I could be talking about the Mandela Effect at this point. In fact, in one way I am talking about it but it would have to be carefully defined. The Mandela Effect is, for the purposes of this post, the situation where a number of people have memories inconsistent with those of another large number of people. This is the most diplomatic way of putting things. The fact that it's a number of people means that an individual having different memories doesn't count. Because of this large number, it would have to be generally the kind of thing which has been publically experienced, such as the death of a famous person or pop song lyrics, or a scene in a Hollywood blockbuster.
I have described a number of my memories which are different from other people's. In my case, some of these are backed up by others and it's possible to list them, but they're not usually the memories which popularly appear as Mandela Effects(MEs). Consequently, my interaction with other such people has tended to be rather unsatisfactory because none of them are well-known and at this point I can put them down as false memories, although oddly also memories shared with other people. This wouldn't be surprising if they were one type of false memory, but they seem to be another.
To illustrate the nature of what may be happening with many such anomalies, I'm going to have to talk about a certain Welsh village. As is widely known, the longest continuous placename in Britain is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. There's a bit near the end of that word where one morpheme ends in "LL" and the next begins with it. If someone were unfamiliar with the Welsh language, they might come to believe that those four L's in a row were three or five. This could become a ME, but could probably only be sustained by someone who didn't know Welsh. This is how I think MEs work on the whole, but it isn't that simple. I mean, I would say this wouldn't I, but mine don't seem to be of that character.
It's also worth examining cause and effect here. The Scottish philosopher David Hume analysed cause and effect as constant conjunction, temporal precedence and spatiotemporal contiguity, and further claimed that a cause producing an effect was never observed. Combining this with the idea of a multiverse, where things are different in parallel universes, it's conceivable that some MEs are not false memories but memories of states of affairs in parallel universes, and whereas a causal chain between the two may not exist, neither does it exist between events and "accurate" memories in this timeline. However, this doesn't get you out of the woods because some things may only seem to be possible. For instance, it seems entirely feasible that there is a possible world where most clover has four leaves, but I strongly suspect this is actually impossible because if a clover plant evolved like that it would be at a disadvantage to other clover plants and also other herbs which would lead to its extinction and the disappearance of that trait, as I think it would mean the ground coverage would not gather light efficiently enough for it to grow successfully in comparison with other plants, of the same species or otherwise. Hence there are no possible worlds where the existence of four-leaved clover as the norm is not propped up by contrived series of events. It is possible that a group of botanists might decide to breed four-leaved clover, then all the wild clover becomes extinct and the four-leaved variety only exists in artificial conditions, but these are arcane and "rare" possible worlds. In the case of MEs, the apparent possibility that they're true can depend on not knowing details about why things are not like that, so for example the "three L" and "five L" possibilities depend on the person holding them not knowing Welsh. But there could be other MEs where not knowing why something is the case is either unknown to everyone or to most people.
Anyway, I have a list of apparent MEs which are shared with a small group of people I've met at various times of my life and I think you'll agree that they are not common. Here they are:
- In the late 1970s, the British government planned to replace the 11+ selection exam with EEGs which scanned children's brains and decided to place children in different secondary schools based on those findings rather than written exams. This was put into practice and proceeded for several years before being discontinued because it turned out not to be reliable.
- In the mid-'70s, a robot was constructed based on mole neurones which was able to respond to noise, light and heat by pointing itself towards the stimulus.
- In 1975, an android called AREK was completed by a hobbyist which could read text aloud and perform housework.
- A new state called Superior was carved out of northern Wisconsin and Michigan in about 1979.
- Domestic recycling began in about 1970.
- A method of processing industrial waste into apparently inert materials which could be used for construction was developed, producing a clear liquid and a cement-like substance. Unfortunately this turned out not to be inert at all and people who came into protracted contact with it developed major health problems. This was a major government scandal.
- There were three Alice books.
Now obviously none of this actually happened so far as I can tell, but the oddity is that I'm not the only person who "remembers" these events. I wrote them down some time in the 1980s, hoping I could get to the bottom of what they were based on. Later on, other people independently mentioned some of these anomalies whom I hadn't told about them. Since I wrote it all down, it's also not the case that these memories have been altered by being edited to conform more to what others believe, and it's also not feasible that the records were tampered with by these other people because the paper sat at the bottom of a box in my parents' attic for years, hundreds of miles away from where these people lived. At the time, they didn't even know where I was from. These also don't seem like the apparently straightforward misrememberings other people have because they can't be explained by something like transposing New Guinea and New Zealand or looking at a map of Australasia and not realising New Zealand was in an inset because it was too far away and therefore thinking it was closer to New South Wales than it actually is.
It is also notable that there's a common theme to most of these. The 11+ enhancement and the mole-based robot both rely on neuroscience. The mole-based robot and AREK are both cybernetic. The 11+ enhancement and industrial waste processing are both linked to public scandals. Waste recycling is a common theme of two. The outliers seem to be Superior and the third Alice book. Regarding the last, I've now tracked that down: it was a book written in the 1950s which purported to be a rediscovered Lewis Carroll manuscript but turned out not to be. The others have a family resemblance. All of this suggests to me that this is my imagination, and apparently that of other people although nobody else has the full list, constructing a world. I don't understand how this could have happened or why it would've happened to more than one person, but there it is.
An early idea I had with all of this was to use it for world-building, but I was reluctant to do this because of the remote possibility that this might just be a series of misremembered incidents, apparently from the mass media in most cases, but not entirely - for instance, the mole neurone robot I encountered at the Science Museum and the 11+ enhancement was heard from someone who was about to undergo such a test, which was apparently about to be widely adopted. Well, I could still do this, since thorough investigation over many years has turned up precisely nothing.
So I will.
Another post in this series mentions brainwashing helmets. This links to my false memory of the enhanced 11+ and I already started a novella based on this idea although I didn't continue it. In the story, the British government introduced a biometric testing system in the late 1970s to assess children at the ages of ten or eleven and determine their placement in educational institutions. It involved a face-to-face interview, watching a film of events in children's lives including an argument, spatial, numerical and verbal reasoning and a proverb test, where children are asked to explain proverbs. As well as brainwaves, children's eye movements were traced while watching the film and a polygraph-like system was used to monitor their stress and arousal. As well as attempting to assess their cognitive skills, the test was supposed to detect latent psychopathy, potential schizophrenia, mood disorders and so forth. I abandoned this story and I'm not sure why, but there's still potential in it. Suppose the following: the government does indeed introduce this policy and has a helmet manufactured which can assess children in this way. A few years later, a teenage hobbyist acquires one of these helmets which was substandard for some reason and adds active components to it rather than just monitoring ones. This includes transcranial magnetic and ultrasonic stimulation, and, well basically all the other stuff I mentioned in the brainwashing helmet post. The hobbyist does this in all innocence and doesn't realise the consequences of what he's done. This helmet is then taken by a group of bullies with nefarious intent. Now this is where it could get a bit Philip K Dicky, because the bullies use the helmet to modify their victim's memories and change her personality, and I'm going to be narrating it from her point of view.
I don't think I've seriously written anything before which involves an unreliable narrator of this kind. I have included hallucinations and delirium before, but this particular story is going to have to involve yanking the carpet out from under the reader and takes it onto another level. It also means the story is going to have to change the goalposts part way through. I would like it to include a response to trauma due to the bullying incident, but am unsure where to go with this.
The problem is that up until introducing the element of brainwashing helmets, the story was going to be pretty much realistic and not at all "science fictiony", so I've decided to introduce the element of the enhanced 11+ measurement devices. I do in fact believe that the device I've described was technically feasible in 1978. Electroencephalography has been practiced on humans for a century now, and polygraphs also date from the early twentieth century. Polygraphs are of course not truly effective as lie detectors, except possibly as a way of getting someone to tell the truth if they wholeheartedly believe they do in fact work. However, this doesn't mean they're not useful for other purposes and they are of course similar to Scientologist e-meters. Moreover, the idea is not so much initially to provide a working device so much as a device in which the education authorities and possibly the government believe to be effective. The difficulty comes in what happens when someone attempts to turn it into a brainwashing device, because this too may be ineffective.
Now the question does arise of why I'd bother to spend my time writing about this. My answer is that I think we need some kind of mythology in our lives, and since we now have difficulty accepting the older myths, new ones for the twenty-first century have to be invented. If we don't do this, people are likely to believe things arbitrarily, and that doesn't seem to be going very well right now.
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