Oral Presentation - Mandela Effect

Have you ever been so sure that something happened, looked or sounded a certain way but turns out
you had been mistaken all along? Even worse, have you seen it happen to more than one person at the
same time? Doesn’t the fact that you can’t even begin to explain how it happened drive you crazy?
We’re talking about shared false memories and they’re more common than you might think.

So, for my presentation, I decided to talk about the Mandela Effect. The name comes from Nelson
Mandela, who was a political activist in Africa. He fought against the horrible apartheid system in South
Africa and was incarcerated from the 60s to 1990. Some people claim to remember him dying in prison
in the 1980s when, in reality, he was later released from prison, helped overturn apartheid and went on
to be the President of South Africa for five years. He eventually died in 2013, thirty years later than lots
of people thought. This event captured the self-described “paranormal consultant” Fiona Broome’s
attention, who started studying this shared false memory phenomenon and even launched a website to
document memories that didn’t match our current reality and its history.

After this short introduction, I decided to put together a few practical examples that might seem familiar
to you:

- (Skechers shoe brand.)

- (Monopoly guy and the monocle.)
- (Pikachu.)

Apart from images, there are also a few famous lines that most people mistakenly remember, such
as:

- the iconic Darth Vader’s words “Luke, I am your father”, which were never spelled that way: in
the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke Skywalker confronts Darth Vader
saying that he was the one who killed his father, the villain actually answers “No, I am your
father.”
- another famous quote from a movie that is a good Mandela Effect’s example is the one when
the Evil Queen from the Disney movie Snow White questions her mirror saying “Magic mirror on
the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” instead of “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest
of them all?” which seems to be what the majority of people incorrectly believe she said.
- the last one isn’t from a movie, instead, I chose a very famous song by Queen, We Are The
Champions, that most people say that ends with the verse “ ‘Cause are the champions of the
world” when, in reality, Freddie Mercury doesn’t sing the last part.

Given these examples, I suppose you might be wondering why this happens. Well, there are several
possible explanations, some of them more reasonable than others: A few pseudoscience commentators
such as Fiona Broome have speculated about alternate realities, saying that, somehow, we might be
sliding between parallel universes and that’s why we are so sure of having certain memories that, in fact,
never happened, at least on the universe we’re in right now. Broome also talks about two other reasons
that might be seen as a bit eccentric and hard to swallow: time travelling and software glitches, as if we
where living in some kind of real-life version of The Matrix movie. However, the most logical explanation
relies on the fact that most science researchers and commentators suggest that these false memories
are shaped by similar cognitive factors affecting multiple people at the same time, such as social and
cognitive reinforcement of incorrect memories or false news reports and misleading photographs that
influence the formation of memories based on them.

The Mandela Effect isn’t all about conspiracy theories but it sure does make you think.

This is the end of my presentation and I hope you enjoyed it.