The Mandela Effect: The Accuracy Of The Brain

Remembering something that never happened can be dangerous. False memories are seen as a touchy subject in the psychology field. They tend to happen in therapy sessions with a professional and usually include memories where one was abused as a child. They can tear families apart and cause great harm to people. It is very hard to prove a false memory as false and there is no absolute certainness that it can be proven. Why do these memories happen? There is no straight answer on what causes these false memories, but in recent studies, there have been determining factors found as to what might affect a false memory being created. Some of these determining factors include; suggestibility, arousal, and mere exposure, (Bernstein &

It is unlikely that social consequences of false memories can be avoided. Elizabeth Loftus was intrigued to study false memories, and is perhaps personally responsible for subsequent developments throughout the history of false memories. Some of this history addresses various theories aimed at isolating how or why false memories occur. These include Source Monitoring Framework, Activation Monitoring Theory, Fuzzy Trace Theory, and strategies for persuasion which can lead to the development of false memory. Such persuasion leads to the present discussion concerning how persuasion in the judicial system has created false confessions and wrongful eyewitness testimonies, due to the Misinformation Effect. Additionally, Recovered Memory Therapy psychotherapy, a method used to reclaim lost memories, reveals itself as problematic where false memories are concerned.

People’s memories are greatly affected by preconceptions and the emotions that come with them. When one’s memories are challenged the response is that they must be right, and everyone else must be wrong. Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson shows this example when during his show “Cosmos” where he inaccurately uses a quote from two different speeches of President George Bush’s to express a science of how stars were named. The quote was implying prejudice tendencies in Mr. Bush right after 9/11, and when Dr. Tyson was confronted of his misinterpretation his overconfidence of his memories he instantly configured that the confronters were incorrect. After evidence proved of his misconception, he admitted to his mistake and publicly apologized. Furthermore,

The Mandela Effect is a worldwide conspiracy theory that recently was brought to attention due to an old children’s book called the Berenstain Bears, however, most people remember it being spelt Berenstein. The idea of the Mandela Effect is that hundreds or thousands of people have a clear memory of something happening one way but in reality it never happened. Some examples include brand names spelt differently than most people remember, famous movie quotes that everybody has been saying wrong, incorrect dates and historical misconceptions. However, a plethora of people believe that the Mandela Effect is hoax and the reason people remember these things incorrectly is simply due to bad memory. While that could be a reasonable explanation,

Humanity is in a perpetual state of trying to make living in the world an easier place. In just a few seconds, people can access information at their disposal, instead of having to look through different books to find what you need. But the question arises; does this boundless place for information honestly make us more informed than before we had the internet? Joe Keohane, the author of the article “How Facts Backfire,” is a political journalist who has also written articles on technology and culture.  He decided to write this article during the midterm election to help educate voters that they need to be better informed about a topic before they make a decision. Nicholas Carr, the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” is an American writer

The Mandela Effect is a name for an instance where a person or a group of people remember an event, or word, etc. in a different way than it actually happened or is.

Repressed memory is defined as a memory that was or is actively repressed by a human’s brain to protect them from a psychologically devastating impact of that memory (such as child abuse, rape, molestation, and more). It is interesting that our mind has the ability to disassociate just to shelter us from our psychological harm. Even though some people believe repressed memories should stay hidden because it would only hurt the person that it belongs to, I think it is better to have the memory and deal with it, and not having a piece of your life missing.

Emma Bryce, a science and environmental journalist wrote an article for WIRED titled “False memories and false confessions: the psychology of imagined crimes”. She bases her article on the experience of a criminal psychologist, Julia Shaw and studies of a cognitive psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus. The article describes several cases where false memories resulted in getting innocent people in jail. Julia’s job is to study what triggers false memories we encounter every day and how the results of her studies can be applied to the criminal-justice system where it is very important to detect them. As she said, unfortunately, the police still makes a lot of mistakes that put innocent people in prison, so her job is to fix this by providing scientific

The Mandela Effect is a theory that paranormal consultant and author with the name of Fiona Broome came up with after she remembered thinking that Nelson mandela died in 1980. This theory is known for the government, and scientist purposely make us misremember things. Most people that believe in this theory also believe that there are

The speech from Elizabeth Loftus “The Fiction of Memory” she mentions that she study false memory for almost 30 years. False memory is the things that people remember but didn’t happened or remember it differently than the way they really were.

David Hume was a skeptic, naturalist, and an atheist philosopher who belonged to a movement founded by John Locke. He strived to apply the sensible procedures for observation to an examination of human nature itself to develop the consequences of Locke 's experimentation. Hume argues that at the base of any system of thought and any science, man is faced with his daily world. This goes beyond the scope of every possible rational project. Man cannot be separated from his experiences, just as there cannot be separate experiences of a thinking ego. Man and his world are mutually solicitous and radically inseparable. The centrifugal and experiential nature of human nature is organized according to Hume on two levels which he calls impressions and

(STEWE-1) The community knowingly doesn’t allow certain thought provoking events to occur, and thus causes people to be limited in the amount of memories and knowledge they have. This is seen in the train stations, a place where all sorts of people go to everyday. Here the nation, by design, blasts people with commercials like, “Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s” (Bradbury 75). By blaring commercials like this, one cannot think. Every time they attempt to do so, the volume of the ads overpowers them and causes them to lose their train of thought and the ability to remember. “The people were pounded into submission:they did not run, there was no place to run” (Bradbury 75). The people in power have intentionally chosen train stations to essentially brainwash people and cause them to be restricted in the amount of knowledge and memories they have. (STEWE-2) Society additionally destroys the formation of memories by forcing people to no longer participate in activities that they would remember later in their lives. By forcing people to obey they eliminate any chance of memories forming, “My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days” (Bradbury 6). By outlawing these events they not only

A Cultural theorist, also a leading figure of the development of media and cultural studies, Stuart Hall’s cultural representation theory is very representative and has a significant impact in the field of cultural studies. His book “Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices” published in 1997 is a study of the crucial links between language, culture and how shared meanings are constructed and represented within the language. Hall believes culture plays the primary role in how we construct meaning and representation was closely related to culture. Representation is the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language, such as

You think the world is ultimately a just place; you will have a tendency to look for reasons to blame victims of inexplicable injustices. This is the concept of the cognitive bias “Just World Phenomenon”. The following example of Just World Phenomenon was presented to us while discussing the lecture on the different classifications of cognitive bias. During the discussion of Just World Phenomenon, examples were lacking to further explain, in more depth, about the actual bias. Curiosity was brought to my attention on the matter, wanting to comprehend the bias more thoroughly. In the novel “Riveted” by Dr. Jim Davies, a whole chapter is devoted to the topic of Cognitive Bias, and Just World Phenomenon is one of the many biases in chapter six.

In conclusion I found the research quite fascinating. I believe that any type of experience if positive or negative has a profound impact in your life and will always subconsciously influence your decision making. But, that our life experiences influence our thought process in repressed memory situations that we can’t predict is beneficial consciously or unconsciously take repressed memory to a whole another realm.