I’ve said it before. All the Mandela Effect stories are easily explainable nonsense except one.
It was called “Interview with A vampire”, damn it. The name has changed even in Spanish. It was “Entrevista con un vampiro”, never “Entrevista con EL vampiro” as google claims it to be.
Looking at it close up on a full screen I can see that one brief shot where it’s clear she’s not wearing braces. The shot before that it looks like she could be. I doubt I could tell that watching the movie on an old TV as I mentioned before. I think you have stated the reason for most of these occurrences, we remember things in the way they should have been. The girl wearing braces would have made much more sense in the movie. Interview with the Vampire should have been name Interview with a Vampire, it just sounds like what a title would be (I assume there’s more meaning to the title for fans of the Rice’s vampire stories but for most people they just recall the name of the movie). Berenstain bears is just mis-remembering the spelling of an uncommon name. I never noticed that C3PO had a silver leg, and I doubt many people have. Even the ending to Big is easy to confuse because another movie had the alternate ending people recall, it’s just confusing the endings of movies not some major event in a person’s life. And I’ve never heard of anyone thinking Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s. Even if you had such a memory in the 80s you’d have to be pretty ignorant of world events following that until his death decades later.
These are just minor issues of memory about unimportant trivial matters, nothing at all like recalling events that never happened or getting significant details wrong in a person’s life experience. Eidetic memory doesn’t exist, we remember most things as a collection of generic information, lots of details get lost and filled along the way, we should expect that, the effect should be called ‘Fuzzy on the details’. It would be more interesting to look into false memories that can’t be explained as an incorrect detail.
I think there’s a significant difference between a faulty memory and a false memory, although in the case of Berenstain/Berenstein it might be tricky to draw the line.
Some people might think it’s Berenstein just because their brains never absorbed the Berenstain spelling in the first place and just assume that that the spelling must be Berenstein because that’s how -stein names are generally spelled.
That’s quite diffeeent from a false memory—that is, having a memory of something that you never actually experienced or something that never happened.
There’s a difference I think between having a memory that gets some details wrong as opposed to a memory that is fundamentally false, in that you are convinced that something happened to you that you factually didn’t experience.
My sincerest apologies for not saying that the girl smiled and had adult braces. Missing such an obvious reference is frankly inexcusable.
Not only that, but that incident was taped in 1977. The story predates that by at least two years - I first heard it in the fall of 1975, and I grew up in a small enough town that it usually took awhile for stories like this to arrive.
Not only that, but the specific line in the legend was “That’d be the butt, Bob”.
Thank you. That was the point I was making about the Berenstain Bears - that, “-stain” being an unusual spelling, people’s memory has clearly “corrected” it.
I’m not seeing the point of the distinction in this case, but if you do, that’s fine by me.
To me, a false memory is just a memory that doesn’t match reality. The Mandela Effect is just the idea that some of the false memories are shared by more than one person.
In my mind, a faulty memory is giving a possible reason why there may be a false memory.
The reason I equated them in writing to you was because faulty memories create false memories, so they lead to the same thing.
My point in writing that post was that it seemed to me that some people were making the “phenomenon” more complicated than it is. It’s merely a memory that doesn’t match reality, often shared by more than one person. There’s not that much mystery around it. The mystery is more around why it happens, which you gave a possible reason for - a faulty memory.
I woke up this morning to see that Chipper Jones was inducted into the baseball hall of fame yesterday. I swear I remember that having happened already two or three years ago.
I do the Moonraker joke would definitely have been better if she had had braces, which makes it harder to accept that she didn’t. Wishful thinking. I think the height difference and her being nerdy with glasses was the ‘joke’ here. They were two kind of opposite misfits. By now it’s been extremely ingrained that nerdy is associated with braces, as evidenced byAndy’s Sister (played by a young Amy Pohler 20 years ago). Then that get’s conflated with “two nerds with braces falling in love” which has been done a lot, most recently in Katy Perry’sTGIF).
BTW, some genius did some VFX work to get the braces “back in.” Works a lot better.
It used to be called the Mandala Effect. When did people start calling it the Mandela Effect?
The ending -stein I have only ever heard pronounced “styne” or “steen.” Never “stain.” But teachers always pronounced is “Berenstain,” and Occam’s razor suggests that it’s easier to forget the spelling than the spoken pronunciation.
That’s one of the most-bumped SDMB threads, but I’m not up to date on the research - what is the other movie?
Mandrills have a little stubby one. But he is, most definitely, not a mandrill.
“14 Going on 30”. Ending linked in earlier post:
If we’re also including false memories personal to us, I have a very clear memory of being on a school bus, on the way back from a field trip my senior year of high school, and hearing for the first time the revised “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John that was released shortly after Princess Di’s death. I even remember the road we were driving on when the song. My friend Heather was sitting beside me, and it bummed her out too.
The problem is that Princess Di died just before I started my junior year of college, and I hadn’t been on a school bus for more than two years at that point, and I hadn’t seen Heather in about a year.
I can’t tell if you’re joking. Is this a whoosh about the Mandela Effect of remembering the term Mandala Effect? Except not many people do remember that from what I can tell.
I did a search on the Mandala Effect and got almost no hits except for people joking or mistyping.
In case you weren’t joking, the term was coined in 2010 and is based on the shared memory about Nelson Mandela.
From the wiki on False memory linked earlier in the thread.
Are you guys talking about the Mengele Effect?
Wikipedia says he drowned, but I distinctly remember him attempting to breed child Hitlers and then being eaten by dogs.
I thought it was the Mandola Effect.
I could have sworn Bill Monroe used to play a lower pitched instrument.
I’m think it’s the Mandarin Effect. Like when you remember a city called Canton but then find out it’s called Guangzhou.
I previously posted this in the “Obvious things about creative works” thread in CS:
