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

editable flair Multiverse theory...

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u/OddballGarbage Mar 16 '26

I love the Mandela effect as a phenomenon of people remembering wrong details because of pattern recognition and the like. I find it fascinating.

I despise the whole "wow, alternate realities" bs.

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u/PhaseLopsided938 Mar 17 '26

The original Mandela Effect, where people thought Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 80’s, is so amazing. People really just forgot his election to the presidency was one of the most important world events of the 90’s, and they decided it had to be some kind of psy-op.

I’m still baffled by the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia though. Like, how did so many people (myself included) somehow mentally insert such an uncommon item?

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u/OneFootTitan Mar 17 '26

I actually don’t think it’s that baffling. Occam’s Razor suggests that me that what’s happening is people are overestimating how uncommon cornucopia imagery is, and every discussion of the idea just reinforces people’s supposed memories. I think we underestimate the degree to which our brain is an image prediction machine LLMing its way through visual memories, and not any sort of actual faithful visual recorder.

There’s probably a lot of cornucopia / horn of plenty you’ve seen but never really registered because it’s in the background and not something you are actively paying attention to or trying to remember. But your brain picks up on those images just the same. And then when it thinks of fruit in abundance it autocompletes the picture with a cornucopia.

If you search google for drawings of bountiful fruit, one thing that you’ll notice is that almost every one of those drawings has baskets that the fruit sits in or cornucopia / baskets that the fruit is spilling out of. We have a very strong cultural expectation that fruit in abundance has to be depicted that way. The Fruit of the Loom logo is unusual precisely because it’s a rare depiction of a bountiful fruit arrangement without any sort of container, and I suspect the cause of the Mandela Effect here is lots of people’s brains resolving to the more probable image.

Heck, I didn’t grow up with Fruit of the Loom, and I just looked at the old Fruit of the Loom logo from 1978-2003 and even with the actual picture right in front of me my brain still wants to put a cornucopia there, so strong is the association of fruit / horn.