Mandela Effect and Identity

OK, so I've been annoying the Mandela folk for a while.
I'm still quite chuffed with myself for my Mandolia Effect explanation but I'm not too concerned with explanations in this topic.

I stupidly thought that if I could convince the ME'ers that there's a perfectly rational explanation I could take on religion.
I was wrong.

The reason I was wrong is that I never took into consideration how much a persons idea of identity effects their beliefs and vice versa.

People don't just believe in the Mandela Effect, they believe they have the ability to see it.
Debunking ME's isn't about discussing facts, it's actually a personal attack.

The same thing applies to the religious, the UFO watchers, the bigfoot people, the atheists, the 9/11 people etc. etc.

All arguments will end with either an ignored response, or the tried and true "You just don't understand".

I will probably keep screaming at brick walls, and I will probably continue being a brick wall also. Both sides think they are right, and both sides are unwilling to be convinced because the cost is too great.

How can we get around this?

Am I destined to keep disbelieving in the Mandela Effect because of the effect it would have on my sense of self?

It is always incredibly easy to deliver a "perfectly rational explanation" for things which you have never personally experienced.

Too often the mysterious and inexplicable experiences are as difficult to disprove as they are to prove.

You can't possibly believe until you have experience. When you do, there is often no explanation rational or otherwise entirely acceptable.

a reply to: Krahzeef_Ukhar

Have you considered just ignoring it and spending your time on things you are able to change that are more important?

that is what I do with folks that believe in ghosts and spectres, I let them get on with it and talk about other things instead.

a reply to: ausername

I have experienced the vast majority of the ME's.
The people that don't are the minority.

But that's off topic.
There's plenty of topics to discuss the various arguments, this is about understanding why consensus is so hard to find.

a reply to: nonspecific

I think this phenomena can give great insight into people.
How often do you see a religion start?

I don't think changing people's ideas is my motivation.
It's about gaining greater understanding of why people believe what they do.

It's a purely selfish endeavor to understand the flaws in my own thinking.

Hmmmm. Are you really attempting to understand why people believe as they do, or is there an underlying need to be right, cloaked by a psuedo-intellectual pursuit?

People believe what they do because it feels right to them, or because they have had direct experience. What I believe and feel to be true will NOT be swayed by a person I do not know verbally ragging on me.

We have courts and juries because things are not always as they seem, and the best we can do is come up with a consensus.

I think, therefore I am. My thoughts make me who I am, based on experience, feelings, and what is most important in my heart.

If you feel that your thoughts are more correct and more important, and you feel the need to 'scream at walls', that feels more like a personality issue rather than a person attempting to understand.

a reply to: FissionSurplus

There's definitely an underlying need to be right.
I'm fighting the urge to question whether there's a difference between intellectual pursuit and pseudo-intellectual pursuit right now.

I won't deny that I feel my thoughts are more correct.
I will deny that my thoughts are more important however.

But you did say...

What I believe and feel to be true will NOT be swayed by a person I do not know verbally ragging on me.

Which brings it back to the point.
My personality (or lack thereof) and my level of familiarity seems to be more important than the facts.

Identity seems to trump facts.

Well everything on ATS seems to me like an endless tug of war.

Needless to say that this attitude will solve nothing at all. 'Skeptics' deny and believers believe. As being personally mandela effected I find it hard to believe that it is ALL just bad remembering.

I've proof that at least the wayback machine is altering search results but discussing that fact doesn't convince a single skeptic that there is at least some other factor in the mandela effect.


ME is war... like UFO's is war and like the paranormal is war. That war is a kind of status quo that accomplishes nothing.I for myself know that there is stuff out there that needs to be investigated right now for the sake of free humanity , but as it is right now nothing will happen than that endless tug of war.

originally posted by: frenchfries
Needless to say that this attitude will solve nothing at all. 'Skeptics' deny and believers believe. As being personally mandela effected I find it hard to believe that it is ALL just bad remembering.

It's not bad remembering it's about understanding how we remember. It's good remembering.
The people who don't experience ME's are either lying or autistic.

There's plenty of topics to argue this however...

This is about how important your identity is in regards to your position.
You implied that I was a skeptic (which is true) and implied you were a believer.
My "attitude" has already given us a starting point we can agree on.

I sincerely think this is the only attitude to have if we want an answer.
There's no point arguing our beliefs, we are both sure we are right.

But there's value in understanding why we believe.

a reply to: Krahzeef_Ukhar


There is no amount of "rational explanations" or diatribes about "faulty memory" that can unconvince someone who has specific, anchored memories of something that has inexplicably changed.

For example, some remember BerenstEin because their own name ends with "stein," and they remember being small children and being taught to spell their own names using the BerenstEin Bears books. How do expect someone to be "unconvinced" of that?

I myself clearly remember noticing in the fall of '16, during the campaign trail, that "Hillary" was suddenly "Hilary" with one L. Others noticed it as well. All television, print, or internet references to her corroborated the spelling with one L. I remember clearly getting a text from my friend about "Hillary," and I told him to check the spelling because now it was being spelled with one L. I told him she had been Mandela Effected. This spelling lasted for maybe two months, but then, a few days before the election, the spelling flip-flopped back to Hillary with two L's. There is no amount of scientific studies on the "fallibility of human memory" that I could be shown that would convince me this did not happen.

a reply to: TombEscaper

I've never said "faulty memory" it's all a side effect of our great memory.
But that's irrelevant to this topic.

There is no amount of scientific studies on the "fallibility of human memory" that I could be shown that would convince me this did not happen.

Now that's relevant to the topic.
How much does you sense of self impact your logic?

originally posted by: TombEscaper
For example, some remember BerenstEin because their own name ends with "stein," and they remember being small children and being taught to spell their own names using the BerenstEin Bears books. How do expect someone to be "unconvinced" of that?

How many Berensteins do you know that were given a kid's book to spell their own name?

I don't want to judge but that's poor parenting.
Was little Johnny Einstein, or Borstein, or Zxystein given a book and told to ignore the first few letters?

That's very specific. Are you making this up to maintain your ME identity?

a reply to: Krahzeef_Ukhar

It's not bad remembering it's about understanding how we remember. It's good remembering.

Maybe some of the remembering is part of a non-local (not in the brain) recollection. Almost all the ME effects are on objects that have many instances and play part of the collective memory.

The people who don't experience ME's are either lying or autistic.

Could you explain do you mean really autistic , if so in my case i'm being diagnosed asperger syndrome and I do experience (some) ME effects

I sincerely think this is the only attitude to have if we want an answer. There's no point arguing our beliefs, we are both sure we are right.

Thanks about that . The main point in ME is why now ? Yes I do know after seeing a ton of YT videos and investigating the subject for at least a year that most ME effects are maybe just bad remembering. but also facts.

1 'Internet/coorperations is actively changing the past to fit their agenda (Like changing wayback machine)

2 ME effects are at the sudden so massive that it might be the result of somekind of Psy-op.

3 YT is changing views / stealth blocking some people that talk about ME effects.

4 Translations of all ME effect are what people remember a ME seems to be nullified if it's a reproduction of the original. (Sex in the city = Sex in the city in Russia for instance) . google however translates the russian translation back to 'sex and the city'. However other translation machines translate (the ME effected translation) it back correctly. WTF google ??!!!! Can anyone explain this ?????

5 In several instances people hear it wrong (that's exactly like people do remember the ME). No memory involved here.

6 What might a tidbit of information for the one might essential for another.

I don't know about the 'berenstein' bears so being Skeptic about that isn't that difficult for me. However C3po was a large part of my childhood (!) I played with that figurine for years , it had no silver leg and no red arm and no black pawns.... I'm sure.

7 Several populair ME effects videos are just clickbait , but many geniune ones have far less views. these are the ones with interesting info about the subject.

8 Most supposed ME landmasses effects are just result of map projections (like mercartor map projections) however with Hy Brasil in mind maybe there is something to it ....

9 Multiverse. Science is more open to the possibility of Multiverses than the general public. Cern indeed fuelled ME by writing 'mandela' in one of their promo vids. However I find it hard to believe that quantum entanglement could change an entire universe. Fact is it that Cern is taking the possibility of Multiverses serious and that experiments have been done in that direction. Also Fact is it that the general public is kept out of the loop in many of the experiments , by CERNdiverting them with occultisch(not a word) video's that make no sense at all.

10 Quantum-computers
With the assumpition that ME is rooted in many world theory.consider this
At the moment the 1024Qbit computer sounds like a farce to me. Not really Qbits. But what is interesting is that the concept IS BASED on the many worlds theory and it seems to work (Qcomputers function and are sold aren't they) ! It's not difficult to understand that quantum entanglement could in theory result in changes in this universe. Also the appearance of ME effect on searchwords correlates the emergence of Qcomputers. Thats a strong indicator (but not proof) that Qcomputers might cause the ME effect.

But there's value in understanding why we believe.

11 There is more... but there's as you said value in understanding.

Divide and conquer is the enemy. To really solve the ME effect riddle we (skeptics and believers) should really investigate the effect. Calling it 'bad memory' doesn't solve a thing. Also blaming it the effect of a parallel universe without proof doesn't solve a thing.

originally posted by: Krahzeef_Ukhar
OK, so I've been annoying the Mandela folk for a while.
I'm still quite chuffed with myself for my Mandolia Effect explanation but I'm not too concerned with explanations in this topic.

I stupidly thought that if I could convince the ME'ers that there's a perfectly rational explanation I could take on religion.
I was wrong.

I really don't understand this type of thinking. What does it matter to you if people believe in the Mandela Effect or not? I see people on the Reddit Mandela Effect forum constatnly posting how the people there are stupid for believing in it. I just don't understand why someone would bother to spend their time posting in a forum to basically just call people stupid.

In terms of rational discussions about the ME, do you have links to any papers that explain how collective false memories can be formed with people who have no contact with each other?

I don't believe that the ME is a result of time-travel or parallel dimensions. Please see the links to research papers below on optogenetics and how this science can be used to implant false memories, visual and auditory hallcinations by aiming light signals at the brain.

There is a new field of scientific research called "optogenetics". Optogenetics uses light to stimulate and control parts of the brain and has been used recently to implant false memories into mice. The following articles are either from mainstream science publications or are actual research papers so this technology and science is actually possible today from publicly known information and is not in the realm of science fiction. This science has been used to create false memories and create visual and auditory hallucinations. I believe that this technology could explain the Mandela Effect bearing in mind that there are no international laws or treatises on bioengineering and there's no legal or ethical obligations for scientists developing this technology to adhere to. Also, the known papers are just what is in the public domain, it could very well be the case that private entities are much further along in their research.

www.technologyreview.com...

This article talks about memory implants. From the article (emphasis mine):
Berger and his research partners have yet to conduct human tests of their neural prostheses, but their experiments show how a silicon chip externally connected to rat and monkey brains by electrodes can process information just like actual neurons. “We’re not putting individual memories back into the brain,” he says. “We’re putting in the capacity to generate memories.” In an impressive experiment published last fall, Berger and his coworkers demonstrated that they could also help monkeys retrieve long-term memories from a part of the brain that stores them.

It can be used to control the brain remotely via light and at the level of individual neurons:

spectrum.ieee.org...
It can be used to create advanced visual images in the brain (emphasis mine)

rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org...

Even when detectable sensations are elicited, reports differ regarding the content of the evoked sensation. In some studies, patients reported sensations of ‘complex forms’, such as faces or visual scenes from memory [10,19,29], while in other studies only simple form sensations, such as phosphenes or colour spots, were evoked [18,20,28] (figure 1a). The circuitry of visual areas further downstream may generally support more complex electrical activity patterns that cannot be readily induced by focal electrical stimulation. We discuss in §2b(i) how these differences in evoked percept might arise from anatomical and functional differences between primary and extrastriate visual cortex in both the human and non-human primate brain.

It seems like it can also manipulate/create auditory hallucinations

www.nature.com...

These findings provide a synaptic and circuit basis for the motor-related corollary discharge hypothesized to facilitate hearing and auditory-guided behaviours.

Not forgetting that scientists can already manipulate memories with it:

www.theguardian.com...

Tying them all together is that this research is all in mainstream science publications and the Royal Society link above already shows they are experimenting with humans (I believe it was blind people in that case).

Scientists Use Light to Reactivate Lost Memories in Mice With Alzheimer's Symptoms

www.sciencealert.com...

Optogenetics Swaps Memory Emotions
www.photonics.com...

If we are talking about rational discussions then would you agree that there is technology that could potentially explain the ME that isn't necessarily related to common psychological explanations based on the links I've included above. Again, this science is from mainstream science publications with research papers so it's not in the realms of science fiction. I'm interested to see if the Mandela Effect sceptics are willing to consider other possibilities when presented with evidence. Again, I don't believe the ME is the result of time travel or parallel dimensions and am happy to reconsider my opinion on any topic if I'm presented with new and better information. I'm not even saying I'm right about this technology being behind the ME, but would you agree that it could at least be included as a consideration?

a reply to: Krahzeef_Ukhar

The people who don't experience ME's are either lying or autistic.

I have asked probably by now over 100 people (face to face not online) if they have even heard of the Mandela Effect and not a single one has so far. When i explain to them what I am talking about they think I'm crazy

So i seem to meet a lot of liars and autistic people and nobody else by your comment.

Personally I'm not sure - film quotes/music/books etc is easily explained by memory (Play it again Sam being the most often wrongly quoted but nobody ever claims Mandela for that one - and it has been around for decades)

Products and logos I wouldn't notice as I pay no attention to that sort of stuff.

The others meh i don't know so waiting till ME happens to me then obviously i will believe

Memories are fallible as have been proven many times so I probably lean to disbelief (55%ish)

I find ME fascinating because it shows how malleable our memories are. You can be told something and it can alter a past memory. And every time you think about a memory you re edit it. So as you get older more information can be added to a memory which actually changes the original memory.