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Speaker 1: Comic Con dot com slash NYCC hyphen presents Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Robert, do
Speaker 1: you remember this movie? This is how a Lot of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind? Episode to begin? But do
Speaker 1: you remember this movie that had Sinbad in it from
Speaker 1: the nineties where he played a genie. Uh, you're you're
Speaker 1: you're discussing the film Shazam. Yeah, but I don't think
Speaker 1: Sinbad is actually in it. I just think a lot
Speaker 1: of people remember Sinbad being in it. It turns out
Speaker 1: it's Shaquille O'Neill who raised and it's Kazam as opposed
Speaker 1: to show exactly. Yeah, this is uh, this is a
Speaker 1: big deal. This is This is one of those cases
Speaker 1: where the joke, the conspiracy theory, all of it sort
Speaker 1: of wrapped together, like ends up actually taking shape because
Speaker 1: I believe it's a college humor came around and eventually
Speaker 1: put out like they got Sinbad. Is that right? I
Speaker 1: didn't know this. Okay, they got Sinbad. They filmed him
Speaker 1: in like a scene from this movie, and they put
Speaker 1: all these filters over it to make it look like
Speaker 1: it was retrieved you know, video footage from a VHS
Speaker 1: tape from the nineties. Okay. Yeah, And essentially what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here is actually, and I hesitate to say,
Speaker 1: this a phenomena that many people report. Uh, and it's
Speaker 1: all connected and bundled under terminology referred to as the
Speaker 1: Mandela effect. Yeah, it basically comes down to something that
Speaker 1: is an alleged shared false memory where it gets it
Speaker 1: gets more complicated than that. We're going to discuss it.
Speaker 1: But the idea is that you'll have multiple people sharing
Speaker 1: a false memory, generally of something from sort of you know,
Speaker 1: obscure pop culture, but in some cases like world history,
Speaker 1: that that everyone has the same mistaken notion in their mind,
Speaker 1: and then they suddenly say, hey, why do we why
Speaker 1: do we all believe this thing that simply is not
Speaker 1: So you can go to Synbad's filmography on IMDb and
Speaker 1: clearly that he was never in such a film. It's
Speaker 1: not listed. I mean you can, you can. You can
Speaker 1: get into situations where, all, right, there are films that
Speaker 1: are not maybe not listed on IMDb because they never
Speaker 1: reached a stage of completion, but people claim to have
Speaker 1: remembered seeing it or seeing trailers for it. So it
Speaker 1: would for that to be the case for it to
Speaker 1: have legitimately existed in some form or another, like they
Speaker 1: would have had to have seen it or at least
Speaker 1: sen a trailer. Right. Well, but I think you're spending
Speaker 1: too much time thinking about the possibilities here, because I
Speaker 1: think it's pretty obvious that it's just the people who
Speaker 1: thought that they had seen Shazam with Sinbad are actually
Speaker 1: originally from an alternate reality. Oh yes, well, there's there's
Speaker 1: that argument, or that a time traveler traveled back in
Speaker 1: time and changed time and we're all remembering it now
Speaker 1: only because of the Sinbad. They traced the like the
Speaker 1: butterfly effect, and they said, if we can stop the
Speaker 1: Shazam movie from existing, then we'll um will prevent say,
Speaker 1: World War three exactly. Now, those of you out there
Speaker 1: might think I'm being a facetious jerk right now, but
Speaker 1: actually that is a explanation for this effect we're talking
Speaker 1: about again, the Mandela effect. You're gonna have a hard
Speaker 1: time finding legitimate academic research done on this topic, but wow,
Speaker 1: it is all over the internet. Like when I started
Speaker 1: doing research on this yesterday, every listical site had a
Speaker 1: twenty two instances of the Mandela effect that you won't
Speaker 1: remember something like, Yeah, you'll find reddits where people are
Speaker 1: arguing back and forth about the various ridiculous conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: explanations like oh, it's it's a glitch in the matrix.
Speaker 1: We're already in a computer simulation, and this is because
Speaker 1: somebody you know, hit delete on Shazam by accident, or
Speaker 1: or yeah, where it's the we've drifted over into an
Speaker 1: alternate reality. Then the only difference is that there's no
Speaker 1: Shazam movie in this universe. Yeah, and I also want
Speaker 1: to make it clear to like, we're not here to
Speaker 1: make fun of the idea of alternate realities or time travel.
Speaker 1: Those are actually topics that we are going to cover
Speaker 1: in the future on this show. But we're going to
Speaker 1: cover them from an actual research angle. Yeah. The computer
Speaker 1: simulation angle came up recently in an episode that I
Speaker 1: did with Joe about growing a universe in a bottle,
Speaker 1: creating university. Uh, the thing. But but a lot of
Speaker 1: this comes down to Aucam's razor. Right, what is the
Speaker 1: what is the most reasonable explanation that we can we
Speaker 1: can take, you know, if we're if we're forced to
Speaker 1: draw Aucam's razors from its sheath, which of course this
Speaker 1: is named for William of Ockham. Uh, then it's it's simple.
Speaker 1: It's the simple notion that among competing hypotheses, the one
Speaker 1: with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Right, So, should
Speaker 1: we assume that there are multiple realities and we're shifting
Speaker 1: among them, that should we assume that we're living in
Speaker 1: a computer simulation, or should we assume based on what
Speaker 1: we know about memory and uh and how infallible it
Speaker 1: is and how malleable it is, that that is where
Speaker 1: we can place all the blame for this shared misinformation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is especially interesting coming on the heels of our
Speaker 1: alien abduction two parter that we did, because we talk
Speaker 1: a little bit in those episodes about the science behind
Speaker 1: inserting false memories and how easy that actually turns out
Speaker 1: to be. There's been a lot of research done on that,
Speaker 1: and this seems to be similar, but just on a
Speaker 1: much smaller level. Right, instead of remembering that you were
Speaker 1: abducted by aliens, you remember a movie that Sinbad didn't make. Yes, Now,
Speaker 1: well let's go ahead and get just the name out
Speaker 1: of the way, because we are saying Mandela effect, not Mandola,
Speaker 1: which was would sound more esoteric and mysterious. But now
Speaker 1: Mandela as in Nelson Mandela. Right. Yeah. So the popular example,
Speaker 1: actually more popular than the sin Bad example, is that
Speaker 1: some people seem certain that they remember Nelson Mandela dying
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties, and they think they saw his
Speaker 1: funeral on television, or more specifically, they remember that he
Speaker 1: died in prison, as opposed to you know, dying later
Speaker 1: after he like WHI which I have. I have a
Speaker 1: hard time relating to this one because I distinctly remember
Speaker 1: like news footage about his relief getting out of person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too, Yeah he actually died in So what's going
Speaker 1: on here? Well? It this seems like a case of
Speaker 1: false memories, right, just like we talked about in those
Speaker 1: alien abduction episodes. But some people do wonder if they're
Speaker 1: remembering something from an alternate reality or if a time
Speaker 1: travelers slightly altered our presence. So Robert and I were like,
Speaker 1: this is a kind of fascinating topic. Why don't we
Speaker 1: dive into this and see what the research says. Um
Speaker 1: Most commentators out there, I want to be clear about this,
Speaker 1: suggest that these are examples of false memories that are
Speaker 1: just shaped by similar factors that are affecting multiple people. Okay,
Speaker 1: but the main proponent of this is a person named
Speaker 1: Fiona Broom. Uh and that that sounds like a witch name.
Speaker 1: It's like like a made up witch name. But Fiona
Speaker 1: Broom is a quote paranormal consultant who dubbed this the
Speaker 1: Mandela effect. She claims that perhaps thousands of other people
Speaker 1: have the same experience and She points to speculation of
Speaker 1: alternate realities as an explanation, and then as I dug deeper,
Speaker 1: I found out that this actually all occurred in our
Speaker 1: backyard here in Atlanta, at our local sci fi comic
Speaker 1: book fantasy uh convention slash party dragon Con. Interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it was at dragon Con in two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: She was in. She was there, apparently, she was a guest.
Speaker 1: They have a paranormal track where people talk about things
Speaker 1: like this, and uh, she was in the V I P.
Speaker 1: Suite and a security person mentioned to the other people
Speaker 1: in the room, hey, do you remember when Nelson Mandela
Speaker 1: died in the eighties? But then he just died like actually,
Speaker 1: and this was in two thousand ten. Sorry, he hadn't
Speaker 1: even died yet. He just said, remember when Nelson Mandela
Speaker 1: died in the eighties and he was still alive and
Speaker 1: nobody else remembers that. And she was like, I remember
Speaker 1: that too, And out of that conversation was born this
Speaker 1: whole thing. Another example, she says, also comes from Dragon Con.
Speaker 1: She was there and someone insisted they remembered a Star
Speaker 1: Trek episode that, according to one star of the show,
Speaker 1: was never filmed, So there was a person in the
Speaker 1: audience who clearly remembered seeing this episode, but it had
Speaker 1: never actually been filmed. Maybe they had read about it
Speaker 1: in so much detail that they thought they had seen
Speaker 1: it they they false remembered it. Anyways, the quote from
Speaker 1: from fion A brooms site. She actually has a site.
Speaker 1: I think it's the Mandela Effect dot com or dot
Speaker 1: net or something like that. She's a book coming out.
Speaker 1: This is profitable and she says on her site, these
Speaker 1: aren't simple errors in memory. They seem to be fully
Speaker 1: constructed incidents or sequential events from the past. They exceed
Speaker 1: the normal range of forgetfulness. So she's saying this is
Speaker 1: something beyond just our our memory being fallible. Well, I
Speaker 1: I strongly disagree with that. Well, and we'll discuss I
Speaker 1: do too. You know what's funny is like on our show,
Speaker 1: I'm usually the one who's most willing, well maybe not
Speaker 1: most willing out of the three of us, but I'm
Speaker 1: always like I want to give these people a chance,
Speaker 1: Like I want to give their idea a chance. Let's let's,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of poke at it and see how
Speaker 1: it works. But immediately with this one, my reaction is
Speaker 1: just like nope, like that that just doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: a thing. I feel like you're just making something up. Well,
Speaker 1: the thing is like that. There's basically a statement that
Speaker 1: that she's making something amazing is happening, and it's blank.
Speaker 1: I agree with the first part of that statement, because
Speaker 1: something amazing is happening, But the what's amazing about it
Speaker 1: is what it reveals about our memory and how we
Speaker 1: influence each other's memory of events. Now I do I
Speaker 1: do have to say, I really wish we could rename
Speaker 1: this the Shazam effect, etcetera Mandela effect, because when you
Speaker 1: call it a Mandelo effect, and I'm sure our South
Speaker 1: African listeners will agree it, it betrays a sense of
Speaker 1: historical ignorance. And you know, I don't want to be
Speaker 1: to judge you with that, but because I think that
Speaker 1: the relatable example of this that I can relate to is,
Speaker 1: for instance, there's a period about a year or two
Speaker 1: before Gene Wilder's actual death that I kind of had
Speaker 1: in my mind that he had died, uh, which you know,
Speaker 1: he just wasn't acting in anything. He just kind of
Speaker 1: you know, I think for the last ten or fifteen
Speaker 1: years of his life, right, yeah, yeah, I think he
Speaker 1: just got super choosy with his projects, and you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't wasn't really that into doing it anymore, which
Speaker 1: is fine, he has everybody had every right to to
Speaker 1: do that. But for some reason, you know, when it
Speaker 1: comes to the existence of celebrities, somehow my mind kind
Speaker 1: of clicked it off that oh, he's an older guy.
Speaker 1: He must he died or something, you know. And granted
Speaker 1: that was allowed to happen because I like Gene Wilder,
Speaker 1: but I'm not a Gene Wilder super fan. I'm not
Speaker 1: the kind. I wasn't checking his IMDb profile every day
Speaker 1: for up upcoming projects. Your ram wasn't backing up information
Speaker 1: about what was going on with Gene Wilder currently if
Speaker 1: there was any media reportage on it, right right, So
Speaker 1: kind of like in the in my my rear view
Speaker 1: mirrors or you know, in my peripheral cultural vision, the
Speaker 1: the the the timeline of Gene Wilder had ended. And
Speaker 1: so I I think what's happening with Nelson Mandela's case
Speaker 1: is that for many people, uh you know, maybe African
Speaker 1: South African politics especially is not something that bere zeroed
Speaker 1: in on. It's happening in in their peripheral vision. It's
Speaker 1: happening based on what is you know, climbing up through
Speaker 1: the news cycle to to greet them. And therefore the
Speaker 1: timeline of Nelson Mandela ended, you know, in his incarceration.
Speaker 1: So and I think it's fair to say that it
Speaker 1: would be extremely rare to find this effect in South Africa.
Speaker 1: Like I would imagine that citizens of South Africa are
Speaker 1: probably very aware of how long he was in prison,
Speaker 1: when he passed away, when he was you know, in
Speaker 1: charge of the country, etcetera. Like there isn't this uh
Speaker 1: sort of like weird cognitive distance from it, right, Um,
Speaker 1: So let's go through some other examples here. We talked
Speaker 1: about Shazam and Sinbad, and we've talked about the Mandela one.
Speaker 1: What about the Barren Stain Bears. Oh, yes, this one
Speaker 1: of course relates to the spelling of the Barrensteine Bears
Speaker 1: is in the Barrensteine Bears children's book series, whether it's
Speaker 1: spelled Barren Stain or Barren stein Stein. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it basically comes down to an argument over what how
Speaker 1: how to pronounce the name right right? Yeah? And it's
Speaker 1: also like, like I think this one just is like
Speaker 1: a simple instance of misspelling and also cognitive bias, right,
Speaker 1: and that like we're more used to Stein being in
Speaker 1: names than stain being in name, so our brain sort
Speaker 1: of self corrects if you see it as stain and
Speaker 1: turns it into Stein. Right. Uh. There was another one
Speaker 1: like this that I saw floating around where people were like,
Speaker 1: this is gonna blow your mind. You're ready for it.
Speaker 1: The peanut butter isn't Jeffy peanut butter. It's just jeff
Speaker 1: peanut butter. And I was like, okay, fair enough, Like
Speaker 1: I did, like in the back of my head, I
Speaker 1: did think of it as Jiffy peanut butter. But I
Speaker 1: think that's just because the word jiffy is probably used
Speaker 1: more often and it's probably like search to the surface
Speaker 1: of my memory data bank than the word jiff which
Speaker 1: most people use now to describe like an image file type. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now one. I don't think this is a widespread example,
Speaker 1: but this one came up recently on Twitter Comal and
Speaker 1: Johnny shared his amazement that Dan Ackroyd and then Dan
Speaker 1: a Chroid of The Ghostbusters that his name his last
Speaker 1: name is spelled a y k r O y d
Speaker 1: and there's no like c uh c k going on
Speaker 1: in there and uh, and I when I read that,
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, I kind of just that's
Speaker 1: odd as well. You know, I've I've certainly seen his
Speaker 1: name plenty of times, but for some reason, I just
Speaker 1: kind of thought there was a C in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too. And I definitely didn't think there was a
Speaker 1: y at the beginning. I mean, there's two wise in
Speaker 1: his name. I didn't think there was a a y exactly.
Speaker 1: Like That's another perfect one where it's like, how many
Speaker 1: Dana Chroid movies have I seen? But how closely am
Speaker 1: I paying attention to the spelling of his name versus
Speaker 1: just how I think it should be spelled on how
Speaker 1: it sounds. Yeah, members of the Acroid family, I'm sure
Speaker 1: how do not have this this effect? Right? So I've
Speaker 1: got an example here actually from the research that is
Speaker 1: much smaller and that it doesn't pertain to pop culture
Speaker 1: and won't be as broadly felt, but it's a really
Speaker 1: good example of how this takes place. Okay, at a
Speaker 1: town clock at the Bologna Central Railway station, which was
Speaker 1: damaged in a massacre in nineteen eighty. When they surveyed people,
Speaker 1: nine percent of them falsely remembered that this specific town
Speaker 1: clock had stopped working since the bombing. Actually, what had
Speaker 1: happened was they repaired the clock immediately after the attack,
Speaker 1: but then they manually stopped at sixteen years later in commemoration.
Speaker 1: These are people who lived in the area, but they
Speaker 1: had basically erased the sixteen years between the bombing and
Speaker 1: it being turned off where it was working. And again,
Speaker 1: it's just how memory works, I think more than it
Speaker 1: is an example of all these people sliding into an
Speaker 1: alternate dimension. Now, one fun personal example of this that
Speaker 1: I that I have to share concerns the Konami video
Speaker 1: game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Top Gun, the
Speaker 1: second mission. Yeah, vaguely remember this, Okay, so it's tied
Speaker 1: into the Top Gun movie. Yes, but it was very
Speaker 1: much It was a loose kind of a sequel because
Speaker 1: you're presumably still Maverick, You're still Tom Cruise, and you're
Speaker 1: going up in these little dog fights against progressively more
Speaker 1: difficult like Soviet dog fight. Okay, I was thinking it
Speaker 1: was like goose Iceman. No remembered in the first one,
Speaker 1: I know, but maybe you fight as ghost. Well, this
Speaker 1: is the thing I was. It's at some point in
Speaker 1: the past like ten years. I was reminiscing about this
Speaker 1: game with my friend Dave, and I was joking to
Speaker 1: him that that at the end you fight Goose, because
Speaker 1: there's this reveal that Goose didn't die in the first one,
Speaker 1: that the Soviets, uh, you know, fished him out of
Speaker 1: the water and they brainwashed him into a you know,
Speaker 1: a Soviet agent, and so now he's just like You've
Speaker 1: Winter Soldiers and uh. And I joked about it, and
Speaker 1: then I think, I think Dave kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking back on it, kind of believed that it was real,
Speaker 1: and I kind of, since I don't think about Top
Speaker 1: Gun to all the time, I kind of fooled myself
Speaker 1: a little bit. So we talked about it later and
Speaker 1: he was and he would he would ask like, was
Speaker 1: is that isn't Goose the villain and Top Gun two?
Speaker 1: And I think, yeah, I think I think he is.
Speaker 1: And then I have to remember, oh, wait, I made
Speaker 1: that up. That was just a joke. Well, so did
Speaker 1: this come back up again recently because they announced Tom
Speaker 1: Cruise announced that they're actually doing a Top Gun too.
Speaker 1: I know, I I feel like I feel like I
Speaker 1: got the script done. Well, yeah, I feel like it'll
Speaker 1: be a personal betrayal. If Goose is not the Winter
Speaker 1: Soldier villain of Top Gun two, well, Anthony Edwards, if
Speaker 1: you're listening, please plead with Tom Cruise once you get
Speaker 1: Winter sold I know he wants then, So for me,
Speaker 1: I don't have a lot of examples of this with
Speaker 1: I Just when things like this happened, I just often
Speaker 1: say like, oh, there goes your memory, right, Like, there
Speaker 1: are definitely moments, especially as I'm getting older, where I'm
Speaker 1: like acutely aware. It's funny to use that term, but
Speaker 1: I'm very aware of how my memory is starting to fail,
Speaker 1: not in like a like an Alzheimer's type way or anything,
Speaker 1: but just in like things like this that I don't
Speaker 1: really keep close to the surface, I tend to forget
Speaker 1: over a long period of time. Right. It's like the
Speaker 1: first you know, several decades of your life for about accumulation,
Speaker 1: and then you run out of room and stuff just
Speaker 1: can yeah, exactly. Like sometimes my wife will be like,
Speaker 1: I can't believe you don't remember this important event that happened,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, well, look, I've got three hundred pages
Speaker 1: of D and D manuals up here, Like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to start deleting loads in order to keep all
Speaker 1: this other information. So yeah, I mean it happens. My
Speaker 1: memory is fallible. I'll misremember an actor who was in
Speaker 1: a movie for an since, or maybe I'll think an
Speaker 1: older celebrity is already dead, like your instance with Gene Wilder.
Speaker 1: Happened to me. When Martin Landau died recentthing. I was like,
Speaker 1: what didn't that guy already die like ten years ago?
Speaker 1: But you know, and I feel bad, But then I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: he just hasn't been working for a while, right, The
Speaker 1: last thing I remember him and was probably ed Wood.
Speaker 1: So you know, I definitely get spelling and pronunciation of
Speaker 1: things wrong, as many of the listeners of the show now.
Speaker 1: But I've never felt like there's anything going on here
Speaker 1: beyond the fallibility of my recollection. But let's you want
Speaker 1: to take a break, and then when we come back,
Speaker 1: let's get into some of the theories surrounding this before
Speaker 1: we hit the science. Okay, we're back, so what are
Speaker 1: let's go. Let's cover like the broad gamut of I
Speaker 1: guess wild theories as to what's going on here with
Speaker 1: what is called the Mandela effect. All right, Well, as
Speaker 1: we already mentioned. There's the alternate reality multiverse view of it.
Speaker 1: There's the the idea that we're in a computer s
Speaker 1: relation that some far future civilization has decided that the
Speaker 1: best way for us to live is to live in
Speaker 1: a simulation of an earlier, more simple time. You know
Speaker 1: what's interesting to me about that is like when you
Speaker 1: take like philosophy one oh one in school, right, you
Speaker 1: learn about Descartes and his whole argument with himself centuries
Speaker 1: ago about whether or not his brain was actually in
Speaker 1: a jar being tortured by a demon and reality was
Speaker 1: just all fake illusions. It's essentially the same thing, just
Speaker 1: a different framework. Yeah, it's actually a topic with don't
Speaker 1: I discussed on the recent episode Order Out of Chaos
Speaker 1: how to create a universe? It's it's it's a fascinating
Speaker 1: area of sort of thought experiment and discussion. Uh. And
Speaker 1: there's some there's some interesting arguments on both sides, but
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's again, it's one of those cases
Speaker 1: where when we're looking at at an alleged phenomenon in
Speaker 1: our world, what what hypothesis entails the fewest assumption about reality? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can see how like you know, you go
Speaker 1: back and you look at that Decartes stuff, and he
Speaker 1: pretty firmly was able to ground his argument and say, well,
Speaker 1: the world is actually real. I'm not braining a jar,
Speaker 1: but you can see how in our present day circumstances,
Speaker 1: because so much of life is simulated via entertainment or computers,
Speaker 1: right for most of us, um that it would be
Speaker 1: easy to fall back on that and be like, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, what if none of this is real? Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that a lot of this relates to thinking
Speaker 1: about the human mind and human experience in terms of
Speaker 1: a computer, because they're analyze the real error. I think,
Speaker 1: because we tend to think of our mind as as
Speaker 1: as like video footage and a surveillance, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a system or just a computer record of what has
Speaker 1: occurred and uh. And then when we pull up an
Speaker 1: actual computer record of what has occurred Sinbad's IMDb profile,
Speaker 1: for instance, we say, WHOA, what's going on? My database
Speaker 1: doesn't match with this database? But I but we're resistant
Speaker 1: to completely throw out our own database, not realizing that
Speaker 1: the memory, of course, is full of flaws and holes
Speaker 1: and false memories and uh and false flourishes. Uh. As
Speaker 1: we will discuss there is something inherently egocentric about the
Speaker 1: argument that it's like, no, I have to be the
Speaker 1: center of things. Even though these other records are different
Speaker 1: from my internal record, they must be wrong and it's
Speaker 1: clearly not me. It's like, am I wrong? Or do
Speaker 1: we live in a computer simulation? I'm I'm I'm going
Speaker 1: with the computer simulation. And again, like I would love
Speaker 1: to say, men, if there's evidence out there that we
Speaker 1: live in a computer simulation, send it our way. And
Speaker 1: I mean, I know people actually have brought this up
Speaker 1: to us before and said, you guys should do an
Speaker 1: episode on it, But like that seems to be something
Speaker 1: that has more evidence to it elsewhere than me not
Speaker 1: remembering a sin bad boo. I'm going to use this
Speaker 1: the next time I forget something at the grocery store
Speaker 1: and my wife says, hey, did you pick up the
Speaker 1: SEC and such? How we go, Well, do you see
Speaker 1: we live in a computer simulation? I think we're just
Speaker 1: this this is essentially turning into excuses for our wives. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: before we go too far down that road, how about
Speaker 1: we revisit a stuff to blow your mind favorite, which
Speaker 1: is a psychologist Daniel Schackter in his book, The Seven
Speaker 1: Sins of Memory. Yes, the Seven Sins of Memory, How
Speaker 1: the mind forgets and remembers. It's a it's a fabulous book.
Speaker 1: I recommend anyone who isn't more interested in deeper dive
Speaker 1: here check this out. Um. Now here's an interesting memory tidbit.
Speaker 1: I cannot, I honestly cannot remember if I have seen
Speaker 1: Daniel Shackter speak on this live at the World Science Festival,
Speaker 1: or if I've merely seen a video of him speaking
Speaker 1: about this. Um, I think I saw him live, but
Speaker 1: I could be mistaken. Yeah, that's happened to me before,
Speaker 1: for sure, especially like when you go to conferences and
Speaker 1: you can watch the events from like your hotel room,
Speaker 1: sometimes on the TV as it's happening. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I'm not certain, but this might be a you know,
Speaker 1: a false memory as well. But he basically takes the
Speaker 1: way our memory works and the way that we form
Speaker 1: false memories, and he breaks them down into seven different categories.
Speaker 1: I've hit this on the on the show before, and
Speaker 1: I think I've we've done it recently in the Alien Abduction.
Speaker 1: So I'll try and be quick with it here. But
Speaker 1: there's transience. This is the weakening, weakening or loss of
Speaker 1: memory over time. There's absent mindedness. So this just has
Speaker 1: to do with attention in memory. And I think we
Speaker 1: can already see how these line up with say the
Speaker 1: Shazam example. You know, transience, it's been a while since
Speaker 1: the nineties. Absent mindedness, maybe you didn't care that much
Speaker 1: about sin bad movies to begin with. And then there's blocking.
Speaker 1: This has failed attempts to recall tidbits of memories. So
Speaker 1: you're trying to remember a film that came out of
Speaker 1: the night. Maybe you're trying to remember Kazam, and then
Speaker 1: you end up, you know, blocking it something. Maybe you
Speaker 1: saw a Kazam and you're trying to to forget yes,
Speaker 1: And then there's a misattribution. This is we crawled. We
Speaker 1: recall an authentic memory, but aspects of it are misattributed,
Speaker 1: and that of course is key into what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here. Suggestibility. This is the power of suggestion, the
Speaker 1: ability for someone else to make a suggestion about what
Speaker 1: you should recall, what you do recall, and affect your memory.
Speaker 1: So an example of this would be like you saw
Speaker 1: Kazam with Shaquille O'Neil, but then your friend was like,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be cooler if Sinbad was in that movie
Speaker 1: and then twenty years passed and you remember Sinbad being
Speaker 1: in that movie? Yeah. Or for instance, this came up
Speaker 1: just the other other night with my wife and I
Speaker 1: because we sat down to watch the latest episode of
Speaker 1: Rick and Morty, which is The Defenders Part three, and
Speaker 1: they're the characters are talking about their previous adventures with
Speaker 1: the Defenders, but they haven't actually shown them on the
Speaker 1: TV show. It's just off screen adventures. Yeah. But my
Speaker 1: wife asked me, she said, is that a previous episode?
Speaker 1: Did we see that one? And? Uh? If I had
Speaker 1: insisted that we we had, If I thought we had,
Speaker 1: I could have probably made a pretty strong case because
Speaker 1: I'm the one who fills their head with useless TV information.
Speaker 1: But I was able to to to sort of see
Speaker 1: through it and say, no, no, no, they're they're doing
Speaker 1: a bid here. There is I've read about this. I
Speaker 1: haven't actually seen this, but it's essentially like Rick and
Speaker 1: Morty are part of like a group like the Avengers
Speaker 1: sort of. Ok. Yeah, and they there have been past adventures,
Speaker 1: but they don't actually factor into any previous episode. Alright,
Speaker 1: So then there's bias. This is just you know the
Speaker 1: power of biased to influence memories. There's persistence, the failure
Speaker 1: of of the memory system that involves the unwanted recall
Speaker 1: of information that it's just that is disturbing. Again. Maybe
Speaker 1: you're just trying to forget that because them movie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it sounds like the kind of film that
Speaker 1: you know, if one if it existed and one saw it,
Speaker 1: you might want to do you know, the only reason
Speaker 1: I know about that movie is because of a podcast,
Speaker 1: that podcast How Did This Get Made? Which is all
Speaker 1: about comedians. Yeah, they just watch bad movies and talk
Speaker 1: about them, and I remember they're conversation about how bad
Speaker 1: that movie is stronger than I remember that movie ever existing. Man,
Speaker 1: we're still waiting for a shock to make that great film.
Speaker 1: You never saw Steal, No, I didn't. I felt I
Speaker 1: think I felt part of it. I want to see
Speaker 1: a film adaptation of Shack Fu. Yeah. So those are
Speaker 1: the seven sins of memory. Some of those are going
Speaker 1: to be more important than others as we move forward.
Speaker 1: So one of the key things to keep in mind
Speaker 1: is that that that you can have binding failures in
Speaker 1: what's called memory binding. So this is where a false
Speaker 1: memory can certainly emerge on the individual level, So we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna focus on individual false memories before we
Speaker 1: get into the idea that we can share them. So
Speaker 1: memory binding is the gluing together of various components of
Speaker 1: an experience into a hole. Okay, a binding failure at
Speaker 1: the time the event occurs in action or object is
Speaker 1: not properly bound to a particular time and place, and
Speaker 1: these can cause the actual actions and objects to bind
Speaker 1: together incorrectly. But they can also dragon events that we've
Speaker 1: merely thought about or imagined. So one example that the
Speaker 1: checked always brings up is this, this real life example
Speaker 1: of a woman who was assaulted and there was a
Speaker 1: TV on in the room and she she was able
Speaker 1: to it because his binding failure, which she put the
Speaker 1: face of the individual on the TV, the face of
Speaker 1: the attacker. Now, another example he brings up is a
Speaker 1: particular experiment where he took younger and older adults and
Speaker 1: they were shown one object and then asked to imagine
Speaker 1: a similar object. So they were dealing with like magnifying
Speaker 1: glass and then a lollipop, uh, and then two dissimilar objects.
Speaker 1: And older adults were more likely to say they'd actually
Speaker 1: seen the lollipop that they were asked to imagine instead
Speaker 1: of the magnifying glass that they actually saw. Oh that's interesting, okay.
Speaker 1: And I would imagine like an empirical test like this
Speaker 1: would probably have like measurable amounts of time in between
Speaker 1: the memories, right and now. Another this is another big
Speaker 1: one too, is the misset attribution for the source of memories.
Speaker 1: So people regularly say that they read something in the newspaper,
Speaker 1: they saw it on the news, when actually a friend
Speaker 1: told them, or they saw it in an advertisement or something.
Speaker 1: So in In one particular study, and this is one
Speaker 1: that Shafter was involved with in the N four with
Speaker 1: hard Book and McLaughlin UH, participants with normal memories UH
Speaker 1: were shown to regularly make mistakes of thinking they had
Speaker 1: acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper when actually the
Speaker 1: experiment it's the experimenters themselves had supplied it. I have
Speaker 1: a similar study to talk about related to that later
Speaker 1: in the episode. Yeah, I think this one is especially
Speaker 1: I mean, this goes beyond contemplations of of Shazam and whatnot,
Speaker 1: because you know, clearly we're in an age now where
Speaker 1: we have a lot of misinformation that is out there,
Speaker 1: some of it intentionally confusing, you know, can intentionally u
Speaker 1: crafted to mislead individuals, and so even you know, it's
Speaker 1: easy to see how people would get their memories crossed,
Speaker 1: especially with all the information that's coming out you're on
Speaker 1: various social media accounts. Yeah, I think that this is
Speaker 1: a really good example of why media literacy is so
Speaker 1: important and understanding how media is made, like whether it's
Speaker 1: your newspaper or Wikipedia or your podcast that you're listening to, right, Like,
Speaker 1: like having a general idea of how that information is
Speaker 1: coming to you, so you can judge for yourself whether
Speaker 1: or not that is worth storing a memory of, right
Speaker 1: And and I think our go to with newspapers for
Speaker 1: the longest time, maybe that's starting to fade now, was Okay,
Speaker 1: I can trust that if it's printed on that kind
Speaker 1: of paper and that and it's in that big font,
Speaker 1: that's a true thing. Right. But then the dangerous part
Speaker 1: is when it's days later and you have this this
Speaker 1: fact or this viewpoint rolling around in your head and
Speaker 1: you have to ask yourself, did I did I get
Speaker 1: that from the New York Times? Did I get that
Speaker 1: from Reuters? Or did I get that from inquirer, from
Speaker 1: inquired or just or somebody on Twitter who's just very
Speaker 1: alarmist and and and therefore should I build anything on that?
Speaker 1: Should I build any of my thoughts on that foundation? Yeah? Absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 1: We are definitely in a period of time where it's
Speaker 1: very it's it's easier for this stuff to happen, I think,
Speaker 1: and like I think it's sort of contingent upon all
Speaker 1: of us to train ourselves to be able to sort
Speaker 1: of what would be the term here cut the wheat
Speaker 1: from the cheff. Now. Another memory error that is worth
Speaker 1: the focusing on here again for the individual false memory
Speaker 1: formation is uh that of a memory conjunction error. So
Speaker 1: a memory conjunction error is is common and this occurs
Speaker 1: when we incorrectly combine parts of previously experienced memories to
Speaker 1: create an entirely new memory. For example, such an error
Speaker 1: has occurred when when people are remembering the you know
Speaker 1: that they see the word toothache after viewing the words
Speaker 1: toothpick and earache instead. I've had this occurring and referring
Speaker 1: to notes or you know, they're just going to be
Speaker 1: two particular words in a sentence and then they end
Speaker 1: up forming together and do a different word. We had that. Okay,
Speaker 1: this week, here's a little behind the scenes for your listeners.
Speaker 1: So the other episode we're recording this week is about
Speaker 1: Cleo Dynamics, and both Robert and I, you know, we
Speaker 1: spent hours doing this research ahead of time, just staring
Speaker 1: at these notes, typing them out, reading article after article
Speaker 1: after article, and reading that word over and over again,
Speaker 1: typing that word over and over again. And yet I
Speaker 1: could not get it to stick the landing in my brain,
Speaker 1: Like even after eight hours of reading about it. My
Speaker 1: wife came home and said, well, what were you researching today?
Speaker 1: And I was like, uh, ker fluffle Dynamo. I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like it couldn't It wouldn't stick for some reason. So
Speaker 1: it's Cleo dynamics. And I kept combining it in my
Speaker 1: head with Kell Deldonis, which has come up in the
Speaker 1: past concerning like the future re virtual sex. Well that's
Speaker 1: the other thing too, is that you and I and
Speaker 1: Joe are just constantly absorbing so much information that it's
Speaker 1: hard to get all of it to stick, right. Like
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people when they meet us
Speaker 1: assume that we have all like nine episodes we've done
Speaker 1: like at total recall in our main and it's hard.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes that stuff I only remember like the main,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know three or four points of an
Speaker 1: episode six months later. Yeah, indeed, it all just become
Speaker 1: sort of a confused jelly in there. Uh. Now, as
Speaker 1: we've stressed many times on the show, merely recalling a
Speaker 1: memory also entails reconsolidation of that memory. So each memory
Speaker 1: is a thing of soft clay, and by touching it
Speaker 1: we alter its form. The memories you handle the most
Speaker 1: are sometimes the one you can trust the least. And uh,
Speaker 1: and then this is an important to note to our
Speaker 1: brains work that don't work this way for you know,
Speaker 1: no reason. Reconsolidation can aid in learning. Its strengthens neural
Speaker 1: connections and allows the formation of new associations. Like essentially
Speaker 1: it's about updating your knowledge of a thing. But you know,
Speaker 1: the way the human mind works, and the complexity of
Speaker 1: the of the of the modern human mind is that
Speaker 1: you can update existing information with false information, with purely
Speaker 1: emotional information, and it just changes it over time. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it and it also can occur just sort of
Speaker 1: based on when you were absorbing other information. So there's
Speaker 1: an article in Ian magazine on this on the Mandel
Speaker 1: effect from Caitlin A. Mont and she brings up the
Speaker 1: example of Alexander Hamilton's. So here's the here's this is
Speaker 1: all pre Hamilton's the musical. I'm not sure to what
Speaker 1: extent that would change this, but for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: you went to school, you learned that Alexander Hamilton's was
Speaker 1: a founding father of the US but never a U
Speaker 1: S president. But a study on false memories from this
Speaker 1: was published in Psychological Science titled Recognizing the Presidents was
Speaker 1: the Alexander Hamilton's President. This looked at who most Americans
Speaker 1: identify as presidents, and the subjects were more likely to
Speaker 1: incorrectly select Hamilton's but not several other actual former presidents.
Speaker 1: Hamilton's simply became encoded at the same time as the
Speaker 1: other presidents wired together. Ben Franklin is similar to this.
Speaker 1: That's another one where like you learn about Ben Franklin
Speaker 1: at the same time as you learn about the founding
Speaker 1: fathers and the first presidents of the country, and and
Speaker 1: and then twenty years later, as an adult, your brain
Speaker 1: just kind of wires it all together and goes, wait,
Speaker 1: he was a president, wasn't he and then somebody goes, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, no, he wasn't you know. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean even you know, there was a time I remember
Speaker 1: we where we had to in school memorize all the
Speaker 1: president the United States in order, and you know, maybe
Speaker 1: you even had a visual aid there with little pictures
Speaker 1: of all these guys, and and I didn't retain that completely.
Speaker 1: I so I don't know to what extent I could
Speaker 1: set here and and get a one when I have,
Speaker 1: you know, presidential history exam, so I can understand how
Speaker 1: this kind of thing happens. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, That's
Speaker 1: one of those things where like when you when you're
Speaker 1: little and you're learning that stuff in school, you're like
Speaker 1: agonizing over being able to actually remember all however many
Speaker 1: of them there were, and now here in the present day,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of like when is there ever a
Speaker 1: moment when it comes up where it's like, if you
Speaker 1: don't know when Grover Cleveland was president, then it's going
Speaker 1: to be like an absolute, uh, you know, life threatening scenario. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: our American history education tends to be kind of rushed
Speaker 1: and and even and even then, if you're going back
Speaker 1: and doing deep dives, you're doing deep dives into certain
Speaker 1: sections of history, so you know, the formation of the country,
Speaker 1: the Civil War, Uh, you know, the twentieth century history, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And they're still gonna be holes and and also just
Speaker 1: something less newsworthy, less interesting phases in presidential history. But
Speaker 1: to bring it back to Shazam. Uh, it's easy to
Speaker 1: walk through the various ways that a vague pop culture
Speaker 1: or historical memory could get twisted around in your mind.
Speaker 1: So you remember that there was that film called Kazam.
Speaker 1: It starts shack and shack plus Kazam kind of sounds
Speaker 1: like Shazam, which is the name of a comic book character.
Speaker 1: So it's not just a completely new nonsense word shazam.
Speaker 1: This is like a major comic guy. Right. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: actually making a Shazam movie pretty soon. The rock is
Speaker 1: going to be in oh man. But it's uh so Shazam.
Speaker 1: Here's here's a fun memory fact for you. A lot
Speaker 1: of people thought the name of the character with Shazam
Speaker 1: for a very long time. The name of the character
Speaker 1: is actually Captain Marvel. But he says Shazam to turn
Speaker 1: from a little boy into like the Superman figure, right,
Speaker 1: oh man, it's that that his current power. He's really
Speaker 1: a boy. Oh yeah, he's always been like a little
Speaker 1: ten year old kid, and and his power is to
Speaker 1: turn into like a like a magical superman. Yeah. Oh
Speaker 1: my goodness. So this movie, we're gonna have some child
Speaker 1: that turns into the Rock. I think the Rock is
Speaker 1: playing the villain in this, but I'm not sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it might be a child turns into the Rock. Which,
Speaker 1: by the way, that's the premise of the new Jumanji
Speaker 1: movie coming out too, that a child turns into the Rock. Yes, yes, well,
Speaker 1: I think the bottom line though, is you're telling me
Speaker 1: there's still a chance that Sinbad could play Shazam and
Speaker 1: an actual film. I think so, yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I don't see why this can't happen. Now. Another aspect
Speaker 1: to all of this is the idea that the character
Speaker 1: is a genie and uh, and the genie is, of course,
Speaker 1: the creature of that emerges from Arabic mythology Sinbad the
Speaker 1: actor his name is Sinbad. Sinbad of course also emerges
Speaker 1: from from from folk tales and mythology of of the
Speaker 1: the Arab people, right, yeah, tales of a thousand and
Speaker 1: one Nights, I think, and the timeline is right for this.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the nineties, you have various films and hopping,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of the clinging on films that come
Speaker 1: off out around the same theme. And it's the sort
Speaker 1: of film that you probably wouldn't have seen, the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that just a trailer came out, you heard
Speaker 1: about it, you didn't watch it. The false memory kind
Speaker 1: of gets stored away incorrectly. Yeah, I gotta say, Sinbad
Speaker 1: is one of these guys, and look, Sinbad, if you're listening,
Speaker 1: this is nothing into you, buddy. But I just don't
Speaker 1: really have any memory of anything he actually was in,
Speaker 1: just a memory of him being a pop culture figure, right,
Speaker 1: Like I think he was in that Cosby show spent
Speaker 1: off a different world. But other than that, I don't
Speaker 1: remember anything he was in. Oh, I feel like he
Speaker 1: was in. Like, here's here's a potential. If you told me, hey,
Speaker 1: Sinbad was in Stallone's Judge Dread movie he played one
Speaker 1: of the other judges, I would be tempted to believe you,
Speaker 1: even though I've seen the film and and and actually
Speaker 1: I think prefer it to the most recent Judge Dread film. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love the new Dread film the New Dread film.
Speaker 1: The New Dread film was was was very entertaining, but um,
Speaker 1: I feel like I feel like both of these films
Speaker 1: get something wrong about the the the actual comic book.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely that it's a satire. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: really I really need those two films to sort of
Speaker 1: come together into one film and and maybe it will
Speaker 1: in your memory after a couple of years. I need
Speaker 1: I need talking robots and and Italian nanny's and uh
Speaker 1: and aliens. I need all the wacky stuff in there
Speaker 1: to really buy into. Yeah. Alright, So at this point,
Speaker 1: I think we've we've given you a good idea of
Speaker 1: how the false memory of Shazam or what have you
Speaker 1: can emerge. But what we're gonna get into after this
Speaker 1: next break is then how do we share it? How
Speaker 1: do we end up in this weird scenario where we're
Speaker 1: talking to other people and and and reminiscing about things
Speaker 1: that simply were not so alright, we're back. So, okay,
Speaker 1: we've got a little bit more from that Eon article
Speaker 1: to discuss here about false memories leading us into what's
Speaker 1: actually happening. Amatt argues that that a lot of this,
Speaker 1: you know, it's going to come down to two issues.
Speaker 1: One is definitely the case suggestibility, which we'll get to.
Speaker 1: But then there's also confabulation. So confabulation is the brain's
Speaker 1: attempt to fill in missing memory gaps by adding fabricated
Speaker 1: facts and experiences. This is tied to various neurological disorders
Speaker 1: like stroke, brain injury, Alzheimer's um corsa cough syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing too, it can happen to healthy
Speaker 1: individuals as well. Yeah, I have a note here about
Speaker 1: how the term is used clinically confabulation, and it refers
Speaker 1: to memory defects that are experienced when patients have brain damage,
Speaker 1: but it also applies to everyday events, like when we
Speaker 1: embellish the truth while recounting events. For instance, she brings
Speaker 1: up one particular case. So there's a there's a editor
Speaker 1: with the name Epic Journeyman who apparently was key and
Speaker 1: and and you know, being I guess, ah, you know,
Speaker 1: spokesman for the idea that that Shazam existed. And he
Speaker 1: worked at a video store in the nineties and he
Speaker 1: had to watch multiple copies of film several times to
Speaker 1: verify that the you know, the tape wasn't damaged and
Speaker 1: they could actually rent it again or they or have
Speaker 1: a rent or complained they'd have to like watch it through.
Speaker 1: And UH, so in this case, he was he was
Speaker 1: he was engaging in this repetitive unpacking of memory. And
Speaker 1: she says that this, uh, this is a situation where
Speaker 1: confabulation seems to be more frequent. So that's a possibility
Speaker 1: that that's that's what occurred with this particular individual. But
Speaker 1: then to draw in uh shacters um commentary not not
Speaker 1: particular to uh Mandela syndrome or what have you, but
Speaker 1: just memory in general. He talks a lot about flashbulb memories.
Speaker 1: So these are memories of events, you know, very emotional events,
Speaker 1: such as nine eleven, uh and UH, and they're stored
Speaker 1: in the amygdala, an emotion processing center of the brain
Speaker 1: that is particularly involved in fear. So uh. The basic
Speaker 1: situation here is that the a magdala focus is so
Speaker 1: heavily on emotions that it doesn't store all the details
Speaker 1: of an event it. But because our emotions are so
Speaker 1: involved in recalling flashboat bald memories, we remain confident about them,
Speaker 1: and this confidency uh spills over into poorly remember details.
Speaker 1: So the example here is when you have people who
Speaker 1: and this has been tested and studies, the idea that
Speaker 1: when asked, people say, oh, yeah, I remember what I
Speaker 1: was eating for breakfast, when when eleven occurred, I remember
Speaker 1: what shirt I was wearing, you know, my shoes, and
Speaker 1: that you see examples of this in other you know,
Speaker 1: very emotional events. Uh, the idea that it's just you know,
Speaker 1: etched in the stone of memory. But but when when
Speaker 1: we've been able to check up on that, we find
Speaker 1: that that's not the case, that the brain is is
Speaker 1: filling in the blanks and these flash bold memories. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean when I think back to nine eleven, what
Speaker 1: I was doing that morning, I don't remember what I
Speaker 1: had for breakfast. I don't remember what I was wearing,
Speaker 1: but I like distinctly remember being at my job, the
Speaker 1: radio being on in us listening intensely to what was happening.
Speaker 1: And then at the time I lived in Boston, when
Speaker 1: I looked out the windows there were fighter jets flying
Speaker 1: overhead because the planes have flown out of logan, and
Speaker 1: I remember all those things distinctly. But I'm remembering those
Speaker 1: memories right like it's like I'm looking at like a
Speaker 1: like a movie file. Uh, and it's slightly distorted, right
Speaker 1: or blurry. So all these examples we've discussed so far,
Speaker 1: these might not explain everything, but I think they're enough
Speaker 1: to create certain individuals who are who are very confident
Speaker 1: in their memory of something, even though that memory is false,
Speaker 1: and then it just has to be planted in the
Speaker 1: heads of others. And luckily we're quite susceptible to that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. So we've already talked about misinformation, be
Speaker 1: it you know, a deliberate misinformation campaign on social media,
Speaker 1: or me telling you know, making something up and telling
Speaker 1: somebody about the boss of a of a video game.
Speaker 1: And in these cases it's been it's been shown in
Speaker 1: and studies it misinformation can actually compromise the fidelity of
Speaker 1: an existing memory. Uh. This is the reason leading questions
Speaker 1: are so frowned upon in journalism and objectionable in a
Speaker 1: court of law. If you're asking the question, that is
Speaker 1: kind of inserting the answer into the individual's mind. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you ever want to be more terrified by our
Speaker 1: justice system, be on a jury for like a couple
Speaker 1: of days and then go into the deliberation room and
Speaker 1: see how well you and your fellow jurors remember everything
Speaker 1: that was presented to and how you recollect it back
Speaker 1: to each other, because it's it's scary how everybody remembers
Speaker 1: things a little bit differently, and then the jurors can
Speaker 1: kind of start like convincing one another that they remembered
Speaker 1: something the wrong way necessarily or the right way. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of it relates could just basically
Speaker 1: boils down to comments and suggestions made when a person
Speaker 1: is trying to recall a past experience. And you know,
Speaker 1: this ties in with some of what we talked about
Speaker 1: with alien abduction or or allegations of ritual satanic abuse
Speaker 1: where an individual, you know, and it's even more complicated.
Speaker 1: It's a very young individual, but they're being questioned about
Speaker 1: what happened and if their seeds being planted uh in
Speaker 1: that questioning while they're trying to recall, then it can
Speaker 1: it can alter the memory. Yeah, when we talked about
Speaker 1: that at length, uh in the alien abduction episode. There's
Speaker 1: all kinds of factors that can lead to faulty memories. Right,
Speaker 1: We're talking about everything in distortions from bias to association,
Speaker 1: to imagination sometimes even peer pressure. Right, So like the
Speaker 1: jury example, I was just giving. That's because our memory
Speaker 1: is constructive, not reproductive. We think of it as being reproductive,
Speaker 1: but it's not. The brain actually builds memories out of
Speaker 1: various pieces of information and then it plays them back
Speaker 1: like a recording. And this is why when you're discussing
Speaker 1: a memory, we often say here on the show, we
Speaker 1: have to say, you're not remembering what happened, You're remembering
Speaker 1: the last time you remembered it, last time you watched
Speaker 1: that file, that recording, right and real quick. Some more
Speaker 1: notes on false memories that we covered in alien abduction,
Speaker 1: So false memory implantation. It's important to recognize that this
Speaker 1: does happen in hypnotherapy, but most hypnotherapists are earnest about
Speaker 1: their desire to help patients. But experimental psychology has actually
Speaker 1: shown it's it's pretty easy to implant false memories in
Speaker 1: an individual's mind. So there was a study where researchers
Speaker 1: were able to implant false memories of getting lost in
Speaker 1: a shopping mall and participants when they never had been
Speaker 1: lost in the shopping mall. And then in another two
Speaker 1: thousand one study, they showed that even when events are
Speaker 1: unlikely such as alien abduction. They can be implanted as
Speaker 1: false memories. This leads to suggestive information being presented to
Speaker 1: the participants and that can increase the plausibility or implausibility
Speaker 1: of an event to them. So take for example, a newspaper, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there have been numerous studies that have back
Speaker 1: this up with restart showing the suggest can influence how
Speaker 1: we perform a memory tasks, how we learned tasks are
Speaker 1: product preference response to supplements and medications. Even so, the
Speaker 1: placebo effect comes into play. One example personal example that
Speaker 1: comes to my mind is so growing up, when my
Speaker 1: family would have boiled eggs, like hard boiled eggs, my
Speaker 1: mom would always enjoyed putting mustard on them. And I
Speaker 1: don't think I actually put mustard on it. I mean
Speaker 1: I wasn't like yuck, but I didn't do it. And
Speaker 1: then at some point, like in grade school, I had
Speaker 1: to write a story, and I wrote a story about
Speaker 1: someone who put mustard on an egg and and my
Speaker 1: my mom got to read it. And then at some
Speaker 1: point my mom was like, oh, you really like mustard
Speaker 1: on your eggs. Let me get mustard out for you.
Speaker 1: And and it ends up with me loving putting mustard
Speaker 1: on my eggs, like like it made it happen, like
Speaker 1: somehow the false memory got implanted in my head and
Speaker 1: then became a reality. But I know that I didn't
Speaker 1: always love mustard on on my egg This is a
Speaker 1: ridiculous thing to spend an time disgusting, but it's I
Speaker 1: think it's a mile in a mild example, and I
Speaker 1: imagine everyone else has these mild examples as well, where
Speaker 1: the idea gets implanted in your head and becomes the reality. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think actually that's a really good like area, like
Speaker 1: a fertile area for researching on. This is like things
Speaker 1: that we have convinced ourselves that we like or don't
Speaker 1: like food wise the course of time. And then of
Speaker 1: course with childhood memories, there's a lot of this too
Speaker 1: where you have to ask yourself, do I remember this
Speaker 1: or was I told that this happened by my parents
Speaker 1: and now I remember it being so right? Like your
Speaker 1: parents say, boy, you hated Brussels sprouts, And the next
Speaker 1: time Brussels sprouts show up on your plate, You're like, wait,
Speaker 1: do I like these are not? Yeah? Yeah, Well in
Speaker 1: nineteen there is this other study McNally and Clancy researched
Speaker 1: memory function in women who believed that they had recovered
Speaker 1: memories of sexual child abuse, and they found that such
Speaker 1: victims were actually more likely to create false memories of
Speaker 1: non traumatic events in the lab, so not false memories
Speaker 1: of their abuse, but of non traumatic events than the
Speaker 1: women who had always remembered being sexually abused. Uh, and
Speaker 1: that women and also women who had never been abused. Right.
Speaker 1: So this is actually what led to them studying alien
Speaker 1: abductions because they were like, we can't implant false memories
Speaker 1: of sexual abuse in these people. That's unethical. We need
Speaker 1: to come up with something that that we're pretty sure
Speaker 1: didn't happen, but they that we can maybe trick them
Speaker 1: into thinking happened. What about alien abduction? Yeah, Now, another
Speaker 1: study on false memory implantation comes from Darren Strange, Marianne Gary,
Speaker 1: Daniel M. Bernstein that's Bernstein, not Burned Stain, and d
Speaker 1: Stephen Lindsay and it's titled Photographs cause false Memories for
Speaker 1: the news. This is the newspaper when I was telling
Speaker 1: you about. In this study, participants were tested to see
Speaker 1: if false memories were more prevalent when images were used
Speaker 1: in conjunction with words rather than when words were used alone. Okay,
Speaker 1: So participants would look at ten newspaper headlines for four
Speaker 1: seconds each. Sometimes the headlines were real, sometimes they were fake,
Speaker 1: and after each viewing, they were asked to rate, on
Speaker 1: a scale of one to five how confident they were
Speaker 1: that they actually recognized the story. Now, when a picture
Speaker 1: was next to the headline, participants were way more likely
Speaker 1: to remember a false event as being a real thing,
Speaker 1: and on the true events, the participants were totally comfortable
Speaker 1: reporting when they did not remember it at all. So
Speaker 1: that wasn't a factor here. It wasn't like these participants
Speaker 1: were scared to admit they didn't know anything. They would
Speaker 1: admit to it if they didn't remember something that actually happened. Now,
Speaker 1: the data here supports the idea that images can cause
Speaker 1: false memories, and according to this, memories seem to need
Speaker 1: a support system to make them personally believable to us.
Speaker 1: What provides that support pictures? As we searched through our memories,
Speaker 1: we're looking for cues and we provide evidence for our
Speaker 1: memories so we can make sure they're accurate with these images.
Speaker 1: So this is even scarier, especially when you take into
Speaker 1: account you and Joe talked about this in the Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley episodes about how easy it is to replicate uh images,
Speaker 1: And now we're getting closer to replicating video of things
Speaker 1: people didn't actually do or say, right, Like, I just
Speaker 1: actually related to what you guys had talked about in
Speaker 1: that episode. I just saw a video the other day
Speaker 1: that somebody did a c g I Barack Obama and
Speaker 1: had him saying things that he didn't really say in
Speaker 1: real life, and it was it wasn't quite there yet,
Speaker 1: but you know what I'm saying, Like, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: to a point where that can be floating around out there.
Speaker 1: And again, media literacy is important. You need to be
Speaker 1: able to determine is this something that I can trust
Speaker 1: to remember my to ensure my memory is accurate, or
Speaker 1: is this something I need to like judge on a
Speaker 1: different system. Yeah, it's interesting this we're discussing the ability
Speaker 1: to use the Internet and modern technology to fact check ourselves,
Speaker 1: because I think that's where a lot of the the
Speaker 1: situation of the Mandela effect emerges from, because we've always had,
Speaker 1: you know, false information kicking around in the back of
Speaker 1: our head, you know, and memories that have been become
Speaker 1: skewed over time. But with the with with the Internet
Speaker 1: at hand, with for instance, IMBB at hand, we've been
Speaker 1: in the position to just instantly look ups and Bad's
Speaker 1: biography and see what's on there, and and so we're
Speaker 1: forced to confront a lot of our our our false
Speaker 1: memories and then discuss them with each other. But is
Speaker 1: i AMDB community built the same way like Wikipedia? Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to imply that IMDb is infallible, but
Speaker 1: it is a pretty good source. And and if you
Speaker 1: do not see a film that you remember on there,
Speaker 1: then then it's a pretty good sign that something's up.
Speaker 1: I'm just imagining this reditor guy that you were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, like constantly going in and editing IMDb and
Speaker 1: Wikipedia on Sinbad's pages and like adding Shazam there. Well,
Speaker 1: about I guess ten years or more ago, I remember
Speaker 1: there being a few cases of films that don't exist
Speaker 1: in IMDb that then fraudently put there, and they are
Speaker 1: always a lot of fun because they had weird descriptions.
Speaker 1: I haven't looked into this recently, but I I don't
Speaker 1: know that there's anything like that anymore. I would love
Speaker 1: to hear if there are any known false films in
Speaker 1: IMDb or if that's something that has been completely removed
Speaker 1: through oversight or just the hive mind of the people involved. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I get the impression just overall from Wikipedia that the
Speaker 1: act the community is so active that like I don't know,
Speaker 1: they're they're paying attention, and they're able to sort of
Speaker 1: for the most part, keep things factual. I I know,
Speaker 1: for the most part when I visit Wikipedia. This is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why we don't do our research
Speaker 1: based on Wikipedia. It is a good place though to
Speaker 1: go find sources, uh for further research, but for instance,
Speaker 1: like almost always, if there's an article that's in dispute,
Speaker 1: it's got one of those uh what do you call them?
Speaker 1: Like there there's like a header up on top that
Speaker 1: lets you know, hey, some of the information in this
Speaker 1: article is up for dispute right now. Um now Strange,
Speaker 1: this is Darren Strange, which is an interesting name for
Speaker 1: a psychologist, right right. Uh. Strange had other colleagues and
Speaker 1: went on to publish another experiment in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: This showed that it's easier to implant false memories and
Speaker 1: people for an event that supposedly happened when they were
Speaker 1: two years old rather than when they were ten years old.
Speaker 1: And basically this shows that our childhood memories are sparse
Speaker 1: and they lack detail, so we filled them in with
Speaker 1: distortions from other information. So going back to our food example, right,
Speaker 1: like things our parents tell us that we did or
Speaker 1: we believed or we felt, uh you know up until
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe age five or something like that. Right,
Speaker 1: and then you sort of take that on as fact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I think this, Uh, this gets a little
Speaker 1: bit into the the power of creepy pasta because there
Speaker 1: are certain creepy pasta tales to sort of play on this,
Speaker 1: the idea that hey, everybody remembers this, right, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: uh and then goes from their crafting some form of
Speaker 1: fiction that reminds me, we're coming up on October. We're
Speaker 1: gonna need to pull out a creepy Pasta episode again
Speaker 1: this year. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if there's hopefully there's
Speaker 1: there's fuel for one at least one that's gotta be
Speaker 1: yeah part four. There was that whole TV show that
Speaker 1: came out after we did the last Yeah. Uh. So
Speaker 1: there are other studies to support mass distortions of memories.
Speaker 1: As well, and we're not gonna go through all of them,
Speaker 1: but here's two more that I want to give you.
Speaker 1: First is, in two thousand five, Stephen Lewandowski and his
Speaker 1: colleagues showed that Americans were more likely than Australians and
Speaker 1: Germans to falsely remember that actual weapons of mass destruction
Speaker 1: were found in Iraq. So that's pretty interesting, like like
Speaker 1: your your memory distortions can be based on your national identity.
Speaker 1: And then another study in two thousand seven showed that
Speaker 1: when we look at doctored photos of past public events,
Speaker 1: that can distort our memories. So tying back into that
Speaker 1: newspaper study, you have to really be careful about which
Speaker 1: you believe now, because it's so easy to use photoshop
Speaker 1: essentially right now, there's other examples where two people witness
Speaker 1: the same event and then they discuss it. One person's
Speaker 1: memory can contaminate the other, kind of like how you
Speaker 1: did with Top Gun the video game, Top Gun two
Speaker 1: the video game. Um, let's tackle quickly the two big
Speaker 1: Mandela effect ones though. Okay, so we've got Barren Stain
Speaker 1: versus Barren Stein bears. Okay, maybe the explanation is just
Speaker 1: simply that names ending in stein are more common than
Speaker 1: names ending in stain. But because we have this prior association,
Speaker 1: we think it's Barren Steaen or Nelson Mandela's death. Frankly,
Speaker 1: the only two moments people in America, for the most part,
Speaker 1: seemed to be familiar with Mandela are when he was
Speaker 1: imprisoned and when he died. And so it's possible that
Speaker 1: they're piecing together a false memory from these disparate pieces
Speaker 1: of information. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, So leading
Speaker 1: us out here, what if? What if this? What if
Speaker 1: this Mandela effect? Stuff that's sprinkling up and we're we're
Speaker 1: considering it now, and I think we've gotten past the
Speaker 1: point that, like you and I are pretty sure this
Speaker 1: is an alternate dimensions at play. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 1: pretty positive. What if it's a good thing? What if
Speaker 1: this is a necessary thing for the human mind. In
Speaker 1: a paper for Frontiers in Psychology from twelve, Adam D. Brown,
Speaker 1: Nicole Curry, and William Hurst argued that there's growing evidence
Speaker 1: that the reconstructive process of memory, which includes its distortions,
Speaker 1: might provide us with great cognitive flexibility. So this helps,
Speaker 1: for instance, support the construction and maintenance of your identity. Subsequently,
Speaker 1: the malleability of an individual's memory can then transform shared
Speaker 1: collections and a group. And then through social interactions, we
Speaker 1: try to take out distinct individual memories and make them
Speaker 1: converge together with other people's memories, and from this emerges
Speaker 1: a collective memory, which establishes our collective identity. So maybe
Speaker 1: all of this isn't as much like a flaw in
Speaker 1: our programming as it is like a like a tactic,
Speaker 1: a strategy that the human mind uses as a social animal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you realize that your memory and recollection is not
Speaker 1: just this iron chain, you know, reaching back through time
Speaker 1: behind you, there's there's something liberating in that, Like you
Speaker 1: can realize that you have a certain amount of control
Speaker 1: over your own memories, over your own identity based on those,
Speaker 1: and you're not just a you know, a slave to
Speaker 1: what has come before. Yeah, yeah, very much. So, all right, audience, Look,
Speaker 1: I'm dying to hear what your examples of the Mandela
Speaker 1: effect are, because if there are twenty two up there
Speaker 1: out there on buzz feed, I'm sure our audience has
Speaker 1: got even more than that. So let us know what
Speaker 1: some of your examples are. Let us know what you think,
Speaker 1: did we come down a little too hard on the
Speaker 1: alternate realities theory? Or should we do an episode on
Speaker 1: alternate realities in the future. Maybe we will. Yeah, and
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Speaker 1: in the last a few hours us about contemplations of mortality. Yeah,
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