Have you ever heard the phrase, “Play it again, Sam”? Many remember it as Ingrid Bergman’s most famous line in the movie Casablanca. Upon review, however, it turns out that Bergman actually said: “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’” Yet many remember the phrase as “Play it again, Sam,” which was never uttered. Why?

It is not the only case. For example, there are those who remember that in Star Wars, Darth Vader spoke the phrase: “Luke, I am your father.” In reality, the phrase is slightly different: “No, I am your father.” While others recall the Queen in Snow White saying: “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” the correct phrase is “Magic mirror on the wall.”

What, if anything, do these instances prove?

In 2010, a theory began circulating on the internet explaining faulty memories that seem to affect many people. That year, Fiona Broome, a self-proclaimed paranormal consultant, explained that she remembered perfectly how Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. She remembered the news clips of his funeral, the mourning in South Africa, the heartfelt speech by his widow, and some rioting in cities in South Africa that started the collapse of Apartheid. But then she discovered that Mandela was still alive. Most importantly, she said, she discovered that many other people shared that same memory (Ratner 2017).

Broome called this phenomenon of collective misremembering the “Mandela effect” and suggested that these erroneous memories are actually proof that parallel universes or realities exist. She posited things happen in a similar—but not perfectly the same—way in these other dimensions. These seemingly wrong memories, according to the Mandela effect, are in fact memories, acquired by mistake, of such parallel dimensions. Others believe the Mandela effect demonstrates that we live in a simulated reality created by a higher intelligence. These memory errors, they say, are the equivalent of software glitches—like in the movie The Matrix.

However, psychology has a different view of what is happening here. These memory errors are exactly what we think they are: errors. Many get the idea that our brains work like a computer or the equivalent of video recorders, storing data perfectly in our mind and then retrieving it exactly as we received it. But this is not the case. Memory is a continuous process of creation and reconstruction, and memories change over time—even though we can be absolutely convinced of their accuracy.

There is also the fact that very often we remember scenes or phrases from films in an approximate manner and then these enter common jargon, as was the case with “Play it again, Sam,” which became the title of a Woody Allen movie. However, the way in which false memories are created is so immediate and widespread that it is even possible to test it. Like, right now. Get a piece of paper and a pen. Next, read the following words aloud once:

bed

rest

awake

tired

dream

wake

snooze

blanket

doze

slumber

snore

nap

peace

yawn

drowsy

Now close the magazine and write down all the words you remember.

According to the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm (Pardilla-Delgado and Payne 2017), people tend to recall a word that is actually related to all the other words but is absent from the list. In this case, the word is sleep. Did you write it down? About half of those who participate in this type of experiment state afterward that they are sure they remember seeing the absent word (sleep), but this is the memory of something that never occurred, a false memory.

Memory is a very delicate mechanism and susceptible to many involuntary distortions, including false memories, suggestion, performance anxiety, social pressure, and confabulation. This is the fusion between different memories or the union of true memories and fantasies. That’s why the next time you hear people saying, “Why, yes! I remember it very well!,” you can be pretty sure that they are overestimating the capabilities of their brains.

And what about the idea of a multiverse or simulated reality? These could very well be, for quantum physicists, not only sci-fi lovers, actually spend time speculating about it (see, e.g., Stein and Dobrijevic 2021). However, until evidence of such alternative realities is found, we can rely on the reasonable explanations offered by modern psychology on how false memories are created (Bornstein 2017; Laney and Loftus 2013) and try to make things work better than they are at the present in the only world and universe that we know there is: our own.

References

Bornstein, B.H. 2017. Popular Myths about Memory: Media Representations versus Scientific Evidence. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Laney, C., and E.F. Loftus. 2013. Recent advances in false memory research. South African Journal of Psychology 43(2): 137–146. Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0081246313484236.

Pardilla-Delgado, E., and J.D. Payne. 2017. The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task: A simple cognitive paradigm to investigate false memories in the laboratory. Journal of Visualized Experiments 119:n54793. Online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5407674/.

Ratner, Paul. 2017. How a wild theory about Nelson Mandela proves the existence of parallel universes. BigThink.com (December 27). Online at https://bigthink.com/the-present/how-the-mandela-effect-phenomenon-explains-the-existence-of-alternate-realities/.

Stein, Vicky, and Daisy Dobrijevic. 2021. Do parallel universes exist? We might live in a multiverse. Space.com (November 3). Online at https://www.space.com/32728-parallel-universes.html.