I'd Call it Stinkin' Thinkin'

I'd call it stinkin' thinkin' except for the fact that I'm not entirely sure there's much real thinking happening.

But I get way ahead of myself.  A friend who's still working where I retired from in December forwarded me a video on a thing called the Mandela Effect.  It's quite possibly the weakest, most illogical and most egotistical argument I've ever heard of, let alone wasted 20 minutes watching.  (Here if you must, but I advise against it).  He's somewhat of the kind of person who sees conspiracy theories everywhere; he'll tell you it's only for entertainment, but he seems to hold on to them a bit too tightly for that.

The idea of this effect turns out to be widespread.  There are many online groups where people gather to describe their "native timeline" (Reddit or BuzzFeed).  It's hard to explain this group of people, but the name "Mandela effect" itself denotes people who are sure Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s.  Since every reference one can find shows he died in 2013, long after getting out of prison and living a full life, these people conclude not that they don't have perfect memory, but that they are living on an alternate timeline or parallel universe that somehow switched them to this one.

It's hard for me to convey just how bizarre this all comes across to me.  The narrator of that video, for example, say that he recalls the name of an iconic breakfast cereal being "Fruit Loops" and that the name he sees now, "Froot Loops" indicates that he has moved between parallel universes.  He does many examples of similar, improperly remembered things.  It takes a special kind of ego to believe that if you never noticed the proper spelling of Charles Shulz, for example, that the universe has changed the spelling of his name.  Or, I suppose, moved you onto a different parallel universe where his name is spelled differently. 

I did a little reading on this yesterday and was astounded to find people who will swear to you the Challenger disaster was not in 1986.  They will swear they recall being in some class or other specific place and it was 1984 or some other year.  There are people who will swear that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans not in September, but in April - a full two months before hurricane system, which would rate it as the biggest freak storm of all time.  There are large groups of people who will swear they watched the Chinese tanks roll over the solitary protester in Tienanmen square and kill him (rather gruesomely). 

Look, not remembering things correctly ain't exactly news.  It's a human experience.  We all find we remembered things incorrectly.  There isn't a court in the country, probably not in the world, that would rate an eyewitness' memory of something as more credible than photographs, recordings or other hard data.  Everyone knows memories are fallible (and I gotta echo the idea that the older you get, the more fallible memory might be). 

What's odd here is the implied thought that "since I remember it as X, and everything I can find today says it's Y, everything in the universe is wrong and I'm right".  That's a special level of ego.  While I never took those graduate quantum physics classes, I understand that parallel universes are a feature of quantum mechanics.  One of the implications of the Many Worlds interpretation is that every decision splits off new parallel universes where each possible outcome has occurred (a bit of an explanation), meaning that there's an incomprehensibly huge number of parallel universes in existence.  These universes are isolated from each other. Which means people can't hop between parallel universes and bring their memories of Charles Schultz eating Fruit Loops. 

An illustration of the splitting of parallel universes.  The guy suggests getting a drink to the girl.  At that decision, two universes come into existence: one in which she agrees and the couple eventually marries and has children (after another few hundred universes form and split off); along the other pathway, she declines the drink and they never get any closer.