My cousin's take on the 'Mandela Effect' made me question my own memory

We were at a family cookout last weekend and he brought up how he clearly remembers the Berenstain Bears being spelled 'Berenstein'. He said he found his old book from 1992 that proves it, but when he showed me, it was spelled with an 'a'. He was dead serious, not joking at all. It hit different because he's not a 'conspiracy guy', he's an engineer who trusts facts. Now I'm wondering if I just misremembered things like the Monopoly man's monocle, or if there's something else going on. Has anyone else had a normal, smart person convince them to look twice at one of these weird memory things?

3 comments

3 Comments

shanem3720d ago

Honestly, your cousin being an engineer doesn't mean much. Smart people get stuff wrong all the time, especially about tiny details from when they were kids. Our brains are just bad at this stuff and fill in blanks with what seems right. It's way more likely a whole bunch of us all misremembered the same thing than some reality shift happened. Tbh, you should trust the actual book in his hand over a feeling.

jake_torres6820d ago

That 1992 book is the key piece of evidence. If the physical object contradicts his memory, what does he think happened to it? The simpler answer is our brains just messed up the spelling.

cora86319d ago

But here's what gets me. If he's so sure, why didn't he check the book first before making the claim? He had to go dig it out. So his memory was strong enough to argue about it, but not strong enough to be sure of the proof. That's the weird part.