The Mandela Effect and Reality Merging

by Courtney Marchesani

In another dimension, popular “beginner books” feature a family of friendly bears who teach children about morality and life lessons. They are titled, The Berenstein Bears. In another, we saw news where Nelson Mandela, the tireless apartheid activist, passed away during his incarceration in Africa. We may have also learned about Greenland and Iceland in geography. And then, there was Svalbard.

If you think that the books titled The Berenstain Bears have a misspelling, if you believe that Nelson Mandela died in prison, or you never knew of the existence of Svalbard, then you may be experiencing the Mandela Effect, or “ME” for short. It is a recent phenomenon whereby some of us diverge from society in our memories of the past. These memories are oddly different from the majority. The Mandela Effect is relatively new and hypothesizes there are people who merged into this reality from another.

What is The Mandela Effect?

According to internet sources, the Mandela effect (ME) was first written about in 2012 in a Stranger Dimensions blog post titled The Wood Between Worlds. Authored by a physics student named Reece, the piece posited a hypothesis on The Berenstein Bears problem. His explanation was a parallel universe, “At some point in the last 10 years or so reality has been tampered with and history was retroactively changed. Somehow, we have all undergone a ?/2 phase change in all 4 dimensions so that we moved to the stAin hexadectant, while our counterparts moved to our hexadectant (stEin).”

Articles explaining the phenomenon credit Fiona Broome as the originator of the name Mandela Effect. Broome discovered other people who had false memories similar to hers. Specifically, that Nelson Mandela died during his imprisonment in the 1980s. “See, I thought Nelson Mandela died in prison. I thought I remembered it clearly, complete with news clips of his funeral, the mourning in South Africa, some rioting in cities, and the heartfelt speech by his widow. Then, I found out he was still alive.”

As the Internet buzzed over the ME paradox, it quickly earned a title as a conspiracy theory. Causes for the false memories were attributed to everything from confabulation of memory, alien invaders, the European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN, and a time-traveler altering time.

Are We Living in a Simulation?

More recently, as an off-shoot from ME, a new theory has gained recognition in surprising circles. Over the summer, billionaire Elon Musk (PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla) made a public statement on reality. “We are almost definitely living in a ‘Matrix Style’ simulation.”  The Silicon Valley mogul told a reporter at San Francisco’s code conference that the odds we are not living in a simulation were billions-to-one.

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