Mandela Effect: false memories, gaslighting, scifi IRL?

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I remember the Barenstain/Berenstein bears thing from childhood but I think I can also spot the causal mechanics as well. I either ether read or had read to me Barenstain bears, at an age where like a lot of people I took things in uncritically and (of course) had no sense that I'd need to remember the correct spelling of Barenstain for later. Later I learned that the last-name suffix that went along with that was nearly always 'stein' so, it's quite likely that my mental spellchecker went on autocorrect based on probabilities.

Things like this to me are interesting because in a way they follow the same sort of rules that mentalists and illusionists exploit just that, well, they're the sorts of magic tricks that accrue over decades and in our own minds.

Back in the ancient days of my childhood (pre Cern Collider, pre U Tube Vloggers) there were already articles debunking popular misremembered things folks had of even more ancient things.

Like the saying "variety is the spice of life" is really a misquote of Shakespeare who actually wrote "variety is the very spice of life".

And of course Jimmy Cagney never actually said "you rat, you dirty rat, you killed my brother" in any movie. And Sherlock Holmes never said, in any novel or short story by Doyle, "elementary my dear Watson". And more recently it gets pointed out that Captain Kirk never actually said "Beam me up Scotty".

Yes, with this I agree. Usually I'm extremely sceptical to the point of being cynical about things like this, except when they happen to me. It's really hard to accept a memory being incorrect that, at the time the memory was formed, the thing being remembered left a really strong impression. For example, this music clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMOKlXfXn50

When this song first came out I explicitly recall the BMW convertible she is driving at the beginning of it was light blue, because I well remember thinking at the time that I really liked the car specifically because it was this colour. I'm not colour-blind, but now it's silver. Everything else - EVERYTHING else - about the clip is exactly the same, as I remember it (and I have a very good memory when it comes to things like this). "False memories"? No, I don't think so.

Now I'm not suggesting, as some have, that CERN is screwing around with the nature of reality, but when things change that one is intimately familiar with, then it's not something to just dismiss as being the paranoid ravings of people who just can't accept the fact that they could be wrong about something. In any case, to just dismiss these incidents as being the result of false memories doesn't actually address the issue at hand, for one has to then come up with an explanation as to why so many people (millions, by the way, remembering the same thing the same way - like those bears I had never heard of before, or the spelling of the word dilemma as 'dilemna') are having this very specific issue, and at a time like this.

I don't get it. I don't have any memory of thinking Nelson Mandela died in prison.

Me neither.

I honestly thought it was called Jiffy.

Always knew it was "Jif".

"Jiffy" wouldn't even make sense as a name. Its not a 15 minute lube job for your car, nor is it like Uncle Ben's rice (its not an instant version of a food): it's not any faster to prepare than any other brand of peanut butter. So there is nothing particularly "jiffy" about it. So they wouldn't name it that even if they were in parallel universe!

The people who think that they remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison are most likely getting him confused with Steve Biko, who actually did die in prison.

In fact it was the 40th anniversary of his death today (Biko's).

It was terrible how he was treated. We didn't get many details about it those days. I was in junior high school when it happened.