Do you remember when Nelson Mandela died? In the 1980s? In the 1990s? The answer is in 2013. The political figure was in prison from 1964 to 1990 before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and being elected president in 1994. However, many people incorrectly remember him dying in prison in the 1980s, which is how the Mandela effect gets its name.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon where a large number of people believe something happened, when in reality, it did not. For example, many people misremember details such as the color of a snack packet or the name of a TV show. A 2020 memory study found that 76% of adults made at least one detectable error when asked to recall information, demonstrating that memory is not accurate.
"The Mandela effect seems to be closely related to a number of well-known memory phenomena," said Tim Hollins, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Plymouth in the U. K. He named three similar types of memory-related phenomena: "false memory, " which is the creation of a memory that didn't happen;" source-memory errors, "which is when someone forgets the true source of a memory；and "imagination inflation（膨胀），"which is the tendency to believe something is real when it is often or vividly imagined.
However, Hollins believes the phenomenon that is most closely connected to the Mandela effect is that of "gist memory," which is when someone has a general idea of something but can't necessarily remember the specifics. A common example relates to the monkey called Curious George, a children's book character that first appeared in the 1940s, and his lack of a tail.
"Remembering Curious George as having a tail just reflects the fact that most monkeys have tails, " Hollins said. "If you just remember the gist-it's a monkey-why wouldn't you remember him having a tail?"
