Have you ever recounted an event and been made to see that things were not as you remembered them? Have you come to have heated discussions because you were “absolutely sure” of an event and an interlocutor has assured you that it was not so? Have you had the opportunity to pass a polygraph, or “truth machine”, affirming something that they later showed you was pure invention? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, it means that you have experienced the “Mandela syndrome”.
What is Mandela syndrome?
What is the Mandela effect? In reality, in modern psychology one cannot speak purely of the existence of an authentic and true “Mandela syndrome”, as stated by the online psychologists Buencoco. But, nevertheless, and as surprising as it may seem to you, almost all human beings have experienced this syndrome, or something very similar, at some point in our lives. We will see examples later.
Actually, the “Mandela syndrome” is more common than it may seem. Have you ever heard someone say that “what they don’t know, they invent”? Well, a percentage of these people is not lying voluntarily, but they have this syndrome, which leads them to be convinced of a fiction.
Did Mandela suffer from the “Mandela syndrome”?
The answer is no, unless it is known. The “Mandela syndrome” is not called that because the South African leader ‘anti-apartheid’ suffered it, which is not recorded, but because he was the involuntary protagonist of this psychological phenomenon.
The “Mandela syndrome” consists of the fact that, at a certain moment, any person has a deficit or memory gap about something and the brain tends to resort to possible and coherent explanations that “cover” this gap. And it does so to the point that the person who lives it ends up convinced of what they have never experienced, has never been true, nor can they come close to it.
The “repeated lie”
The human brain fulfills a “mission”: not to leave questions open and unanswered, not to allow for “loose ends” in a testimony or in the explanation of an event. Avoid uncertainty.
Badly compared, it would be what now, in politics, is called “story”, or “post-truth”. But with the difference that the “story”, called with this “new sense” (of “relation of inventions”, not in its original sense of “relation of real events”), and the “post-truth” (neologism that arouses as many “philias” as “phobias”) have a defined origin and a clear objective: to divert the attention of a community towards a version of events that diverges from the reality that occurred.
It’s nothing new. Paul Joseph GoebbelsMinister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda of the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945, already said that “a lie, repeated a thousand times, becomes the truth.”
The “Broome lapse”
Actually, the “Mandela syndrome” should have been called the “lapse of Broome”. But the writer Fiona Broome is not as universally known as Nelson Mandela, and hence the circumstantial character has eclipsed the subject of the story.
In 2009, the American writer Fiona Broome gave a lecture on Nelson Mandela, whom he considered dead when there were still four years to go before his death (2013). broomeknown for her books on pseudoscience and paranormal events, believed the South African leader and 1993 Nobel Peace Prize laureate had died while in prison in the 1980s.
broome she was confident in her memory of the death of the former president of South Africa, a memory shared with other people and enriched by the memory of precise details.
Other “Mandela effects”
This is not the only case of mandela effect that has transcended As we say, many people claimed to remember that mandela He had died in the 1980s, while being imprisoned by the racist regime of the ‘apartheid’ (“racial segregation”), because the “Mandela syndrome” can be collective.
For example:
- When was the mother canonized? Teresa of Calcuttain 2016, many people remembered that he had already been canonized in 1990.
- Many remember the man from the Monopoly game logo wearing a monocle. But he doesn’t wear it.
- In Spain, there are thousands of citizens who remember having followed the coup d’état on February 23, 1981 live on television. But it was only broadcast on radio channels.
- In the movie “Casablanca” the phrase “play it again, Sam” is not said, but it is said by numerous translated dubs of the feature film.
- Darth Vader does not say “Luke, I am your father”, one of the most famous phrases of Star Wars. actually says Luke Skywalker: “No. I am your father.”
- During the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989, a student stood in front of tanks to prevent them from advancing. Thousands of people remember that he was run over, but the world famous video of the scene proves that he was not.
And so on…