The 6th Sense and the Mandela Effect

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In Authors of the Impossible by Jeffrey Kripal, he discusses magnetism as a 6th sense. Part of magnetism is the idea of a collective memory telepathically shared between people. While this could occur between two people, I think it is more interesting to consider a collective memory across a larger group. If my friend and I both text each other the same meme, that could easily be coincidence and because we like the same things. It’s much less likely to be a coincidence when the 6th sense experience is shared by thousands of people.

The Mandela effect immediately sprang to mind. The phenomenon of a large group of people misremembering events, images, names, etc. incorrectly could be an example of a collective memory. False memories are common, people misremember things all the time. What is potentially paranormal here is the collective false memory, where everyone misremembers in the same way. The Mandela effect is named after Nelson Mandela, who many people believed died in prison in the 1980s (he did not, he died in 2013). Other examples of the Mandela effect include:
  • The Fruit of the Loom logo does not and never has had a cornucopia, many people believe that it does or did at some point in the past
  • The line from Snow White is not “Mirror, mirror on the wall” but “Magic mirror on the wall”
  • They’re the Berenstain Bears, not the Berenstein Bears
  • Pikachu does not have a black tipped tail, it is solid yellow
  • Curious George does not have a tail at all, many people believe he does
  • The brand name KitKat is not hyphenated
Fruit of the Loom | Official Website
There have been many attempts to scientifically explain the Mandela effect. One common way is that most of the examples make sense (sometimes more sense, looking at you KitKat) the way they’re commonly misremembered, so a lot of people misremember them the same way and this spreads as they interact with others. Many think social media exacerbates this. However I don’t know that this fully explains the reason so many people have the same false memories, and even if it did it’s much more fun to imagine the Mandela effect as an example of the 6th sense (and maybe alternate realities if you want to have extra fun with it).

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