The Mandela Effect

Snopes.com: Human memory is a peculiar thing, at once astonishing in its scope and power and dismaying in its fallibility. There’s much we don’t know about how memory works, but suffice it to say it isn’t perfect.

Particularly vexing is the phenomenon of false memories, erroneous or unconsciously fabricated recollections of past events that feel so real and true that people who experience them refuse to accept evidence to the contrary.

Psychologists call the phenomenon confabulation. The term is used clinically to refer to memory defects experienced by patients with brain damage, and also to describe everyday phenomena like embellishing the truth when recounting events and inventing facts on the fly to fill in gaps in memory.

We’ve all done these things at one time or another, though we’re rarely conscious of it when we do.

No single example of the Mandela Effect has generated more online buzz than that of the children’s book series and animated TV show The Berenstain Bears. Quite a few people who grew up with the series, it turns out, remember the title being The Berenstein Bears, with the name ending in “ein” instead of “ain” (with some even going to go so far as to maintain that the fictional bears’ surname was changed along the way to make it “less Jewish”)...read more>>>...