X.O. DePlume
Sep 9, 2018 · 2 min read

I love a good paranormal story as much as the next person, but this doesn’t strike me as particularly mysterious. I clearly remember the Berenstains having an A, the Flintstones having a T, Sex and THE City, and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. I had, however, forgotten a personal event that others remember and even when I did remember it after reminding, the details were very unclear. However, the details of the BOOK I was reading at that time and had trouble putting down are still very clear, partly because I later saw the movie as well. Memory can only hold so much, and has “roads” — the ones you revisit often are clearer, like well-travelled roads stay clear. The ones you rarely or never go down get overgrown and tangled.

Many studies have proven people cannot, over time, distinguish between what they remember, what they’ve imagined/dreamed (particularly as very young children, but even later), and what they’ve been told. A guest died on the Dick Cavett show once in the 70s. The story was told in the press, but of course the pre-taped show never aired out of respect. Yet many people who had not been in the studio audience approached Cavett saying how vividly they remembered that man dying — though they could not possibly have seen it.

Other memory misfires are simply failures in perception. C-3P0 was shown through much of the first movie in the bright sun, so the colour discrepancy between metallic silver and gold hues is less noticeable. Even if you notice it, you may not remember it with everything else going by so fast in the movie. By the 2nd or 3rd movie, your memory is already overriding your perception. (Plus, only the more expensive C3P0 toys had a silver leg — the cheaper versions were all gold, or yellow more exactly for the plastic version. People didn’t have VHS or DVD when the first movie came out — you saw if maybe a few times in the theatre, but more often you read the comics or played with the toys.)

While the Disney logo is not always accompanied by Tinkerbell, The Wonderful World of Disney TV show ran weekly for YEARS and DID feature Tinkerbell at the beginning (Google Wonderful World of Disney and you’ll see her) and Tinkerbell also rang the bells to turn the page in the record/book sets.

For years, it’s driven me crazy when people call the Guinness Book of World Records the Guinness World Book of Records, but it’s super-common. Or “what comes around goes around” when it should actually be “What goes around comes round”. Like slang, certain errors become common through seeing/hearing other people make the error without being corrected on it. I like the idea of parallel universes and time travel, but there is nothing in the Mandela Effect that seems at all inexplicable IMHO.

    X.O. DePlume

    Written by

    Self-help blogger who in the name of ego evasion shall remain named DePlume