Mandela And 100 Monkeys

Calm down, this isn't about race, you bloody racists! It's about the fluidity of reality: alternate dimensions and/or alternative universes. It's about two different phenomena that challenge our understanding of what we know, and how we know it; Epistemology in all its permutations. In light of the intense political gaslighting to which we've been exposed during the last forty-eight months, I thought this would be a timely topic to discuss.  It may serve to help those with severe cognitive dissonance, also known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).

The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon wherein a large number of people believe something, usually an event or an occurrence, that simply didn't happen and isn't true.  Sound familiar?  It was first identified in 2009, when professional paranormal researcher Fiona Broome was attending a conference. 

". . . when she got onto the subject of Nelson Mandela’s death. She stated memories of him passing away in a prison in the 1980s, which of course is not true. However, many of the people at the conference shared the memory with her. In fact, some could remember it quite vividly. How could this be? It’s a case of false memory and is of specific interest in the field of psychology. Fiona Broome coined the term “Mandela Effect” in 2009 and has dedicated a website and plenty hours of research to understanding the phenomenon."

So how does this happen?  How can a large number of people share a false memory?  Enter quantum physics and the theory of alternate universes.  Such a theory suggests that there is more than one timeline of events existing in different alternate realities, which then may cross paths or merge or "bleed" into each other.  This, the theory goes, may occur only in a specific space-time thereby affecting some, but not necessarily all.  It involves shifting between different realities as things change; the memories of a certain group of people will therefore be different than the memories of others.  If metaphysics being defined and explained by quantum physics leaves you in a state of, well, confusion or skepticism, read on.

Staying firmly in the safe discipline of psychology, how about the concept of false memories from association?  In this theory, it is suggested that memories are stored in a neurological framework and grouped together within the brain. When similar memories are grouped together, it's called “schema”. When trying to recall a memory that may be closely associated with another, it can set off the neurons in the brain, recalling information or a memory that isn’t precisely correct, but has vague similarities to the actual event. You may have heard this condition similarly expressed in the media lately as someone who has "conflated" two ideas or events, that is, a memory that’s a bit garbled with other information.

Now let's talk about the monkeys.  The 100th monkey effect is an accidental discovery by a team of researchers in 1952, on the Japanese island of Koshimain. The team was studying the Macaca monkey that was provided sweet potatoes that the monkeys enjoyed eating. The potatoes were dropped in the sand, and the monkeys liked the spuds, but didn't like the beach sand that stuck to them.  Soon a young female realized she could rinse the sand off in the surf.  She taught this to others in her group, and between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys - described as the hundredth monkey - were washing sweet potatoes, and virtually immediately, almost every member of the island's tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them.  It seems the knowledge of washing spread with the hundredth money to the entire island by a simple transition of awareness.  There's more.  First, the effect was not a complete and total paradigm shift within the monkey population. At best, all that occurred was a transition of awareness; the newer monkeys learned about the washing method, but did not automatically begin washing the potatoes.  But knowledge of the washing skill jumped to other islands, where the phenomenon replicated itself.  Those monkeys went through the 100th money paradigm as well.  All of this suggests a synchronization process, which is a property of waveforms or systems of frequency. The mind and consciousness have long been associated with frequency and rhythmic patterns, and this knowledge transmission effect perfectly matches what can be observed in other phenomenon, such as synchronizing metronomes. 

So we're back to metaphysics, after all, aren't we?  What the hundredth monkey effect strongly suggests is that there is absolute validity to such metaphysical disciplines as remote viewing, telepathy, healing at a distance and other arcane practices. I've written ad nauseum about mind-brain studies such as these and their practical applications, as well as the importance of Epistemology in our everyday lives.

But these two effects can aptly explain what we are experiencing in politics today as the left continually attempts to bend reality to their point of view, and thus is rewarded with cognitive dissonance.  In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, or participates in an action that goes against one of these three, and from which experiences psychological stress.  In other words, what they firmly believe to be true is shown not to be.

The effects of Mandela and 100 monkeys is most likely one of the greater causes of TDS.