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The Mandela Effect
Intro bit briefly explaining what it is, poking fun at conspiracy kooks.
Let's Science The Shit Out Of It
Blah, blah, blah, what's actually causing this phenomenon to occur.
Parodies
Blah, blah, blah, specific Simpsons and Family Guy examples go here.
Production Runs
One of the largest contributing factors to this stupidity is regional distribution differences, production run variations and production errors or "factory seconds". For example in certain places they'll change certain minor aspects of a product in order to make them more appealing to local markets/demographics. And sometimes it's done to make certain runs of a product worth more than others, or to save money on subsequent runs. And of course sometimes someone just fucks up and nobody notices until after, say, ten thousands have already run through the assembly line.
So, what to with those factory fuckups? Well, historically, the most common practice has been to either give them away to schools, hospitals and orphanages as a tax write off or to sell them at a big discount. So like in the example below the books on the left were likely found in a school library while the ones on the right were likely sold in a book store.
These days most factory seconds are actually intentionally produced for sale at bargain stores like Wal-Mart. For example a store will ask a product manufacturer if they can sell a certain quantity of their product to the store at a certain price and the manufacturer will scratch their head a bit and be like, "Well if we skimp a bit on materials, if we run the machines slightly faster, if we use a cheaper brand of ink, a cheaper brand of capacitor... yeah, sure, we can make that work." and then the eventual end result is you buy say a TV at Wal-Mart that craps out within a year because it was produced with cheap ass caps, where as if you had bought the exact same brand/model of television at another store and paid 10% more it would have lasted like... ten years.
The moral to this little story is you get what you pay for. If you're paying less, you're paying less for a reason.
Knock Off Brands
Blah, blah, blah, copy cat products and bootleg shet.
Let's Enhance
In order to be more efficient your brain automatically organizes and stores "like information/data" together. For example Monopoly Man, Scrooge McDuck and the Planter's Peanuts mascot will all be stored in the same area, which might lead you to remember the Monopoly Man as having a monocle... when he didn't, but the Planter's Peanuts mascot and Scrooge McDuck (which are similar character types) did have monocles.
So when you try and remember the Monopoly Man, you're going to get a vague mish mosh of similar character forms and might remember him as having a monocle. To further exacerbate this your brain's memory acts like a kind of telephone game; meaning the more you recall an event, the more it will become subject to alteration by your imagination trying to fill in the "holes" from what's lost or not recorded in your memory. Largely by using material from other memories.
To put that more simply imagine that someone gives you a drawing that they made and you hang it on your wall. Now every day you wake up and little pieces of the drawing are missing. So everyday you can take out a pen and you can try and redraw those missing pieces. This will continue on over and over and over until eventually you'll have redrawn the entire image in your own hand and the original drawing will be lost entirely.
The upside to all this is that the more emotionally important, traumatic or impactful an experience/event is, the better it becomes imprinted into your memory. In other words no matter how many times you recall the experience, it won't be subject to the same inherent degradation as stuff you don't much care about. This is why eye witness testimony is allowed in court, because as long as an event was traumatic you can generally trust a persons recollection of events.
You were able to read that because your brain doesn't memorize the exact spelling of words, rather you remember the word as a whole, with the first letter and the last letter of the word being the most prominently embedded, so you can actually mix all the other characters up or blur them and you can still read it like normal. Your brain will automatically fill in the blurry parts with material from your memory/imagination. The blurrier it becomes, the more your brain will have to just "make shit up" to fill in the missing visual information, which can lead you to see shit that isn't even there.
This is how we get UFO, big foot and ghost sightings as well. Because your brain is constantly trying to make the "Zoom And Enhance" meme a real thing, again by taking random shit out of your memory that vaguely resembles what you can't see very clearly. In turn it creates real time optical illusions, making you see things that aren't even really there. This likewise works with your other senses, which can lead to completely fabricated experiences in your brain.
TL;DR - The less your senses pick up, the more your brain retards back into "make shit up" mode.
The human brain is basically a slop job of file storage when you get right down to it, hence the reason we now rely so much on computers and digital recording to act as our surrogate memories.
Trolling Conspiracy Nutters
Blah, blah, blah, fake Sinbad video (done by College Humor I think). Blah, blah, blah Photoshops, messing with conspiracy theorists, etc.
See Also
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The Mandela Effect is part of a series on Visit the Truth Portal for complete coverage. |
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The Mandela Effect is part of a series on Visit the Memes Portal for complete coverage. |