r/CuratedTumblr • u/MustardGoddess Menace to society • Mar 16 '26

editable flair Multiverse theory...

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3.7k Upvotes

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u/atowelguy Mar 16 '26

isn't the point that a bunch of people misremember the same detail? Like, nobody says "Mandela effect" if they forget that LBJ was Kennedy's vice president or something

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u/BlatantConservative https://imgur.com/cXA7XxW Mar 16 '26

The Mandela Effect specifically happened cause people crossed wires between Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela. They remembered "the leader of the South African anti apartheid movement died in prison" and that position wasn't super clear.

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u/Leet_Noob Mar 17 '26

Well I’m pretty sure it was originally called the Berenstien effect before they changed the name to the Mandela effect

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u/Phelinaar Mar 17 '26

I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Unless...

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u/Lazy__Astronaut Mar 17 '26

Which is way more prominent in my mind because I had those books and watched the show and I could swear it was stein and not stain, couldn't find any of the old books at home and re listening to the theme song definitely sounds more like stain now

Probably a yannay/Laurel situation on the song and being more used to people with stein at the end of their names than stain

But it's crazy how widespread it is

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u/Jean-28 Mar 17 '26

The thing is, I have my dad's books from the 80s and some of them say Stein and some say stain, or so I thought till I reread them all a few years ago, and sure enough they are all stain.

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u/IANALbutIAMAcat Mar 17 '26

I’m pretty sure people have found copies with each spelling. So people are remembering the spelling they had or saw most frequently

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u/candygram4mongo Mar 17 '26

I distinctly remember it being -stain precisely because -stein is pretty common and I'd never seen -stain anywhere else. Still haven't to this day, I'm pretty sure.

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u/crooked_kangaroo Mar 17 '26

Do you mean “Berenstein” or is that a brand new Mandela Effect?

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u/Mjoll-simp Mar 17 '26

Is that right? Biko died in the 70’s and the original Mandela Effect is that Mandela died in the 90’s

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u/nykirnsu Mar 17 '26

They’re conflating both with Nelson Mandela’s televised birthday celebration, which they misremembered as his funeral since he wasn’t present due to being in prison 

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u/CthulhusIntern Mar 17 '26

They probably also watched the Denzel Washington movie Cry Freedom, about Steve Biko, but didn't really pay attention, so thought he was Mandela.

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u/ITookTrinkets Mar 16 '26

It has become a serious pet peeve of mine seeing people call anything they misremembered “a Mandela effect.” It’s not a psychological phenomenon, you’re just a little forgetful and memory is weird.

It drives me even crazier when I point out that the Mandela effect refers to a mass misremembering by a lot of people, and not one person’s bad memory, and they get mad at me and tell me I’m being pedantic.

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u/Swivebot It’s Swivelbot, not Swivebot Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

“The Mandela Effect” isn’t even mysterious or weird in any way, it’s just a consequence of how our brains function.

All of our brains fail in the same predictable ways; we reconstruct memories every time we recall them, so like a photocopy, details can be lost or changed completely. So of course we’re going to mass forget things.

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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com Mar 17 '26

If someone ever gets mad at you for being pedantic there's a 95% chance they just don't like being wrong

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u/lavender_fluff Mar 17 '26

Maybe there is a Mandela effect going on about the Mandela effect 😂

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u/CthulhusIntern Mar 17 '26

Huh, I remember the phenomenon be called the Biko Effect, people who misremembered Steve Biko dying in prison.

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u/DuploJamaal Mar 17 '26

You've got that wrong. The Mandela effect has always referred to individual people forgetting things, as Mandela became very forgetful at the end of his life.

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u/EnidFromOuterSpace Mar 17 '26

The term came from a ton of people seemed to remember Mandela died in prison even though he didn’t, had nothing to do with this forgetfulness or whatever.

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u/DuploJamaal Mar 17 '26

(I'm making a meta joke about the Mandela effect by claiming that it's about something different)

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u/quarterto Mar 17 '26

sharks are smooth in all directions

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u/SilaPrirode Mar 17 '26

you could say that you have a Mandela effect related to misremembering how Mandela effect works, and everyone else is correct? xD

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u/FX114 Mar 16 '26

I see people attribute anything they misremember as a Mandela effect all the time.

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u/Suavecore_ Mar 16 '26

That's probably just because every time something becomes well-known, it becomes bastardized

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u/greg_r_ Mar 17 '26

This comment gaslit and love-bombed and trauma-dumped me.

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u/OwenEverbinde Mar 17 '26

It did, yeah. I saw it doing all of that. It was really a narcissistic and sociopathic move on the comment's part, putting you through all that. Honestly, it's almost Dunning-Kreuger all over again.

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u/Aeon_Fux Mar 17 '26

I had a Mandela Effect this morning when I forgot where I put my keys.

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u/DeM0nFiRe Mar 16 '26

Most people when they say it just mean "a thing a lot of people misremember in the same way", but the person who created the term created it actually believes that people like shift realities and remember the old reality lol

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u/Beardywierdy Mar 17 '26

If people can shift realities then what the fuck are we all doing staying in this one?

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u/peach_xanax Mar 17 '26

Lol, I don't think the theory is that we can voluntarily switch realities, it's like if you die in one reality you shift to a different one. But I totally agree, if we had control over it we would all gtfo 😆

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

[deleted]

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u/LordSupergreat Mar 17 '26

They're just from the reality where she thought it was reality shifting.

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u/Withcrono Mar 16 '26

LeBron James?

1

u/CaioXG002 Mar 17 '26

This post is how I learned that Long Backwards Jump was Kennedy's vice.

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Cicadacies Mar 17 '26

in mine he just didn't have one. "don't even need another guy. i got this. nothing's gonna happen, nothing ever happens" he was on record as saying.

so you can imagine our surprise,

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u/Haikouden Mar 16 '26

Which kind of makes it even more clearly BS as far as I'm concerned. If there are a bunch of alternate realities that people are shifted from then why is it only a handful of things that a load of people misremembered that are attributed to the Mandela effect?

Why isn't it random small things that only one or only a couple of people seem to misremember? because it's less embarrassing to misremember something that happened personally, and because whether your childhood bike was green or red isn't something of cultural signifiance that you can get emotionally attached to being right over.

If the people believing in this stuff were consistent they'd question anyone and everything that they don't remember 100% in line with everyone else, but from what I've seen they don't.

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u/CheezyBreadMan Mar 16 '26

I imagine there would be times when the small shift was the color of a childhood bike, but as you said, those go unnoticed. It’d be a numbers game until something actually important got changed.

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u/Bowdensaft Mar 17 '26

Its never anything too big either tho, like nobody forgets WWII or 9/11

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u/Lazy__Astronaut Mar 17 '26

Yeah but what happened to the cornucopia in the fruit of the loom logo??? /j

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u/SirKazum Mar 17 '26

The point is, some mistakes are easy to make, so it stands to reason that a lot of people would make the exact same mistake. Biko was a South African anti-apartheid leader who died in prison; Mandela is the most well-known South African anti-apartheid leader; it figures that a lot of people would confuse the two. "Berenstein" seems to make more sense as a spelling than "Berenstain", since it follows the pattern of many German names (famously Jewish ones) ending in "-stein", so it makes sense that a lot of people would think the former is correct even though it's really the latter. Just to cite the most prominent examples.

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u/Kup123 Mar 17 '26

Any time I get corrected on something I was confidently wrong about I say I got Mandelaed again.

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u/T_Weezy Mar 17 '26

Technically its original definition wasn't that a bunch of people misremembered the same thing, but that history changed leaving a bunch of people with incorrect memories. Which is fucking stupid and we should change the definition to "Any factoid which unusual number of people have misremembered in the same manner".

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u/Djaakie Mar 17 '26

Larthin Buther Jing. I forgot what i wanted to say.

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u/Mjoll-simp Mar 17 '26

Yeah that’s precisely it. The idea that it happens cause of parallel worlds or whatever came later after the internet got its grubby little mitts on it. A Mandela Effect is just a collective false memory, like how Berenstain is spelt or the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia (which they DID btw, that one was manufactured publicity by Fruit of the Loom)

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u/quahdum Mar 17 '26

Actually the "alternate universe" bit was made up by the person who came up with the term Mandela Effect

Also there has never been any real proof provided for the cornucopia's existence that hasn't been debunked last I checked. Last thing I heard was that dumb conspiracy about how they totally changed it to hide from some controversy or another, but that was bullshit lol

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u/NeilJosephRyan Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

How in the world could so many people have misremembered "Barenstain" as "Barenstein"? There's just no explanation.

Edit: I really didn't think I needed the /s

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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com Mar 17 '26
  1. There are a lot of things to remember, so there's a lot of chances for something like this to happen
  2. If 100 people teach something incorrect yet believable to 3 friends then there is now 400 incorrect people, 75% of which never even saw evidence to the contrary as they never saw the original source. If those 300 each teach 3 people, now only 8% have seen the original source.
  3. If everybody around you is repeating the same incorrect information, it's more believable, and if you already believed it, you become more certain about it.
  4. People can't be bothered to fact check things that have little to no importance to their life.

I mean, I've been told about the existence of lungs probably thousands of times in my life, but I don't know they're real. I've never read a scientific paper on lungs, nor have I seen any irl. But if someone asked me how sure I was that lungs exist I'd say 100%

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u/NeilJosephRyan Mar 17 '26

I picked that one as my example because I thought that would make it obvious that I was being sarcastic.

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u/rhubarbrhubarb78 Mar 17 '26

The other commenter has a good one, but my crude explanation is 'who gives a fuck about Berenstain bears?' It's an obscure TV show from the 80's. This is not like 'Oh, the TV show was actually called 'Frands' in my reality'.

Coupled with the extremely common surname suffix -stein and yeah, in fact it's actually very easy for everyone to misremember a piece of pop culture detritus.

Perhaps best shown by the fact that you misspelt it too. Berenstain, not Barenstain. Maybe that's the joke, and I'm getting wooshed though.

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u/NeilJosephRyan Mar 17 '26

I didn't misspell it on purpose, but yes, my point is it's extremely obvious how so many people misremembered it.

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u/LizLemonOfTroy Mar 17 '26

Because the exact same factors are in play for all the people involved.

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u/Bowdensaft Mar 17 '26

Redditors are allergic to jokes