The Mandela Effect

The Mandela Effect,first described online in 2010, by Fiona Broome described an experience at a convention called Dragon Con, where she discovered that others had a false memory similar to hers, which was that Nelson Mandela had died during his imprisonment in the 1980s.This is where the phenomenon gets its name from.The reason this idea took off is because a large number of people collectively remember something differently. Since it's inception,several other nondescript things have been pointed out by its subreddit, the Bernstain Bears, the Ford logo, Looney Tunes among the most popular.

The explanation for this phenomenon has ranged from sceptical views upon memory formation to conspiracy theories involving the Large Hadron Collider. 

Neurologists and psychiatrics argue that memory isn't reliable and unlike a cassette tape, one cannot replay past events in perfect detail, instead memory is constructive and the brain constantly looks for clues to fill in the gaps in our memory subconsciously. For example, people might have heard about Nelson Mandela's death and combined it with their old memory of Nelson Mandela's imprisonment and their brain fabricated them onto a single false memory. 

This extract from an article debunking the Mandela Effect puts it nicely:

"The term it fits most with is “confabulation” which is a disturbance of memory which produces fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about the world, without the explicit or conscious intention to deceive others. People who confabulate in this way produce incorrect memories about the most trivial details (as seen with most Mandela Effects) but range up to more complex fabrications as well. They are generally extremely confident in their recollections and will typically resist any contradictory evidence."

The conspiracy theories involving the Large Hadron Collider typically involve the LHC supposedly destroying parallel universes or merging them with our time stream. The claim that the LHC is causing this shift in time streams is based around the fact that the Mandela Effect was first reported around the time the Large Hadron Collider was first operational.While this is true,the explanation is fairly simple. The term "Mandela Effect" didn't exist before, there have been several events of collective recollection of false memories in the past, some even garnering some serious publicity. 

Keeping scepticism aside, what if this effect were true? Parallel universes, although a staple of the genre of science fiction isn't ruled out in theoretical physics. The problem with Mandela Effect, is that if the effect were true, it would only exist in the mind of the person experiencing it.Analogous the Cassandra complex, the person would have nothing tangible to prove their claims. 

In conclusion, this phenomenon is a pretty interesting one and only goes to show how creative the human mind can be, to conceive an idea such as this, maybe just to avoid admitting it's error or perhaps it genuinely recollects memories from a different time stream.