Friday, 16 September 2016

I've got the Mandela Effect

The Mandela Effect is a recently identified phenomenon; in fact research into it can only be traced back to 2010 and the pioneering website of Fiona Broome. She became interested when she noticed people talking about how they remember things differently to how they actually are recorded in historical records. There is a common error of memory that psychologists call confabulation and everybody experiences it from time to time. You might recall somebody you knew many years ago and haven't seen since; and when you're shown a photograph of them from that same era, they don't resemble your mental image at all. The difference with the Mandela Effect is that large numbers of unconnected people are afflicted by the same misremembrance. The most obvious anomaly refers to Nelson Mandela, the political activist and former president of South Africa; hence the name of the effect. As far as I'm concerned, and most people are, Mandela actually died in 2013, indeed I wrote an obituary to him, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/nelson-mandela-dies.html; but a surprisingly large number of people say they remember Mandela dying in prison in 1986. They have no doubt that they saw news items on TV, newspaper articles and other information at the time, and they recall the incident in detail. If they are mistaken, why are they all mistaken in the same way? I only started looking into the matter in depth a few days ago when somebody wrote to me and told me how they used to watch the Looney Tunes cartoon shorts on TV when they were children. Indeed, I did too and I loved them; characters like Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and Porky Pig. I remember them very well. However I distinctly recall that they were called "Looney Toons", not "Tunes". This is a very clear recollection because the titles of the shorts were in a standardized style with the same theme music. I even made this observation as an adult when I watched the 1990's TV comedy Bottom in which one of the characters insults the other by calling him a "looney tune". This was many years before I gained a serious interest in the paranormal. After receiving this letter I went and double-checked. Sure enough, the series is called Looney Tunes. It ran for twenty-nine years, from 1930 to 69, and was always called Looney Tunes. I was astounded. Not only do I have a memory that I really shouldn't have, but other people have the same memory as well. This is just one example; see the website for many others: http://mandelaeffect.com/about/. At some point a skeptic is going to yell "coincidence!" like they always do, but how realistic is that? (Skeptics themselves don't understand this endemic fallacy of theirs, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/pan-pareidolia.html) There has to be more to the Mandela Effect than that. It could be that it is an artefact of the collective unconscious as theorized the psychologist Carl Jung. The same concept could be behind the "hundredth monkey effect", see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/lyall-watson.html. Another possibility is that people who experience the Mandela Effect are literally moving between different worlds, slipping into parallel universes within the "multiverse". If so, why has the Mandela Effect become more noticeable only within the last few years? Possibly because it is only now that it's being defined properly by Fiona Broome and others; but could it perhaps be also because the structure of our universe has physically changed? If so then what has caused that change? What force could be powerful enough to alter the very fabric of reality? To undermine the foundations of space-time causality?... Regular readers will guess where I'm going with this... The answer is, of course, CERN. See background links below for my detailed discussions about the Large Hadron Collider, what it is capable of and what its real purpose might be. Also Kev Baker has covered this in his radio shows, for example see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVCzq0TwQI0. This is disturbing news. Does it mean that I can no longer be certain of my own past, at least from the point of view of whatever dimension I'm in? Still, I might as well look on the bright side. I might be lucky enough to slip into a universe in which Prof. Brian Cox was never born.

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