Back in the early 1940s, segregation between coloured and white people was pretty common in the west, but over at South Africa at that time, they had apartheid, which was segregation at a totally different level. Most people who were considered minorities were out in a different section of the society, with walls around their neighbourhoods.

The South African activist and former president, Nelson Mandela was a global avocation for human rights, he was a leader of both peaceful protests and armed resistance against the white minorities oppressive regime in a racially divided South Africa. As tensions began to rise up and the civil rights movement had preceded in full swing, in 1962, Mandela and a lot of other revolutionary leaders were arrested on conspiracy to overthrow the government. As we all know what happened, after about 27 years in prison, Mandela was finally released and was immediately elected as the president.

After retiring from politics in 1999, Mandela remained as an advocate for social justice and world peace until his passing away in 2013 at the age of 95. His death sent a shock down many people’s spines as they could recall like it happened yesterday, that Mandela never actually got released from prison, but instead passed away as a martyr for the civil rights movement! They even could remember newspaper reports and television shows that mourned his death. Some even went as far as seeing a heartfelt speech by his wife on television.

Did you ever have a memory of some event that had occurred in your childhood days that never really happened? If you did, you might not be the only one alone when it comes to having such memories.

The Mandela Effect, a term coined by a paranormal expert, Fiona Broome in late 2009, deals with this fallacy created by our brains in order to prove the existence of parallel universes. Fiona Broome tried to explain such occurrences of memories as the existence of alternate realities and proof for the existence of parallel universes. As in those people that witnessed Mandela’s passing was indeed present in a universe in which that happened, but at some point between then and now, you allegedly got transported into a parcelled universe with an alternate history, and thus some of your memories misalign with the reality you know.

As it turns out, this wasn’t a one-off thing either, as more and more people came together on forums on the internet to talk about some of their experiences, slowly the number of cases of the Mandela effect started to stack up to unimaginable heights. One popular example of this would be the Ford logo. Which one of these two logos do you think is actually the correct one?

Well as it turns out, the correct logo is actually the one in which the loop between the F and the O is present. But many people tend to believe otherwise.

So does this prove the existence of parallel universes present in our universe? Well, our brains aren’t as accurate as we perceive it to be, and the fact that groups of people end up developing similar false memories shouldn’t be a cause of concern. Our memories could get corrupted over time and then what we end up perceiving to be true could very well be false. One of the most important functions of our brain is to remember, and when we tend to not remember some things, that’s when we end up creating false memories.

Another scientific explanation that can help us debunk the Mandela effect would be the misinformation effect. The misinformation effect happens when a person’s recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of post-event information(Wikipedia). A few of the factors that influence include time, news reports, and repeated exposure to misinformation. Looking back, the number of news sources that reported on Mandela’s failing health was a lot, and this might have influenced their memories over time, to think that Mandela had passed away in prison.

In a way, it’s good to think that in a parallel universe, there could be a version of you that did not make the same mistake, or even picked up the opportunity that you ended up regretting not picking up over time. A universe in which you were in a much better, or worse position than you were in compared to right now. As far as the existence of a parallel universe goes, we cannot prove its existence with something as unreliable as our brain.

By Anoop Muralidharan XII-B