Examples include lines from famous movies that everyone gets wrong (e.g., Humphrey Bogart's saying "Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca), erroneous dates and numbers (apparently many people answer "52" when asked how many states there are in the U.S.), and historical misconceptions (are you among those who recall learning in school that cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney was black?). One type of memory glitch that has generated a lot of Internet buzz in recent years is called the "Mandela Effect." In simplest terms, the Mandela Effect is an instance of collective misremembering. We've all done these things at one time or another, though we're rarely conscious of it when we do. The term is used clinically to refer to memory defects experienced by patients with brain damage, and also to describe everyday phenomena like embellishing the truth when recounting events and inventing facts on the fly to fill in gaps in memory. Psychologists call the phenomenon confabulation. There's much we don't know about how memory works, but suffice it to say it isn't perfect. Particularly vexing is the phenomenon of false memories, erroneous or unconsciously fabricated recollections of past events that feel so real and true that people who experience them refuse to accept evidence to the contrary. Human memory is a peculiar thing, at once astonishing in its scope and power and dismaying in its fallibility.
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