28 January/February 2022
Science
9
// B Y D A I S Y H E R N A N D E Z //PHOTO ILLUSTRATION CREATED BY ELENI DIMOU USING GETTY IMAGES (BACKGROUND, MONOPOLY MAN); PER-ANDERS PETTERSSON/GETTY IMAGES (MANDELA); PANTHER MEDIA GMBH/ALAMY (LOONEY TUNES); PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY (CURIOUS GEORGE)I
F YOU REMEMBER WHEN MONOPOLY’S RICH
Uncle Pennybags wore a monocle, or when
Curious George had a tail, or when Looney
To o n s graced your childhood TV set, you’re
wrong. Pennybags has perfect vision, Curious
George is as tail-less as a guinea pig, and the
show is correctly spelled Looney Tunes. But
before you question your reality, you’re not alone.
People all over the world have these same mis-
recollections. It’s called the Mandela Effect, and
the term can be traced back to one person’s inac-
curate memory.
In the 1980s, a self-described paranormal
researcher named Fiona Broome claimed that
she remembered hearing about the death of
Nelson Mandela, the prominent South African anti-
apartheid activist, while he was in prison. However,
Mandela emerged from prison in 1990 and went on
to become president of South Africa in 1994. Broome
wasn’t the only person to “remember” Mandela’s
death. After hearing from other people who had
similar recollections of Mandela’s passing, Broome
created a website to recount her false memory and
dubbed the occurrence the Mandela Effect.
Memories are unreliable for many reasons, but a
contributing factor might be the complex arrange-
ment of memor y storage in our brains. We don’t have
a central memor y storage unit. “Different aspects of
experiences are stored in different parts of the brain,
and they are linked together by a brain structure
known as the hippocampus,” says Daniel Schacter,
Ph.D., a Harvard professor, psychologist, and author
of The Seven Sins of Memory. The hippocampus
resides in the temporal lobe. It’s the metaphorical
intersection of our brains’ complex memory high-
way, and it stores our long-term memories.
To retrieve a memory, we have to use differ-
ent parts of our brains and “different elements of
an experience,” says Schacter. Memories are psy-
chological combinations of visual perceptions,
auditory perceptions, and emotional responses.
They’re not like photos, Schacter says. “They
ref lect our interpretations of our experiences, and
are not literal recordings of what happened.” Mem-
ories are complicated even more by the inf luence
of stored knowledge and past associations. When
our brains don’t have all the information they need
to relay a full memory, they fill our memory gaps
with educated guesses based in what they already
think is true. That’s when things become confusedThe Science
Behind the
Reality-Bending
Mandela Effect