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Hand-Waving Science Makes Ripples Through Time

By Austin Kuntz

Time travel has a wild degree of differing understandings. Sci-Fi series like Doctor Who, movies like Interstellar, and even the wackier episodes of Star Trek all offer different perspectives on the mechanics of time travel. But attempts to explain even the hypothetical mechanics of time travel usually boil down to the perspective offered by The Doctor as portrayed by David Tennant in Doctor Who, where he describes time travel as "a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.”  

It’s that lack of scientific understanding of time that has led many to apply ideas of time travel to shared false memories. These shared false memories are commonly dubbed the “Mandela Effect,” named after a common false memory of viewing Nelson Mandela’s funeral on television during a time when he was alive in prison. Other popular examples include believing the characters of the “Berenstain Bears” are actually called the “Bearenstein Bears,” and misremembering the shape of the F in the Ford logo. These examples can be found as a topic of discussion on a site dedicated to discussing the Mandela Effect, mandelaeffect.com. The basic explanation offered by believers in this theory is that occasionally, memories from the future find their way to our brains in the present.   

This explanation may not seem far from Tennant’s “timey wimey stuff,” but it’s a popular theory because it takes aspects of real science, even if improperly or inexpertly applied. Time is, as we’ve heard so many times, relative. To demystify that term, that means that different spaces in the universe experience time differently. While an hour passes on one planet, an hour and ten minutes may pass on another. The gravitational forces of different bodies in space affects the rate at which time travels; in a way, gravity “pulls” time. But it’s not just mass that can create a gravitational pull, energy can as well, including energy from light. One professor at the University of Connecticut, Dr. Ronald Mallet, is exploring how this aspect of light can be exploited for theoretical time travel. Mallet explains that gravitational energy from light “creates the foundation for a time machine based on a circulating cylinder of light.”  

Mallet explained this in depth in a 2018 BBC documentary on time travel titled “How to Build a Time Machine” along with several other astrophysicists and philosophers. One professor’s perspective, offered by Dr. Shohini Ghose, perhaps explains best why the believers in the Mandela Effect believe the time travel of memories to be possible. Ghose explains that while nothing can move faster than light, if you theoretically did move faster than light, you could look back and see yourself before you moved. In this scenario, the light from where you were would be able to catch up to where you are. In essence, you would see the past.  

For believers in the Mandela Effect, it’s not too much of a jump to believe they, and millions of others at the same time, could also occasionally see the future if there was some glitch in how light travelled in the universe. It’s application of this idea that makes some commenters claim that recalling the Ford logo improperly can’t simply be a faulty memory due to their extensive experience with Ford vehicles. But as unbelievable as false memories may be to online commenters, occasional misremembering may be more likely than blips in the space time continuum. 

False memories often start from assumption. These assumptions are explored in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, a pattern where participants in social experiments who are given a list of words often recall words that would be assumed to be among that group. For example, participants given the words “haystack, thread, prick” often recall the word “needle” despite it not being in the list. Repetitions of this experiment have found that subjects misremember words from the list just as often as they recall them correctly. Applied in a more familiar example, mention of Nelson Mandela’s poor health in prison from 1962 to 1989 may have caused many to associate death with those factors.  

But that doesn’t explain why so many hold the exact same false memory. Aspects of social groups, large and small, can influence what we remember or even implant new memories into our minds. In smaller social groups, people are more likely to agree with the memories of more confident individuals. To fit in, it’s easier for us to convince ourselves that we also remembered something the same way than to offer a conflicting account. The context in which accounts are offered can also influence our experiences with our own memories. In a conversation where turns are taken, like an online forum, there is more social pressure to match the direction of the discussion. This could explain why so many discussions about the Mandela Effect are convincing when shared in online environments.  

Some researchers, such as Dr. Felipe de Brigard at Duke University, suggest that memory is so malleable because the neurological functions involved with it are not all necessarily for remembering. In an article hypothesizing the purpose of memory, Brigard suggests memory is a form of “episodic hypothetical thinking.” The idea is that misremembering does not occur because of some neurological malfunction, but instead happens because our brains are simultaneously processing what could have happened while piecing together parts of a memory at the same time. When a part of that memory is missing, like what the Ford logo looks like or how “Berenstain Bears” is spelled, it becomes a lot easier for our brains to fill in that information with the hypotheticals offered by other people. Those hypotheticals then become our memories. Because the “what could have been” and the “what was” are processed in the same place, they become the same thing.   

Human beings are suggestible creatures. Even when we don’t recall something on our own, it can be easy to mold our own experiences to match a group or expectation. If the group is thoroughly convinced of vague theories of time travel, it doesn’t take much nudging to get someone to agree and even offer their own experiences as evidence, even if those memories were altered by the discussion. Wibbly wobbly inconsistencies are much more common within our own minds than within space-time.