Your mind plays many frustrating tricks. For example, as I detailed in How to arrest what’s-his-name’s [Ebbinghaus] forgetting curve, the brain purges valuable information far too quickly. A fellow statistical trainer recently refreshed my memory of the forgetting curve—citing this study that replicated the original experimental results from Ebbinghaus.
Coincidentally, I watched Friday’s episode of the quirky new “How to With John Wilson” HBO show*, which featured widely shared alternate (false!) memories such as:
- The Raisin Bran sun wearing sunglasses
- Stouffer’s Stove Top Stuffing mix
- Mandela dying in prison.
The last common misconception spawned a growing belief in what became known as the “Mandela Effect”. Check out this list with hundreds of other alternate memories and see if some resonate with your recollection. If so, you may be living in an alternate universe!
The “Mandela Effect” really plays tricks with your mind with memories that never happened but seem as if they did. However, it may not be evidence of a multiverse, but rather more mundane mental mistakes explained here by Healthline.
Never mind the Mandela Effect, the memory lapse that works for me is the forgetting curve—it doing its magic on the year of 2020.
“Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.”
― Kahlil Gibran
* Reviewed highly here by Vulture.