Sitting here, eating lil *Chick*-fil-A, and I know, know, KNOW it used to be **Chic**-fil-A. The company has claimed it never was. Of course I’m not the only one to recognize it, and it got me thinking…how in the hell does *that* work? What’s the reasoning behind it?
[Potential evidence that may or may have not been shopped](https://external-preview.redd.it/oMP_BhE3XQA6jzustCYX0hMImg5Sn921aVfJqAA7tgI.jpg?auto=webp&s=5f946da110099adecf88bf1ed2226e9713c5dbb5)
[Bonus](https://external-preview.redd.it/oMP_BhE3XQA6jzustCYX0hMImg5Sn921aVfJqAA7tgI.jpg?auto=webp&s=5f946da110099adecf88bf1ed2226e9713c5dbb5)
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Faulty memory and delusions of the past.
Human memory is faulty. You eat your chicken sandwich. In an hour you’ll remember eating it, then maybe you’ll remember it again later.
At each instance you’re not remembering the chicken sandwich, you’re just remembering your memory of it. You save and overwrite your memory each time.
That memory is subject to change. Maybe one time you see a misspelling or something else, so you incorporate it into your memory, and now you have a false memory.
Maybe you saw someone spell Chick-fil-A incorrectly, incorporated that into you memory, now you’re remembering an incorrect memory, and due to bad memory, paranoia over conspiracies, age, and delusion, you think the name changed or you’re going insane.
Since the internet allows insane people across the world to congregate, then a bunch of people can think they’re collectively insane, therefore a conspiracy, therefore <insert whatever theory it is>.
A lot of it is just priming. If I asked you if you remember that John Houston movie from the 1980s with Molly Ringwold and Matthew Broderick, there is a good chance you’ve never thought about that before, and are now trying to cobble together imperfect memories of 1980s teen angst movies to reach the conclusion I’ve led you to. Essentially an elaborate trick question.
Similarly, you likely never thought too hard about chicken franchise names until someone suggested a plausible but false alternative. You never really knew how the Berenstain Bear’s were spelled, so you assumed the much more common -stien over the unusual -stain.
The Mandela effect is when a large group of people remember something clearly, when the actual history is completely different, and contradictory to the memory. Some examples are Nelson Mandela dying in prison , and later becoming president of an African country (Can’t remember which) which is the most common example and the namesake of the event. Or the Berenstain bears being remembered asthe Berenstien bears (I’m actually one of those people). There are multiple explanations, but the most popular one is that memory is not perfect and people have imperfect memories that can be explained away. Nelson Mandela dying in prison can be explained by the fact that another Anti-Aparhtied activist died in prison while Nelson Mandela was in prison. The berenstain bears is a lot simpler, most of the people who insist it was Berenstien were children when they were first exposed, and they may have had bad reading skills, or simply didn’t pay much attention to the name, and Berenstien seems more logical, last names ending in “stien”, are much more common than those ending in “stain” after all.
Memory is still a bit of black box for science, so we don’t know _exactly_ why this happens.
One of the theories is that memory doesn’t work like opening a file on your hard drive – which is perfectly saved every time. Instead, every time we remember something, we “resave” the updated memory, which allows inconsistencies to be introduced. After a while, we aren’t remembering an event or a fact anymore, but rather remembering the memory of the memory of the memory, etc. of that event or fact. At some point in time, you memory of Chick-fil-A got “resaved” without the K, and every subsequent recall “resaved” it the same way.
If you’ve ever heard people say that it’s impossible to have an original thought, that everything has been thought of before, etc. The Mandela Effect capitalizes on this fact, except for false/misremembered things. There is a huge list of things that fall into this category, mostly with movie lines, titles, or other pop culture references. If you misremember something in pop culture, its almost certain that other people have misremembered that same thing in the same way.
Part of what is happening here is that as time goes on, your memory gets worse. In spite of this, your *confidence* in your memory improves. This is why you can have siblings that hugely contradict an event that they were both present for years ago. This is also why eye witness testimony is among the least reliable evidence you can have, especially if the event was a long time ago.
Before social media, people didn’t get to compare their wrong memories. Now we can, and it’s weird.
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