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As an individual you can have memories embedded in memory that never happened, but what happens when the false memory becomes collective?
The phenomenon is called the Mandela effect and was named in 2010 when a group of people believed that the Nobel Prize winner had died in the 1980s.
Brands are also victims of “gap filling” in phrases, design or even name; This is how Martha Higareda explained it.
Through the official TikTok account “De todo mucho”, a podcast made by Martha Higareda and Yordi Rosado, content was shared in whichhe film actress explained the Mandela effect in brands: Monopoly and Pikachu, the main ones.
Can you imagine trusting a memory or historical fact and that the collective endorses it, but in reality it turns out to be false? The phenomenon of collusion shared by several people was dubbed the Mandela effect by pseudoscientist Fiona Broome when she realized at the 2010 Dragon Con Convention that attendees remembered the death of the South African Nobel Peace Prize winner in the 1980s, when in reality Mandela died in 2013.
Another historical fact that is falsely remembered is the canonization of Teresa of Calcutta in 1990 when in fact this happened in 2016.
The pseudoscientific explanation is that memories can be modified and when there are references to a different memory, they can be shaped if there are confirmation biases.
Some explanations of a psychological nature go towards social validation, that is, it is believed when other people believe it; confirmation biasby prioritizing information that confirms beliefs; cryptomnesia, the brain places data in memory locations with actual content; false attribution which refers to believing something that turned out to be false, but previously it was stored as true and collusion when an attempt is made to remember something and since the information does not exist, the response is falsified to fill the gap.
Martha Higareda explains the Mandela phenomenon in brands
The Mandela effect is not only present in historical events, but the design of brands is also a victim of the filling of the memory void.
In it podcastMartha Higareda told Yordi Rosado that one of her cousins was the one who caused curiosity on the subject:
“He told me: —how do you remember the achievement of Monopoly?— and I: —Ah, well, a man with a mustache, a hat and a monocle—. Well no! He has never had a monocle ”, assured Higareda in the conversation with the television host.
He also gave Pikachu an example, since many people remember him with a yellow tail and a black horn at the end; however, the creature from the Pokémon franchise does not have a black tail.
“My cousin told me that this is called the Mandela effect,” said the Mexican film actress.
@detodounmuchotiktok Has it happened to them? 😨 Let’s talk about #mandela effect #detodounmucho #marthahigareda #yordirosado ♬ original sound – detodounmuchotiktok
These are some of the main examples that the group remembers, others are the following: Snow White’s queen never says “mirror, mirror in front of the mirror”, but instead makes an invocation with thunder to call the “mirror slave” so that come out of the dark; Disney’s main character is remembered with braces when he doesn’t actually have them; The Simpsons do not have an “s” at the end, although in the pronunciation the collective identifies it in this way; the logo of the Looney Tunes series is spelled correctly like this and not “Toons”; there is no hyphen that separates the Coca Cola design, only a period.
In design, names, brands, historical facts and cinema, the possibilities of an inserted collective memory are infinite and curious when reality is discovered.