The 5 Most Widely Experienced Mandela Effect Moments

Memory is a funny thing. Everyone can attest to remembering some fragment of a moment from one event on one day like 15 years ago, but having no clue what they had for lunch yesterday. This often-cited, conversational anecdote ought to be enough to prove how faulty human memory is. The University of Georgia explains how folks are decent at remembering the "gist" of something, but not details. A recent study on published on Plos One indicates that memory becomes faulty after a couple seconds, particularly in the case of "pseudo-to-real letter memories," aka, the written word. The Conversation discusses how memories change, evolve, mutate, drop out, sub in, etc., again and again over a lifetime. Basically, our brains have trapped us in a bubbled, illusory realm that only kinda-sorta resembles physical reality.

So why is it that people insist that something is true, or believe that their own highly faulty and malleable memory encoding and retrieval process is ironclad, rather than admit that they're wrong? Further to this point: We can talk about cognitive dissonance all day — the discomfort felt at encountering information that contradicts perception — and the myriad logical fallacies that leave humans intellectually stricken. But if we do, some folks will still not capitulate and admit, "I was wrong," or, "I remembered incorrectly."

Enter the Mandela Effect: a highly meme-ified phenomenon whereby everyone swears that something happened one way when it didn't. Examples abound, many of them textual, and some of them almost universally shared.

For our next entry we turn to that most glorious of fantastic rock front men: Freddie Mercury. He strode across stage with his absolutely enormous mouth, fist raised to the air, singing of further things biting dust, wanting to ride his bicycle, rocking you, not stopping now, mama ooooooo, and we being the champions. The champions of what? Of the world, of course! You remember the lyrics, right? They're pretty simple: "We are the champions / We are the champions / No time for losers / 'Cause we are the champions / Of the world." Done. And the song ends with one final chorus and one final, "of the world!" Except it doesn't.

Queen's legendary "We Are the Champions" from 1977's "News of the World" illustrates one of the more prominent Mandela Effect moments, as Happy Media and many other sites explain. Tons of people swear that the song ends with one final, "of the world." It does not, as the official lyrics illustrate. Don't believe those? Go ahead and listen to the song wherever you like and wait for the final line. The final line is one last, "We are the champions," and then the song fades out.

In all likelihood, folks remember "of the world" from earlier in the song, because every chorus up until the last one does indeed end with "of the world" — but the final chorus doesn't. So, the confusion is understandable. But sorry again, brain. That's strike two.

Now it's time to talk about everyone's favorite financier's propaganda vehicle — er, we mean, the time-honored and strategic board game that happens to be about besting opponents through the power of property purchases. Fun. But Monopoly has those cool-like silver game pieces and that funny little top-hatted late-19th-century industrialist mascot guy, Mr. Monopoly, aka Rich Uncle Pennybags, aka non-aviary Scrooge McDuck. He's even got that little monocle that he wears whilst whisking away sacks of cash from the unawares who must be lucky enough to get out of jail free. Also: monopolies are illegal because they violate anti-trust laws (per the U.S. Department of Justice). Just saying.

Well, guess what? Mr. Monopoly *does not* have a monocle, and never has — not since his very inception in 1936. As Monopolyland explains, you might be thinking of Mr. Planters, the mascot for Planters Peanut Butter (great, another one about peanut butter). Or, a monocle just might fit Mr. Monopoly's dapper ensemble. Or, you might be thinking of the Pringles guy on the top of plastic Pringles lids, who looks like Mr. Monopoly but doesn't have a monocle, either. And to make matters more complex, Mr. Monopoly *did* appear with a monocle in a 2016 Monopoly advertisement, as Facebook shows, perhaps created in response to the Mandela Effect. But does it really matter? Mr. Monopoly doesn't have a monocle and never has. You and your brain are wrong. Deal with it.