Would you be willing to bet your savings account that the tip of the tail of the most famous Pokémon, Pikachu, is black? That the famous man illustrating the game Monopoly wears a monocle on the tip of his nose? Or that the face of the Laughing Cow is adorned with a ring? Wrong pick: you are victims of the Mandela effect and will definitely lose all of your savings, and this is really not the time at the start of 2026!
If the concept of false memory began to be theorized at the end of the 19thth century, at the birth of psychoanalysis, this cognitive bias was only named in 2009, by a certain Fiona Broome, a paranormal researcher. Noting that thousands of people believed that Nelson Mandela had died in the 1980s during his stay in prison, formalizing this gap between reality and the perception that we can have of it. Effectively, Mandela died on December 5, 2013from an acute respiratory infection, which took his life at the age of 95: a ” petite » difference of around thirty years all the same !
This collective cognitive dissonance has its obvious culprit: our brain, which allows itself to be fooled by associations of ideas much more attractive than the truth. This is why it sometimes forms these parasitic memory traces, which seem more real than nature to us.
Episodic memory vs. semantic memory: a cerebral duel
The process of memorization is very complex, both from a physiological and psychological point of view and we have not yet even unlocked all its secrets. So, rather than getting bogged down in long and boring demonstrations, we will schematize it to explain this memory bug at the origin of the Mandela effect. First, we must understand that our memory does not work like a hard drive located in a single location and does not encode reality butinterprets to create a simplified and coherent version, even if it sometimes means distorting it.
It can be seen as a bookcase with two shelves. The first is the episodic memorywhich records the film of our existence, classifying our personal memories in their spatial and temporal context. The second is the semantic memorybringing together all our acquired knowledge without necessarily remembering the exact moment of their learning. The Mandela Effect occurs precisely at the intersection of these two levels, but flourishes fully in this second floor.
Wilma Bainbridge, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, explains: “ Our memories are actually a filtered version of the original. When you recall this memory, you only bring back this compressed version “. A boon for our brain, because this compression prevents it from being cluttered with unnecessary detailswhich would slow down the processing of information essential to our daily lives.
A phenomenon which, even if it is saving, sometimes makes him a forger; if this allows it to simplify reality so as not to collapse under the weight of an ocean of information, this saving of energy has a Price. This forms gray areas and when a detail processed by semantic memory is missing, our brain draws on its cultural representations to fill them. Pre-established mental images that dictate what the world should to be logical.
Let’s take the example of the Monopoly man and his monocle: if he emerges from your semantic memory but the details of his face have become too blurry over time, your brain will ” deduct » what is missing depending on what he knows about this archetype. In our collective imagination, a billionaire banker from the American upper bourgeoisie of the 1900s goes hand in hand with his monocle.
Even if this is not necessarily true and is a cliché, your prefrontal cortex will therefore imagine this accessory from scratch so that the image conforms to your cultural and social expectations.
For the Laughing Cow, the same: we all have the image of the cow grazing peacefully in its meadow with its muzzle pierced by a ring. The same phenomenon is triggered and combines this legendary advertising icon with our rustic knowledge of the agricultural world.
Your nervous system, when faced with incomplete information, will tend to bet on the most probable version of the world as it perceives it. In neuroscience, this is called predictive coding : instead of waiting for the process of retrieving a memory to be complete (which would be too slow and energy-consuming) your brain projects what seems most consistent with your prior knowledge.
Seen under this prism, there is no raw reality for our brainwhich, for the sake of optimization, actually a default reconstruction : a set of hypotheses generated from within, making our memory a tool for social survival, not necessarily serving to establish the truth. « The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is without borders », wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The famous writer and essential philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment had therefore already understood that our first relationship to the world is that of an interpretationa artificial truth that we constantly rework so as not to lose our footing in reality. Well, in this case, Rousseau was so convinced of this that he ended his life in a state of extreme paranoiaconvinced that he was the victim of a great conspiracy: psychological suffering can nourish a quest for meaning, which sometimes comes at a high price.
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