The Mandela Effect

[Bellver888]

Has anyone experienced it?
I’m currently sending my head backwards and forwards because I thought “Vimto” was “Vimpto”

@HarrietSchulenberg

I was one of the many people who swore salt n vinegar crisp packets swapped colours with cheese n onion. Apparently they didn't.

They bloody DID!

I remember that, too.

It's taken me all of these years to get used to he swap.

@NotSorry

We haven't said DYB DYB DYB, DOB DOB DOB in Cub Scouts for more than 50 years (since 1967 to be precise), yet people swear they remember saying it when they find out I am a Cub Scout Leader (and quote it at me )

So unless they are over 60 years old, they didn't say it (and it was only for Cubs, never for Scouts)

My brother is 56 and I can remember his cub pack chanting DIB DIB DIB very clearly. Perhaps his Akela was behind the times.

I could have sworn blind that Oscar Pistorius died in prison about 5 years ago. I was amazed to find he's still alive. I'm convinced I saw news items about his death.

@Couchbettato I’ve just had to run upstairs and check my Berenstain books - I also thought they were Berenstein!!

@pinkearedcow

There is an unproven theory that there are an infinite number of universes where every possibility is played out. In other words, there is a universe that is exactly the same as ours, except for the fact Mandela died in the 80s. Somehow, people's memories from one universe have been merged with our own

I love this theory, even though I don't think it is true.

It reminds me of a novel by David Ambrose called The Man Who Turned Into Himself - about a man who finds himself in an alternate universe where JFK was never assassinated (though he was impeached I think) and Marilyn Monroe became the world's favourite grandma.

@HarrietSchulenberg

I was one of the many people who swore salt n vinegar crisp packets swapped colours with cheese n onion. Apparently they didn't.

You're correct, they absolutely bloody well DID!

@SinisterBumFacedCat

Don’t know if this has already been mentioned but there is a whole podcast about this called The Walkers Switch. They even managed to get Gary Linikers opinion on in it. He says Walkers are lying!

Thanks for that, just downloaded it. A whole 2+ hour podcast series about the colour of crisp packets. Amazing.

Slight tangent but I was in Savers the other day and they are selling multipacks of Golden Wonder crisps for 99p. They're so much better than Walkers - and salt and vinegar are blue, cheese and onion are green, (just how they should be). I've got no idea why Walker's dominate the market, they're so greasy and flavourless. Golden Wonder are so much better.

One of my favourites is St John's Ambulance.

Apparently it's not. It has always been St John Ambulance. Weird.

It's definitely pronounced Vimpto. It's the opposite of a "silent p"

Oh and Danielle Steele isn't Danielle Steele, she's Danielle Steel.

Re, Walkers crisps from their website:

Vimto is an anagram of vomit, so it can’t be Vimpto because then the anagram doesn’t work and it makes me laugh every time I think of it.

The Mandela effect is a load of complete and utter bollocks by people looking for woo where none exists.

It is no more than people not paying proper attention the first, or first few times, they come across something. They and their brain thinks, right got it, we know that now, no need to pay much attention to that easily recognisable thing when we come across it again in the future.

Ever done a sum wrong, saw it doesn't look like it adds up right, redone it and got it wrong again in exactly the same way. Same thing.

Possibly human arrogance in thinking that I am too clever to make silly mistakes. The Mandela effect is a further extension of this arrogance I think, insofar as, "I couldn't possibly be that dumb so it must be that the world has partially flipped around my all knowing self...wooooo".

It's an eye roller for me.

@TakeTheCuntOutOfScunthorpe

There are various causes of the Mandela Effect, the honestly-held memory of an event that did not happen. The three most plausible are:

a) Your memory is correct. In the case of Mandela dying in the 1980s,
this could well have happened but he was too useful a figure for the post-Apartheid era so a doppelganger was used and official records adjusted. Alternatively, the original death could have been a hoax to try to stamp out the anti-Apartheid protests, which failed.

b) There is an unproven theory that there are an infinite number of universes where every possibility is played out. In other words, there is a universe that is exactly the same as ours, except for the fact Mandela died in the 80s. Somehow, people's memories from one universe have been merged with our own.

c) We're living in a computer simulation. (This is actually highly possible, arguably it's more likely we are living in a simulation than this being reality.) In our reality, computers are reset, saved data is wiped, but traces are still left on the hard drive. It's equally possible that our data from one fork of simulated reality has traces from another fork.

Personally, a) seems the most likely, if only because it's the easiest to understand. History gets written and rewritten - "facts" can be changed. It reminds me of Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Winston Smith knows for a fact that aeroplanes were invented before Big Brother turned up, but officially - and in most people's mind - Big Brother invented them because every record says that he did. He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.

Do these scenarios have any impact with regards to people that eat all meals at the dining table?

She definitely did @Sobeyondthehills

There's a whole website devoted to people who believe dilemma used to be spelled dilemna

It's nothing to do with people not paying attention, it's more to do with how we encode memories.

We couldn't possibly remember the exact details of every single thing we've ever done or experienced. You'd run out of "storage space". So things get consolidated. You might remember brushing your teeth this morning. But in a few days it will get consolidated into a general sense of what brushing teeth is like. Years later, unless something very memorable happened this morning while you were brushing your teeth, you won't remember this morning's session at all. But you don't forget how to brush your teeth because at this point it is an ingrained process.

However, this kind of consolidation happens for all kinds of memories, even the kinds of things that you think you know exactly where you were, what you were wearing, what you'd had for lunch etc. Sometimes the details will be correct and sometimes they'll be incorrectly consolidated.

I studied A-Level Psychology in 2006. Just 5 years after 9/11. The teacher asked us all to recall exactly where we were and how we found out about it. I later realised that although I remembered coming home from school, putting my school bag down next to the sofa and sitting down to watch the news, that couldn't have been right, because the living room was arranged in a different layout in September 2001. There were photos showing this other layout, I'd simply consolidated my general "come home from school and watch TV" memory with the 9/11 news memory.

@BaggoMcoys

Slight tangent but I was in Savers the other day and they are selling multipacks of Golden Wonder crisps for 99p. They're so much better than Walkers - and salt and vinegar are blue, cheese and onion are green, (just how they should be). I've got no idea why Walker's dominate the market, they're so greasy and flavourless. Golden Wonder are so much better.

Seabrook crisps are far superior to Walkers too. And their cheese and onion has always been in a green packet.

I love cheese and onion crisps but I don't think I've had Golden Wonder since I was a child. I'll have to try theirs out now, even if the packet is the wrong colour. Cheese can be blue!

@DrSbaitso

I think the Mandela effect is when lots of people have the same false memory. Named for the phenomenon of people "remembering" that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. He didn't.

Wtaf?

I'm mystified as to how anyone can possibly think that, when he was SA's first black president and the first to be democratically elected. I get that many people now are too young to actually remember it, but it's a really significant historical event.

I cried. It was so moving.

I'm mystified as to how anyone can possibly think that, when he was SA's first black president and the first to be democratically elected. I get that many people now are too young to actually remember it, but it's a really significant historical event.

Well, I've just looked it up (Wikipedia) and the source is a bit less reliable than I was expecting. A "paranormal consultant" coined the term in a blog post, saying it was her (obviously incorrect) recollection and saying maybe thousands of others have shared it. So perhaps it isn't that widely believed after all. Maybe the Mandela effect is in fact itself a Mandela effect of a false memory of a false memory or....oh I don't know.

@HarrietSchulenberg

I was one of the many people who swore salt n vinegar crisp packets swapped colours with cheese n onion. Apparently they didn't.

They did.......... !!!??

Clearly it should be called the Crisps Effect.

It doesn't matter how many of you say they did, they still did not.