很多人都记得“曼德拉在监狱里死了”，可他明明是2013年才走的

There was a post on Tianya, the title roughly meaning: many things have happened twice in recent years, some people have died twice, has time been reset.

The people upstairs and downstairs talked most about Mandela. Some said they had seen TV reports over ten years ago that Mandela had died, in prison, in the eighties, with footage of the funeral procession, and many people remember it. But in reality, Mandela passed away on December 5, 2013, and was released from prison in 1990. There are no reports of that "earlier death" to be found online either.

This is not a memory unique to Chinese netizens. In 2009, an American woman who studies paranormal phenomena, named Fiona Broome, discovered while chatting that there was a group of people like her who clearly remembered Mandela dying in prison in the eighties, and she called this phenomenon the "Mandela Effect".

After that, a large number of such "collective memory errors" were collected online: many people are convinced that Pikachu's tail tip is black, but it isn't; some remember the line in "Star Wars" as "Luke, I am your father", when it is actually "No, I am your father"; some remember the old man in Monopoly wearing a monocle, which he never did.

There were two camps in the post. One camp said this is just misremembering, mixing things up, and rumors spreading, and everyone has a bunch of false memories in their head. The other camp said no, I experienced it myself, time was reset, most people lost their memories, and only a small portion of people's memories were not completely erased.

Someone in the post gave a definition of "time reset": the entire spacetime retreats to a certain point and starts over, the new and old trajectories can be exactly the same or different. They added a sentence: if you can find evidence, that actually proves it wasn't a reset, because a real reset would not leave traces.

This logic, you cannot refute it, nor can you prove it.

The psychologists' explanation is much simpler. American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted a famous experiment in the 1970s: she had people watch a video of a car accident, then asked them how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other, versus when they "hit" each other. With different wording, people's estimated speeds differed, and those asked about "smashed" were more likely a week later to say they saw glass shards, which were not in the video at all. Memory is not a video recording; every time you recall it, it is rewritten, and what people around you said and what you saw online gets written into it.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #天涯旧帖