
This curiously named effect is said to occur when a person believes their distorted memories are accurate, but in reality, it does not involve lying or deception.
Several other people remember Mr Monopoly or Rich Uncle Pennybags with a moustache, a suit and tie, a hat, and a monocle. But on checking, we can easily find that Rich Uncle Pennybags does not wear a monocle. He doesn’t and never has since his appearance in 1995 when the game first came out. So, why do so many people remember him that way?
The Mandela effect has nothing to do with lying or deception. When someone talks to you about something that is inaccurate but they think is accurate, it is simply that their memories are mixed up.
Another example of this effect is that on iPhones when you use iMessage, there is a robber emoji, but there isn’t. The robber emoji is a false memory, and we think of a robber emoji because there is a ninja emoji. This weirdly fascinating effect reminds us how subjective memory can be.