Text: Bai Xiaosheng
Editor|Caifeng Bai Xiaosheng
Did I lie to me?
Every once in a while, human beings will find an unbelievable thing, that is, a certain thing that most people remember deeply has been changed, and reality and memory have been discreted.
Have our memories been tampered with, or are our brains deceiving themselves, and after deep research, we have found that this phenomenon is terrifying.
What is the reason for this, and what are the lessons to be learned from this phenomenon?
Are we making a mistake in memory?
Memory is an important part of our cognitive ability, we often find that our memory is biased or even subversive, this kind of thing is not uncommon in learning Xi and life, whether it is the national anthem, children's songs, classic literature or film and television works, will bring a variety of cases of collective memory confusion.
The Chinese folk song "Love My China" is a typical example, Song Zuying made this song very popular, but many people grow up and find that their memory of the lyrics is wrong.
Most people think that the song begins with "Fifty-six Nationalities", but even if we find the original lyrics and find out that the correct lyrics are actually "Fifty-six Constellations", it is puzzling why everyone has a memory bias in the lyrics.
A similar situation has occurred in the process of our Xi, and we have Xi learned famous sayings such as Mencius's "Heaven descends to the great task of the people", which has been recorded in textbooks and people's memories for many years.
However, Mencius's original text actually wrote "Heaven descends to man", and the correct words and phrases implanted in everyone's minds instantly subvert our original memory. A similar phenomenon is also seen in Chinese characters, where the number of horizontal characters is also misremembered, and the horizontal in both real and straight characters is three horizontal, while most people remember two horizontals.
Many people can recall the plot of the 86 version of the TV series "Journey to the West" in which Yang Li Daxian got into the oil pot, but this funny scene has never appeared in the actual version, how did this false memory spread among the audience?
This phenomenon is not unique to Chinese, and many people in foreign countries have memory biases, in an American cartoon, many people remember that the good friend of the protagonist in "Ricky and Jingle Bell" is a green puppy, but in fact, the dog is blue.
There have been various opinions in the academic community on how to explain this phenomenon of collective memory confusion, and some believe that it stems from the subjective consciousness of human beings, which plays an important role in memory, which leads to these deviations.
We are now living in an era of information explosion, and how to distinguish between true and false memories and how to maintain the accuracy of memories have become issues that we pay attention to and think about.
The terrifying Mandela effect
Since 2010, the Mandela Effect has been a cause for widespread concern and discussion in the global community, and the name of this phenomenon comes from the astonishing skew in people's memories of former South African President Nelson Mandela, many of whom clearly remember that Mandela died in prison in the 80s of the last century, when in fact he died in 1994.
This phenomenon of collective memory bias came to be known as the "Mandela Effect", but the scientific community has not fully unraveled the real cause of the Mandela Effect.
What is the reason why so many people have such a collective biased memory? Experts have given many explanations, one is that the possibility is that the memory mechanism of historical events in the human brain automatically generates false memories, and when a false memory begins to spread among people, it is easy to be reinforced through interpersonal communication, and then becomes more and more difficult to change.
In this era of highly developed social media, the speed at which false memories are transmitted is even more astonishing, which also provides more channels for this memory bias.
Another explanation is from a psychological point of view, people tend to have a kind of ambiguity when remembering historical events, and it is easy to confuse similar or related events, which, combined with the influence of individuals by the media and others, leads to misinformation and misunderstandings.
Through this interpretation, we can think of this phenomenon as a kind of mass collective hallucination, the result of the combination of people's vague memories and external information.
From the perspective of quantum mechanics, some scholars try to explain the formation of the Mandela effect, which says that there may be infinite parallel universes in our world, and these universes will interact with each other, and people's memory fragments in different universes are infiltrated with each other, resulting in the so-called Mandela effect.
Although there is no way to prove this view for the time being, it provides us with a new perspective and research perspective to explain this phenomenon. As a kind of collective memory bias, the Mandela effect may be caused by a combination of various factors such as the memory generation mechanism of the human brain, psychological factors, and quantum mechanical theory.
Some conjectures that have been put forward
The multiverse theory plays an important role in the explanation of the Mandela effect, according to which there are many parallel worlds that are extremely similar to each other but slightly different in some details.
The second speculation is more surreal and even more implausible, suggesting that when the future of human technology is highly technologically advanced, they are trying to revise our current history.
In this case, those obviously wrong memories in our brains may be a kind of loophole, and the technology of human beings in the future will not be enough to erase all our memories, so their modifications leave loopholes. Although this claim is reverie, it is not supported by conclusive evidence at all, so it is controversial.
The last explanation is more realistic and scientific, and our collective false memories may only be the result of the propagation, validation, and reinforcement of the false memories of a small number of people.
Our brains are susceptible to the influence of others, especially the recollection of important events and shared experiences, and on social media platforms where information flows rapidly, people confirm and reinforce false memories in the form of discussions and shares, making false memories more common and real.
These are not all objective answers to the causes of the Mandela Effect, but rather speculation so far, but they remind us of the mechanisms of memory and highlight the distortion and misdirection of external information, as well as the influence of collective thinking, the existence of which requires verification and more in-depth research to reach more accurate conclusions.
Human memory processes and the influence of external information provide a more reliable explanation, as memories deteriorate over time, and new information that we acquire over time may interfere and distort old memories.
The emergence of the Mandela Effect reveals that human memories can change, and that external information has a huge impact on memory misleading, reminding us that we need to think independently and improve our ability to recognize rumors and misleading information.
Experimentally proven
To better understand and respond to this dislocation of collective memory, scholars conducted an interesting scientific experiment in which a hundred children were asked to recall an event that happened, but in fact the event was completely fictional.
In the end, the results of the experiment showed that one-third of the children had a false memory of this false information, which was very unexpected, and if it was not confirmed by an external observer, the one-third of the children would take the false memory seriously, which is really terrifying.
The causes of the Mandela Effect have not yet been scientifically answered, and the different speculations and explanations have brought great challenges to the way we perceive the real world.
Whether it's the multiverse theory, future human history revisions, or collective false memory propagation, they are a reminder of the heightened concern about memory mechanisms, the misdirection of external information, and the impact of collective thinking.
The Mandela Effect provokes us to think
The human brain absorbs all kinds of information, and if there is an error in this information, it can also affect people's memory and understanding of past events, so in order to keep a clear mind and reduce the bias of collective memory, we need to always pay attention to the source, authority and reliability of information.
In the current information age, there will be countless amounts of information impacting our brains all the time, and if we want to escape this memory tampering bias, we must always be awake and have the ability to think independently, so that we can distinguish the truth of the information. Before disseminating a certain message, we need to verify it ourselves, so as not to become an accomplice to the misinformation of others.
We should always remain rational and vigilant, and strive to improve our ability to discern information and filter out misinformation to ensure that we are invincible in the complex modern society.
Collective memory bias is common, and individual memory is no exception, for memory confusion, we need to have a deeper understanding of the process of memory construction, storage and recall, only through continuous thinking and exploration, we can better understand why our memory is biased or wrong, so as to deal with memory challenges more objectively.