For anyone who doesn’t know what it is: “This involves mistakenly recalling events or experiences that have not occurred, or distortion of existing memories.”
Like remembering “Looney Toons”, but it was always “Looney Tunes”.
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It’s all based on stuff that is similar to something else you’d think if you didn’t ‘know’
Like you remember the name Looney Tunes, but you were a little kid, so you didn’t notice the pun ‘Tunes’ but they were cartoons, and later on there were Tiny Toon Adventures …so when you recall it later, Looney Toons makes sense.
Same with Berenstain Bears… ‘stain’ isn’t a common name ending, ‘stein’ is. So you fill in the more common name ending, odds are some adult even pronounced it like that when you were a kid.
Almost all of them are examples like that
Most of it seems to be ‘crosswiring’ in my opinion.
To take your example of Looney Tunes, it’s a cartoon, and ‘Toons’ is a common shortening of that (like Who Framed Roger Rabbit), plus it already has the double O in ‘Looney’, plus it wasn’t heavily music focused, so it seems to make sense that a lot of people would think ‘Toons’ makes more sense, especially if they haven’t actually seen it in years.
Humans aren’t that great at remembering stuff, I mean excluding people with a photographic memory, we forget almost all of our own lives, we forget most of what we read and hear, I mean we can spend hundreds of hours studying for a simple exam and forget large parts of the material. We make a lot of shortcuts in memory, and replacing things and filling in the gaps with what seems to make sense is a large part of that.
The ELI5 version is: human memory is notoriously unreliable, and our shared experiences in society cause people to independently develop the same false memory. For a more detailed explanation, I’d recommend /r/askscience
Common misconceptions exist in the world, often because the truth is unexpected or unconventional. If you never paid much attention to the vowels at the end of Berenst**n you would just assume they go like most names of that form. You’ve seen the name, so you also assume you saw what you thought the name was.
Technically, the “Mandela Effect” is a claim that the subject is more likely to have unwittingly traveled between dimensions than they are to have misremembered a small detail. Pure solipsism.
Point of order: the Mandela Effect specifically involves situations where a large group of people share the same incorrect memory (ex., all of the people who vividly recall watching Nelson Mandela’s funeral on television in the 90s when he didn’t die until 2013).
Basically, your brain actually remembers a lot less than you think. It is just good at filling in the gaps with its best guess, or whatever it’s been told recently. Most of the time, this works. But sometimes it messes up.
If someone tells you “Hey, it was spelled Looney Toons when we were kids, right?” your brain doesn’t actually think back to the details of the title screens of cartoons you watched decades ago, because why would your brain store unimportant yet detailed information like that for decades? Instead, it takes the suggestion you were just given, and constructs a memory around that.
Even if you aren’t given a suggestion, your brain will take a guess and then form a memory based on the guess. If someone asks you how the Berenstain Bears were spelled, your brain doesn’t have the exact letter sequence S-T-E-I-N stored, it just goes “hmm, Frankenstein, Einstein, everything is spelled -stein, must be -stein.” So, it creates a false memory with -stein.
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