92 | June• 2018
committing a crime – theft, assault
with a weapon and police contact- and after three interviews using
leading techniques and imagination
exercises, we see that 70 per cent of
them accept that they’re guilty of
a crime that they didn’t commit.”
But not everybody accepts the
explanation that false memories
are a by-product of our imperfect
brains. Fiona Broome, a para-
normal consultant from Florida,
coined the term the ‘Mandela Ef-
fect’ in 2010 when she realised she
wasn’t the only person to remember
Nelson Mandela’s funeral, 30 years
before he actually died. She discov-
ered that hundreds of people across
the world shared the same richly de-
tailed false memory.
So what causes these eerily similar
collective false memories? Broome
speculates that we’re all “sliding be-
tween parallel realities ... that some-
how have glitches.” She proposes a
version of the quantum mechanic
‘multiverse’ theory, which speculates
that there could be many universes
all existing simultaneously.
Multiverse theor y was hypothe-
sised to explain physics experiments,
but nevertheless, Mandela Efect en-
thusiasts enjoy speculating that their
false memories are windows between
worlds, not simple human errors.
Professor Chris French, from
Goldsmiths University, in London,
is sceptical.
“We have a tendency to put
vulnerable to fabrication. In fact, be-
cause we tend to be more conident
about our memories of emotional or
traumatic events, they can be even
less reliable than their humdrum
counterparts.
Not only are false memories pos-
sible, psychologists have proved
that they can actually create false
memories, hacking into our brains to
implant recollections of events that
never took place.
Shaw is one such psychologist.
“I get people to repeatedly imagine
‘Memory hacker’
Dr Julia Shaw claims
she can implant
false memories of
committing a crime in
70 per cent of people