the mandela effect is fascinating. the go-to explanation is "memory is imperfect", but if that were the case, wouldn't everyone misremember different things, and there would be no phenomenon at all? instead we see a few dozen instances where people will swear up and down that X used to exist, or Y used to be spelled differently, or that there was a cornucopia in the fruit of the loom logo.
i vividly remember the seahorse emoji, a hiker emoji, and a robber emoji (wearing a black mask) - none of them ever existed. it's really interesting to wonder about
I think it's more "memory is imperfect, but in consistent ways". I.e. whatever representation people form in their heads (given a shared language, experiences, and culture) is at least reasonably likely to put the same kind of concepts close enough together that failures in recall are liable to cause the same errors.
i vividly remember the seahorse emoji, a hiker emoji, and a robber emoji (wearing a black mask) - none of them ever existed. it's really interesting to wonder about