CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog

The COVID-19 pandemic was a very strange and disruptive time for people all over the world. During the pandemic, we were asked to stay home in order to prevent the spread of the virus. This social-distancing aspect of the pandemic was especially hard to get used to. For some people, social-distancing at home was a nice break from school and work, and maybe (if you’re like me) it was a time spent binging TV shows and movies on Netflix. For many others, however, it was a very isolating and worrisome time. Adults over the age of 60 are at an increased risk for COVID-19 infection, so they were likely to have more strict isolation measures and continued social distancing for a longer period of time than younger adults and children. Many older adults live in long term care facilities and you may think they would still be surrounded by a community of peers and health-care workers during the pandemic, but they were also placed under strict physical distancing measures. The CDC recommended limiting nonessential visitors to these facilities, including family, volunteers, and nonessential health care workers. This means that older adults were more likely to experience feelings of social isolation and loneliness, which has been shown to have a negative impact on cognitive function.

Which of these two images is correct? 

The correct answer is the image on the right. Many people misremember the title of this show as “Loony Toons”, even though it has always been spelled “Tunes”. Let’s try another one:

This one really blows my mind. I could have sworn that Pikachu had a black zig-zag at the end of his tail, but the correct image is actually the one on the right. One last example is a well-known quote from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs movie. Do you remember the witch saying the words “mirror, mirror on the wall”? That is how it is often quoted but the real line in the movie was actually “magic mirror on the wall”. Pretty crazy right? 

This phenomenon is called the Mandela Effect and it is when a large group of people collectively remember that something happened or looked a certain way, when, in reality, it never did. It was named the Mandela Effect by Fiona Broome, who had a vivid memory of the former South African President, Nelson Mandela, dying in the 1980s in prison, even though he lived until 2013. She soon discovered that, strangely enough, many people also believed that he had been dead for years. This led to the discovery of many other cases of mass false memories, such as the examples above of Pikachu and the Monopoly Man.