Mandela Effect: Simple to Exotic

Explanations for what the Mandela Effect is ranges from simple to exotic. At its simplest it is faulty memory experience by a relatively few individuals. For example one can count the number of people who assert that in their childhood Froot Loops was actually Fruit Loops in the hundreds to maybe a few thousand people. Statistically the number must be exceedingly small compared to the set of everyone who ever saw a box of the cereal. A few people go as far as claiming the box art changed recently and sometimes even as they watched it happen. While the claims of Fruit being the spelling and people claiming to have seen it in the store, nobody seems to have thought to buy the box and keep it as proof of their experience.

There are many other spelling, logo and grammar and punctuation examples to give, but they all lead to the exact same place: Either something changed the past or the claimants are self-reporting their memory fault. Memory faults are not necessarily a disability or critical malfunction. The way humans store memory is fraught with the opportunity to infill missing pieces and for personal preference to color what the memory consists of.

In some instances a memory trace is colored with an agenda that must be maintained. Such is the discrepancy in the size of the Presidential Limo of the JFK Assassination on November 22, 1963. The claimants of a 4-seat limo neglect the presence of Mrs. Connally. She necessarily must have been elsewhere if the limo did not have 6 seats. To account for that missing personage, the 4-seat claimants must infill their memories with alleged evidence that she indeed was elsewhere for some good reason. There are several alleged images of a 4-seat limo, but at critical review the photo fails to substantiate the 4-seat claim.

JFJ Limo at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit
used by permission from Robert Carlson

The following picture is purportedly shown a 4-seat limo but still shows the partition between the driver row and the middle row where Gov. Connally is sitting. Notice the missing steering wheel and driver if this is a 4-seat limo.

This photo is a non-evidentiary photo shot to accompany the magazine article. Notice the wilted flowers to suggest this is the limo but the total lack of blood splatter anywhere in the back seat.

These three photos suggest nothing of the Mandela Effect in this matter. Maybe some evidence still persists, but we have not yet seen any of it.

Timeline Alterations

A few people have become convinced that they are from an alternate timeline. They have slid into this reality from one where what they remember is what actually was the conditions and events of their earlier lives. They arrive here with a snapshot recollection of how it was in their world, but cannot fit it into a cohesive cause and effect timeline the remainder of us experience.

Some of them have visual memories of Australia being 1,000 miles further south. Some of them claim for them South America was 1,000 miles further west than it is in the reality most of us have ever known. While they have a strong emotional connection with their recollections of South America they all fail to mention that 1,000 miles would also have shifted the internationally recognized time zone layout of South America.

Every single mention of alternate continental placement on the globe can be attributed to flat map projection differences. How is it that a person can believe they came from an alternate Earth over the idea the cartographer was not very accurate? Just for the Flat Earth readers of this Post: If the Earth were indeed flat, the map makers would not have had to resort to so many different projections. One would do.

Earth Two

A couple of the followers of Mandela Effect strangeness have also cited the massive relocation of Earth from the Sagittarius Arm to the Orion Spur as an explanation for why they remember facts and figures which are otherwise dubious and not recognized by their peers. Whether the Earth and solar system was moved or whether it was replicated 10,000 light-years away is not germane. Somebody would have had to go to extreme limits to accomplish such a task to benefit “such poor little lambs as we.”

The assertion is the New Earth is not quite the same as the Old Earth. They make a few errors in their pre-move survey. Some people remember Old Earth while those who are now awake see the New Earth for what it is. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy discusses the summary destruction of Earth to make way for an Inter-galactic super highway. Afterwards the Galactic council must rebuild the Earth and repopulate with those people who were unjustly destroyed. They decide to make it a better place than before, somewhat like a Disneyland perfection.

I’d say the construction crew did not go nearly far enough to fix the ills of the Old Earth. I expect more than a return to “normal.”

Simulated Reality

I like the concept that we live in a simulated reality. If that is true then there is no “higher” level to go. We are just subroutines running in some supermassive computing system. Frank J. Tipler wrote about such a future of mankind in his book, The Physics of Immortality. At some point in the future we will be able to resurrect every person who ever was, including those who died as infants, or never really existed because the egg was not fertilized and carried to term. We would necessarily do that in a cyber environment due to the limitations of universe energy to support all the flesh and blood bodies. But then it would make no difference. If we are conscious beings with a real or imagined Free Will being “real” or simulated would be no different.

Issac Azimov posited the problem of Entropy in the short story, The Last Question. In that story all the stars were burning down and at some point there would be zero energy to power the continuation of mankind’s’ consciousness in the simulated world to which we were forced to move.

The Real Simulation

All science fiction aside and all conspiracy theories dispelled, we do exist in a simulated universe. Ponder this: We do not actually see a tree in the forest or a building on the street. What we see is only the light waves reflecting off their surfaces. That patterning of light is ALREADY A SIMULATION. Your entire eye is smaller than a chicken egg. The light sensitive surface inside is about the size of your thumbnail. It being so small doesn’t stop you from seeing the panorama of the Grand Canyon. The image on the thumbnail sized retina is actually upside-down. It is physically inside your skull (whether or not you believe our skeletons changed to add boney parts behind the eyes). You see it as though it was “out there”. Several miles of horizon image fits on the retina and in your head. Then later your brain can “resimulate” it again as you dream about seeing the Grand Canyon. Quite an amazing simulation if I do say. Each and every conscious mind is its own computer processing a shared database of “reality.”

Sounds work the same way.

The Takeaway

Everyone can have fun imagining what causes the phenomenon of memory not matching the current reality. Just don’t take it all too seriously or you may be relegated to the ranks of the goofy and eccentric.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

Keep pondering and speculating, the answers to your questions may yet to be revealed.

Are ME Observations Just a Glitch in The Matrix

A number of people believe that ME evidence is related to glitches in The Matrix. The Matrix being a computer simulation is the most prevalent suggestion for what it is.

This simulation supposes a computer and memory medium which they cannot see or experience. The simulation also requires coders and someone to build it. We can speculate widely on if they are reptilian aliens, the illuminati, satan and his minions, our future selves or someone else entirely.

This simulated human life in a simulated environment begs this most important question: Where are you really and what exactly are you? Following this question is if you get out of this Matrix, would you like what you find?

The Mandela Effect: Real or Imagined

Because it is an observed phenomenon one cannot declare it doesn't exist. Therefore, it can be both real AND imagined. At lease WHAT it is can be imagined. Perusing the blogs, Facebook pages and Youtube vids there are a myriad range of mundane to fantastical explanations for the experience.

On the mundane end of the spectrum there is the idea that some people misremember a fact or event and find dozens to hundreds of other people who similarly misremember it and they share their experiences in internet forums. As such, the Internet facilitates a filter-effect to bring together these people.

On the opposite extreme, there is the hypothesis we are now living in a virtual simulation after the Earth has been destroyed in some unspecified calamity such as an asteroid strike or alien invasion. Taking this idea to the extreme extreme, maybe our entire existence has never been anything but a simulation. In that case, there is no There out there to go back to and we ought to get used to being a simulation.

Along the continuum of possible causes of the Mandela Effect there are explanations of varying complexity. Below are a few of those possibilities.

Different time-lines of cause and effect are colliding due to natural aging of the Universe. Fruit Loops and Froot Loops, Berenstain and Berenstein, Sex in the City and Sex and the City, et al. each exist in their respective time-lines and are now confusing us here in this time-line. I suppose the people in the other time-line are equally confounded by their disparities.

Going a bit further afield, the Mandela Effect may be the result of entire QuantumUniverses merging long enough for a few people to get trapped on the wrong side of the membrane. They remember their history and tell us about it. In their version, South America is farther to the west than it is here. Australia had another land mass off its western shore although no one has come up with its name yet.

Some people suggest that the effect is man-made and possibly due to the activities at the CERN facilities on the French-Swiss border. The CERN high-energy experiments are hypothesized to be opening alternate dimensions, merging time-lines and messing with the past. Calls to shut down the plant fall of deaf ears even as more examples of the Mandela Effect are catalogs and debated ad naseum.

If the alterations of our past is the real cause of the Effect and that cause is natural, we can only get used to it happening.

If it is a man-made Effect (possibly by the activities at CERN) we can likewise not stop the changes from happening. The suggested impacts of the CERN experiments ripple across time and universe membranes. We would have to stop the CERN lab in every universe and in all time in order to eradicate it. Just the mere suggestion of stopping CERN in all Universes creates more Universes where it must be stopped. Since today's CERN activities alter our past so would future CERN activities (both here and in all Universes.) Oddly, even past CERN activity can still alter out past as well as our future.

Sadly, if we all have been relocated to the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way from the Orion arm by some superior civilization, there is no going back. Planet Krypton exploded and Kal-El cannot go home without traveling back it time to a point before it went boom.

If you wake up in a different Universe or time-line, you best get used to your new life because unless you are Jim Belucci in Mr. Destiny, George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life or Jack Campbell in Family Man, when you see the alternate life you don't get to go back.

Actual Changes to the Past

Actual changes to the past is a far more difficult concept to wrap ones head around than is the idea that alternate pasts already exist and only some of us have a recollection of them. Both concepts require an agent of causation which today is not widely accepted by the scientific community nor the totality of people who assert they are the beneficiaries of selective knowledge.

For some people the explanation for differing memories is that they themselves appeared in this reality from a different timeline. While this is a lofty and romantic notion, precisely how many ME examples did it take to bring them to that conclusion? Is it a preponderance of examples that helped form their conclusion or is it a feeling that it must be so? A lot of people assert they remember the ME namesake, Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s but when pressed for any details such as the date, they are absent an answer.

The opposite condition is also an explanation. In that variation, in is not the observer who made the transitions between realities but the events themselves. To those observers the alternate events and conditions are only represented in their memories but not in any remaining physical artifacts.

This brings us to the variation where a single coherent past is actually modified by some (as yet) unspecified agent of causation. The LHC at CERN is one alleged cause. A superior alien civilization is another. Our future selves as time travelers are also suspect. Even ancient earthly civilizations residing inside a hollow earth are hypothesized as the instigators. Lastly, mere quantum perturbation might result in a spontaneous modification of what was originally manifest and some people escaped knowing about the change.

"My biggest smack in the side of the head was digging out my old copy of Springsteen's Born in the USA to see that it indeed is now a red visor cap in his pocket not his signature red bandanna."

Realizing that all matter is really energy waves until an observer observes them makes the next explanation plausible. Every two (or more) waves which interact with each other encode their own natures in each other. Waves move in the three ordinal directions (x,y,z) and one of time (present into the future). Waves also move in the negative ordinal directions. There is nothing to stop them from moving in a negative time direction also.

How far back they have an impact has never been fully explored, although physicists know waves do this. They also know future events help determine the causative events which made the future what it is (will be.)  ME experiences may be a manifestation of backward traveling Event Waves which mix with the "immutable past" and alter it in small, medium and large ways. We only see the changes to things which we have recent memories of with to compare. for example we can discuss the apparent changes of a word in the Bible because we have a Bible to go look it up in. But in a Retroactive Event Modification wave removed an entire chapter from the bible, we could only speculate on its name and what it said. We might go looking at the list of "Lost Books" of the Bible that were proposed but never approved as possible candidates.

So now at this point in time each person must choose his/her own explanation for what they believe.

Mass Brainwashing

Mass Brainwashing

People who clearly recall some little detail in popular culture differently than can be seen by looking at "evidence" have come up with a spectrum of causes ranging from "I just always thought..." to we are all living in a simulation controlled by superior beings, are being manipulated in everything we see, hear and do while the Mandela Effect are glitches in the matrix we are not supposed to notice but do. To some people the superior ones are the Illuminati while for others it is lizard people from Saturn or Nibiru. Another popular explanation is time travelers who are having a go at us with silly bugger changes.

The alterations of popular culture is the possible way to make anyone aware of the changes being made. In a nutshell, most ordinary people are not known by a sufficient number of other outspoken people for it to ever be known they used to have 6 fingers on each hand but somehow now it's only five. Without photographs there would only be a few people who ever knew.

On the other hand, Bart Simpson is far more real in popular culture than most actual human beings. Millions of people have seen him and know of his antics. They know how many fingers he has on each hand. Five, right? Oh, no, now it is only four. And its every character from the very first show.  His signature saying, "don't have cows, dude," would be remembered by most of them. At least the ones who watched from the early days before he stopped saying it."

The idea that a powerful alien civilization has made this simulated world just for us is more than a little bit Christian in its formation. Very Biblical. Genesis to be exact. Even the one god of genesis say WE when they refer to themselves and the making of the world in six days.

Another suggestion is we were all "natural" flesh and blood creatures until the end of the Mayan Calendar in December 2012 when its end signified that something catastrophic "might have happened" and we all were resurrected in this simulated world. ME and déjà vu are glitches in the software. What was so special about humanity that it warranted being recreated in a cyber world that is exactly as flawed as the old one was? The architects of this simulation decided that all 7 billion people needed to be preserved even though they will appear to suffer and die of environmental and manufactured causes. Or are all those "others" just non-conscious props for the benefit of we who are sentient and conscious as in "Breakfast of Champions?" That is a dangerous supposition that will allow us to minimalize the plight of those others.

This brings us to the concept of us all being brainwashed into thinking we are more than we are and need all the stuf (or stuff) that is being sold. Exactly to what end are we being enslaved by the brainwashing? Automation is making human labor obsolete. Soon there will be few if any people working. Everyone will be given their "daily bread" by the masters just for standing around being submissive. Again very Biblical.

The whole idea of a massive slave population is a bad one at best. Consider 7 billion people all wanting the attention of the Master, dependent for everything. This is why parents expect their children will eventually grow up and move away and many times kick them out after 18 to 20 years and told to get a job.

Next up: Actual Changes of the Past

Three Phases of ME

Thousands of people have the sense that something in their past has changed and only a few other people have any sense of it happening. The phenomenon has been labeled "Mandela Effect" by Fiona Broome.  To them the question becomes: did something alter mine and many other peoples' memories or did the Past actually change. For them there is only those two possibilities.

A third explanation emerges which is equally able to describe and explain the experiences people have with respect to the Effect. Briefly the Mandela Effect is a memory fluke which is derived from the reports that when Nelson died on December 5, 2013, Houghton Estate, Johannesburg, South Africa (Wikipedia) people surfaced who said they thought he had died in prison many years earlier. To them Mr. Mandela never was the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and the man who presided over the dismantling of the Apartheid government. While they "clearly remember" him dying in prison, they have no idea who was the President during the years 1994-1999 in South Africa. Basically, they were not paying close enough attention to African politics at the time.

This third explanations requires a large communication portal wherein large numbers of people can read what others say and post their own responses to either agree with or disagree with what is said. The Internets create this great filter through which the information flows. Many hundreds if not thousands of participants add their part to the collective recollections. Without the ability to communicate with large numbers of people who appear to have the same recollection there could be no body of knowledge we now call the Mandela Effect. Each person would casually dismiss their own recall as being faulty with no corroboration from others to validate the error of that memory.

Now that the phenomenon has a name, multiple Youtube channels and a presence on Facebook and Twitter, many more people are able to validate their faulty memories.  The erroneous memories seem to only manifest in pairs. It was THIS way or it was THAT way as in Berenstain and Berenstein Bears, or Fruit Loops vs Froot Loops. In this manner the cause in not likely a merging of quantum realities since many other permutations of the alternate spellings of word choices would have equally probable presence. We should see many different appearances.

Should some time traveling adventurer return to our past and make changes, he or she would be wasting massive amounts of high-energy resources to Punk us here in the early 21st century. Adding a dividing line in the VW logo, a curly F in the Ford logo or the "male arrow" to the other circular Volvo logo, would be playing silly buggers with us here for no apparent reason.

The ability to aggregate opinion via a massive telecomm system facilitates the Mandela Effect. Cartographers have from time to time emphasized and deemphasized the presentation of the spherical planet onto a flat piece of paper. Until an accurate time piece was made which remained accurate during turbulent sea voyages, longitude was a "best guess" by the navigators who were on the exploratory trips around the globe. As their skill improved as well as the accuracy of their clocks, so were their maps.

Ship's Captains commissioned by Kings were not adverse to stretch the extents of their travels with deceptive maps. After all there was no one to challenge their veracity. Recall that Christopher Columbus was not looking for two new continents but a westward route to the India and China. Imagine Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand saying," But I always thought the world was flat and resting of the back or a turtle. Something must have changed."

So now is it that the person feeling the Mandela Effect is merely being wrong or did someone tamper with his brain?  Next up: Mass brainwashing.

To ME or not to ME

During the previous decade there has arisen an assertion that millions of people have experienced a "memory phenomenon" wherein they remember facts, events, visual presentations which are not substantiated by an historical review of what the vast majority of people both remember and now today see.

Simple differences can be shown in whether or not there is an apostrophe in a brand name, an "s" at the end of a celebrity's name, a word or two different in a title or movie dialog. The most elaborate difference claimed by various persons is whether the Presidential motorcade limousine in which JFK was assassinated has/had two rows of seats or three. The emotional attachment a person has to his experience and his explanation for how it came to be makes much of their testimony suspect.

Even though there IS a physical mechanism for how the past might become altered and for there to be convergences of quantum realities, much of that has been put forth as evidence has little probability of being accurate.  Many claimants say proof of their experiences and recollections are accurate. One only has to cite examples of errors which are not Mandela Effect related to show most of the examples fall in the "not ME" category. One of the hallmarks of a compelling ME example is there is zero physical evidence to point to. If there are such artifacts those artifacts can be attributed to raising the confusion in the first place.

Pic of the album in my vinyl collection

Compelling ME examples are the VW logo, the Volvo logo and the Red hat/bandanna of Springsteen's Born in the USA album. In the latter example the hat is highly unusual since Bruce did not use such a hat in his personal image but did use a red bandanna.
Advertisers have used the phrase "feeling ones oats" to signify the vitality a person will get if they breakfast on their cereal. That phrase has been around a long time and has gained a meaning of its own apart from the original words "fielding ones (wild) oats."  Its meaning and usage is not appropriate for oat cereal products. To most people reading this blog post the "feeling" variant is the only one they ever herd and the reference to springtime reproductive rites is unknown. The change took place was and propagated so widely that the original phrase is mostly unknown. It is highly unlikely that "feeling" would ever be altered to be "fielding."

Here is another phrase to consider. It's a"tough road to hoe."  Why is it a road with a hoe? how many people hoe a road? Well even though common usage had made it a road the phrase is "row to hoe" as in farming or gardening in dense hard-packed soil. Similarly to the previous example in is highly unlikely a road reference would ever become a farming reference.

The English language is a highly volatile and flexible one where nuances can be made with the sweep of a pen, words sound similar and most people do not practice diction to a high degree. Graphic designers love to make unique and memorable messages by altering some small part of the images and text. Therefore, unusual spellings are not that unusual.

If the "real original" name and spelling was Berenstein Bears it would be highly improbable people would gloss over the spelling and come up with Berenstain by accident.  The converse is not equally probable.

A subset of people reporting ME experiences also impute that they are from an alternate timeline of the Earth. Their observation is of such things as continental positioning. In particular South America seems to now be about a thousand miles further east than they remember it being located. Neglecting cartographers' variations the continents do move. South America did diverge from Africa and move westward to where it is today. Tectonic pressures are are now pushing it eastward again. For an alternate timeline explanation to hold true, both variations must have been possible but differently manifest. Internal Earth pressures did likely place the South American continent in each of the reported positions. A spurious event would necessarily have at some date in the multi-million years ago past happened or not happened to result in the position of today. For those people the alternate timeline hypothesis holds at least some water.

The other big geological example is the alleged land mass west of Australia. While some people have a "recollection" of such a place, they have no name for it or and physical description of its character. There is no unemerged sub-sea formation which alternate time references would either create or suppress its rise to dry land in the region. For their supposition to hold any validity we need to elevate their hypothesis from mere alternate timeline to a completely different manifestation of Earth itself.

There is no consistency yet for what the ME actually is:

1. Illusion
2. Wishful-thinking
3. Manipulated memory
4. Erroneous memory
5. A timeline phenomenon
6. Converging realities
7. Alteration of the past
8. Some even more exotic cause

My opinion is #7 by a combination of natural and man-made causation.