Existential Quiz: The Mandela Effect

On pizza rolls and shifts in the space-time continuum

If somebody asked if I’d like to wager all the money in my bank account as well as my personal freedom on the question of whether it was “Totino’s” or “Tostino’s,” I’d bet everything on the latter.

Obviously, those little meat-filled pizza rolls are “Tostino’s”—not “Totino’s.”

Right?

Wrong. The other day, I learned that they are indeed called “Totino’s” with no “s.”

Image Credit: BJS.com (Modified/Fair Use)

I also discovered that:

• the Monopoly guy has no monocle (despite Ace Ventura’s suggesting otherwise)

• the Fruit of the Loom logo has no cornucopia

• Darth Vader never said “Luke, I am your father” (he said, “No, I am your father.”)

Apparently, many others have made the same exact mistakes. This phenomenon of collective false memory is called the Mandela Effect, so-called for a reporter and other individuals who remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite his serving as President of South Africa in the 90s and living until 2013.

Image Credit: National Graphic (Modified/Fair Use)

There’s an active reddit community about the Mandela Effect. Even CNN deigned to cover the Mandela Effect last year, going so far as to question why scientists can’t explain it.  

Question: How do you explain the Mandela Effect?

Choose the best possible answer below:

• A) These memories are real, and they demonstrate a break in the space-time continuum. You see, we have shifted into an alternate dimension. There are parallel universes. In one, they’re called “Tostino’s.” The one we’re in now calls them “Totino’s.” CERN and its Large Hadron Collider are responsible for this shift into a new dimension. Thus, whatever you do, don’t call them “false memories.”

• B) One person’s mistake became everybody else’s. It’s as simple as that. There’s no need to complicate matters here, man. It’s like the telephone game. One person called them “Tostino’s.” And then another person simply replicated that mistake. Darth Vader never said “Luke, I am your father.” But Chris Farley did.

• C) The Mandela Effect has something to do with the gestalt nature of perception. A gestalt is a perceptual whole. We perceive the world in gestalts. You’ve seen the image of the old lady that is also a young lady, or a duck that is also a rabbit, or a cup that is also a pair of faces looking at each other. And you know you can switch back and forth between these perceptual gestalts. When you look at the letters in the words in this sentence, you’re perceiving them as gestalts, too. At some point in your education, you ceased to perceive the letter “A” as a shape, and you began to see it as a letter. Spoken words, too, are perceived as perceptual wholes. We never hear just sounds, we hear the fire crackling or the engine starting (as per Heidegger). Sometimes, gestalts appear to be two things at once, and we can use our mind to go back and forth. Again, think of the duck and the rabbit, etc. Note well: We cannot outthink or reason our way out of this need to perceive the world in gestalts. Like Nature, the mind abhors a vacuum. The law of closure (or sometimes referred to as “perceptual closure”) refers to how the mind fills in the gaps in perception to complete a complex whole (see here and here). In other words, at the level of perception, the mind fills in whatever is left out, no matter what you happen to think. The mind fills in that missing “s” in Totino’s. The phantasm of “Tostino’s,” what it sounds and looks like, really gets stored in the memory. The question is why the “s” got filled in there to begin with. Perhaps it has something to do with “Tostito’s,” the tortilla chips, also being a popular food in the 1990s. Thus, the individual mind reacts with collective expectations about what goes with what to produce the Mandela Effect. We fill in the monocle on the Monopoly guy’s face because of our sense of what goes with what, because it seems like it should be there. The cornucopia seems like it should be behind the Fruit of the Loom fruits perhaps because we drew dozens of cornucopias in elementary school during Thanksgiving time.

• D) There’s no way to generalize across instances. However, both B and C are likely correct. It is a combination of the telephone game and misperceptions/instances of perceptual closure that become lodged in the memory. Also, while we’re on the subject, isn’t it interesting that there are no instances of the Mandela Effect involving taste, touch, or smell? So far as I know, the Mandela Effect is a purely audiovisual phenomenon.

• E) I don’t know for sure. But the Mandela Effect is a very interesting specimen of our need to distinguish the fake from the real. We have an intense desire to distinguish the original from the copy. Does any other species do this?

• F) None of the above, but science will explain it someday.

• G) None of the above, but science will never explain it.

• H) This article is fake. The original disappeared into another dimension. In fact, it is not an existential quiz, after all. It is actually an “Existential Quip.”

Thanks for reading. This lovely product page on Instacart proves that I am not alone on the question of “Tostino’s.” Compare the product title with the screenshot of the bag. My wife pointed out Chris Farley’s saying “Luke, I am your father.” Finally, Kenneth Burke talks about our sense of what goes with what as “piety” in his Permanence & Change.