Our Mission: Documenting the Undocumented
The Mandela Effect Library was founded on a simple, profound question: Why do so many people share the exact same memories of things that never happened?
Located in Geneva, Switzerland, a city synonymous with international dialogue and knowledge, our institution provides the world’s first dedicated, neutral archive for this phenomenon. We are not here to push a single theory, but to document the memories, the verifiable facts, and the various explanations.
Our three core mandates are:
- Collection: To systematically gather and catalog every reported instance of the Mandela Effect.
- Analysis: To serve as a resource for psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, and physicists exploring the causes.
- Education: To share our findings and encourage critical thinking about the nature of human memory and reality.
Exploring the Leading Theories
Our resources allow visitors to explore the three major schools of thought regarding the Mandela Effect:
- Cognitive & Psychological Theories (The Scientific View):
- Confabulation: The brain’s attempt to fill in memory gaps with incorrect, yet plausible information.
- Schema Theory: Memories are reconstructed based on existing knowledge and cultural expectations (e.g., a rich mascot should wear a monocle).
- Source Confusion & Suggestibility: Misattributing where information was learned, often reinforced by social media or repeated misquotation.
- Alternate Reality & Multiverse Theories (The Experiential View):
- The belief that the observed shifts are genuine historical alterations caused by “jumps” between nearly identical parallel universes or timelines.
- Some theories even speculate on a connection between the global increase in effects and high-energy physics experiments near Geneva, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
- Simulation Theory (The Philosophical View):
- The idea that our reality is a sophisticated computer simulation and the Mandela Effects are detectable “glitches,” bugs, or subtle patches in the code.