CERN, and Mandela Effect science

Have you wondered if there is any way to prove the Mandela Effect is real, and not simply mis-remembering?  If so, you’re in luck, since scientists have just made significant progress in this area, in the same month that CERN fired up their Large Hadron Collider, sparking great interest in what effect, if any, this may have on Mandela Effect activity.

I’m grateful to have been contacted by Jason Koebler, a reporter for VICE Motherboard, who wrote an excellent article, Is CERN Causing Collective Mass Delusion by Creating Portals to Alternate Dimensions? An Investigation.

The ever-increasing interest in the topic of the Mandela Effect seems to have come to quite a peak this July 2022, with the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) firing back up on July 5th.  I have been watching to see whether we might witness an increase in new Mandela Effects being reported this month.  So far, I’ve not yet heard of people noticing remarkably new Mandela Effects, though I am witnessing a steady increase of interest in this topic.

Apparently, some physicists at CERN, including Clara Nellist, expressed concern regarding the surge of people’s concerns that CERN might somehow be contributing to the Mandela Effect.  While Nellist calls the Mandela Effect “mis-remembering,” this article’s author, Jason Koebler, recognizes that the Mandela Effect phenomenon is verifiably real.  Koebler references recent research studies conducted at the University of Chicago that describe an emperically observable phenomenon that persisted across many people with no clear explanation.

University of Chicago Mandela Effect Research

Researchers found that “there are certain images that elicit a specific false memory, despite high familiarity and confidence.” Their research study demonstrated that “seven familiar images from popular iconography have low memory accuracy, with a specific incorrect version consistently remembered across people.” These findings indicate that there is something about these logos that are being misremembered by large numbers of people for unknown reasons.  The pre-print of the University of Chicago paper is entitled, The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people.

In their research paper, psychologists Wilma Bainbridge and Deepasri Prasad describe how they asked volunteers to identify famous logos or characters based on their memories, working with research volunteers through Amazon Turk. Prasad and Bainbridge showed study participants the actual logos and characters in lineups of slightly manipulated images, and then asked the participants to rate how much confidence they had in whether their specific memory of that logo or character was correct.  

What’s most fascinating about this research study is that the study participants proved that indeed, random research volunteers share a collective false memory of popular brands, logos, and characters–choosing the exact same ‘wrong’ images as the one that they remembered as being correct.  These ‘wrong’ renditions were selected and drawn even when people reported that they had a “high familiarity” with the image in question.

Not only did people pick out the same ‘wrong’ images from line-ups, but they also independently drew similarly ‘wrong’ images from memory, with the same ‘wrong’ characteristics.  While the researchers do not yet propose a mechanism by which this Mandela Effect phenomenon occurs, they suggest that “there might not be a universal explanation for why the Visual Mandela Effect occurs.”

When contemplating CERN and the Mandela Effect, as when considering just about anything, I recommend asking at every opportunity, “How good can it get?”

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REFERENCES:

Koebler, Jason. “Is CERN Causing Collective Mass Delusion by Creating Portals to Alternate Dimensions? An Investigation.”  VICE Motherboard.  20 Jul 2022.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88qg5v/is-cern-causing-mandela-effect-by-creating-portals-to-alternate-dimensions-an-investigation

Prasad, Deepasri and Bainbridge, Wilma.  “The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people.”  Psychological Science.  2022.
https://psyarxiv.com/nzh3s/

You can watch the companion video to this blog here:

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Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps.  Cynthia has a degree in physics from UC Berkeley, an MBA degree, a Doctor of Divinity, and a second degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won. Cynthia is the founder of RealityShifters, and first President of the International Mandela Effect Conference. Cynthia hosts “Living the Quantum Dream” on the DreamVisions7 radio network, and has been featured in numerous shows including Gaia, the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, One World with Deepak Chopra, and BBC. Cynthia reminds us to ask in every situation, “How good can it get?” Subscribe to her free monthly ezine at:

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