In the movie "City of Souls", a group of extinct aliens capture some humans for research, and the aliens build a city that floats in the universe, and humans live in it and do not know that they are experimental subjects.
Whenever the bell rings at 12 midnight, everyone falls into a coma, and then the aliens begin to act, injecting new memories into everyone.
Then, the next day people started to live again, but their identities changed, one second they were poor couples, the next they became millionaires.
Image note: Screenshot of the Soul Shifter Fragment
The film was released in 1998, but the ideas and settings were very advanced, and many films have had similar settings since then.
Although human "memory tampering" only exists in science fiction works, some people now believe that it may really exist in the real world.
Among them, the more famous "evidence" is the "Mandela effect".
Caption: Mandela
About the Mandela effect
Known as the "Founding Father of South Africa", Mandela was South Africa's first black president (1994-1999), devoted his life to anti-apartheid, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and sang about Wong's "Glorious Years".
However, Mandela's life was bumpy, and he was imprisoned by the non-anti-apartheid regime from 1962, a life that lasted for 27 years.
The "Mandela effect" does have something to do with the great Mandela.
In 2010, Fiona Broome, a self-described "paranormal consultant," published an article on her personal website saying she clearly remembered Mr. Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s and saying she had read reports and even his widow's speeches about his death.
Apparently, Mandela did not die in prison because he later became president and won the Nobel Prize, in fact, Mandela did not die until 2013.
But Fiona's article resonated, with many like her saying they distinctly rememberEda Mandela's death in the 80s.
Fiona calls this phenomenon the "Mandela effect," considers it a supernatural phenomenon, and claims that it is likely that in another parallel universe, Mandela did die, and that many people retained memories of that parallel universe.
Others interpret arguments such as memory tampering or that humans are simply living in analog computers.
The "Mandela effect" is not recognized by the scientific community, although some doctors believe that the "Mandela effect" is a form of fiction.
Fiction is often likened to "honest lies", where a person creates false memories not intentionally to lie or deceive others, but rather they try to fill in the gaps in their own memories.
Our brains are not as intuitive as the computer stores information, our memories are extremely fragmented, and our brains are also very lazy, and they will remember very deeply what it thinks is important, and the unimportant will be ignored.
This leads to problems that most of the time we can only remember part of the facts of the event – the "most important" parts, the most important here is only unusual for you.
However, this situation will encounter some trouble when we need to extract the memory, and the longer it takes, the less likely we are to bring out the whole truth, and the result is that the brain itself will "make up" something.
So, sometimes it happens that Mandela is clearly alive and well, but he is "killed".
As for why there are a large number of people with similar memories at the same time, the reason is actually very simple, our brains are really lazy, when there is a person who said that Mandela died in the 80s, the brain felt quite reasonable, and it also made up such a memory.
This claim has been tested in other examples of the "Mandela effect" – most of which are close to the original or real memory.
For example, the picture of Pikachu above, one with a black rod on the tail and one without, which do you think is the real original Pikachu?
It is estimated that many people will say that it is the one with the black rod, because Pikachu has such a logo on his ear.
In fact, the one on the right without a black rod on the tail is the real cartoon character.
There are many such examples.
Note: How should the meditator's hand be placed?
Our memories don't fully remember the whole of events, so they give us a lot of room to think, which is the main reason for the formation of the "Mandela effect".
However, many now believe that the "Mandela effect" is becoming more and more pronounced.
Of course, this is not evidence that human memory has been tampered with, I think it is just because of the arrival of the Internet, and the cost of information dissemination has become very cheap.
Under such low-cost information conditions, it is obvious that our attitude towards information may only read a headline, and for the communicator, everyone can freely tamper with the facts and then publish the information.
A modified picture can be spread at will, and a fabricated story can be spread at will.
When we receive too much information, it is already difficult for us to remember the full facts of the event, not to mention that we often read the wrong information, and it is normal to be induced.
Let's take a more famous example: the "death" incident of Zhuo Yiting.
I don't know how many people, like me, have always believed that Zhuo Yiting is dead, and I still clearly remember her death in a car accident, but I also remember that I listened to other people's information.
It is obvious that Zhuo Yiting is not dead, she is still continuing to produce a solo album, but her new songs are not as popular as before.
The reason why we think that Zhuo Yiting has died because of a car accident may only be because a previous "title party" editor wrote a passage similar to "Zhuo Yiting temporarily left the music scene because of the car accident".
After Zhuo Yiting's exposure decreased, our brains thought that she had died was indeed quite reasonable, so there was this typical "Mandela effect".
At last
For the human brain, the emergence of the "Mandela effect" is a normal phenomenon, it is not a memory tampered with, nor is it a multiverse memory interspersed, but our brain is misremembered, misled, and that's it.
However, now more and more people want to take advantage of this phenomenon to create rumors, and in this era of information explosion, we need to be vigilant so as not to be used by rumor-mongers.