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Do you remember that scene in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice — you know, the one where Colin Firth, as the brooding Mr Darcy, emerges from a lake in a dripping wet white shirt? If you don’t, you must either be too young or not much of a popular culture consumer: it is regularly voted one of the most memorable moments in British television history.
So iconic is the scene that a giant floating statue was erected in its honour in the middle of the Serpentine Lake in London in 2013, with Darcy shown waist deep in the water, his rippling muscles visible underneath his sodden shirt. The Guardian was one of many newspapers to cover its unveiling, describing the sculpture as a celebration of “the notorious scene . . . in which Colin Firth as Mr Darcy emerges wet-shirted and dripping from the lake of his country estate”. A video news segment on the statue described the moment that “saw Firth wade out of a lake”.
But here’s a funny thing: this scene does not actually exist. I discovered this when trying to find the original footage for a recent feature. We never see Mr Darcy getting out of the lake at all; we see him diving into the water in his clothes, and then in the next shot he is walking along solid ground — slightly damp, yes, but certainly not dripping. This “memorable” scene, in other words, is nothing more than a figment of our collective hot-blooded imagination (as Firth himself once had to point out).
And this is not the only thing we have dreamt up en masse. Do you remember when Walkers changed the colour of its salt & vinegar crisp packets from blue to green — and vice versa for cheese & onion? Do you remember when the “KitKat” logo was hyphenated? Do you remember the cornucopia behind the fruit on the logo of the clothing brand Fruit of the Loom? If so, you have succumbed to what is known as the “Mandela effect”.
This term is credited to “paranormal researcher” Fiona Broome. She coined it in 2010 when large numbers of people on the internet were claiming to have remembered the anti-apartheid activist turned South African president Nelson Mandela having died in prison during the 1980s. He was in fact still alive.
In psychological terms, it is what we might call a collective confabulation: an unintentionally distorted or fabricated memory of something that the (mis)rememberer feels confident about — even when shown evidence that contradicts it. Research has shown that memories are not static or fixed, but instead formed by the so-called “rehearsing” of a story over and over, to ourselves and to others. Once we have exaggerated or approximated a story enough times, that becomes our “truth”.
This works on a collective level too: psychologists explain that the Mandela effect happens through a combination of emotional bias, the consumption of misinformation on the internet and in the media, psychological priming and the need to make sense of things.
There are many reasonable explanations for most of the examples I cite. It is likely that the death of Mandela was conflated with that of another anti-apartheid activist named Steve Biko, about whom a popular movie had been made. With Darcy, our false memory is probably a result both of our filling in the gaps in the story, and of the repetition of the made-up scene in the media. The first mention I could find of Darcy’s emerging “dripping” wet from the lake was in The Independent in 1995, soon after the series’ release; it has subsequently been repeated in several hundred articles.
But some things are less easy to explain away by simple psychology: the fact-checking website Snopes last year published an exhaustive inquiry into whether or not a cornucopia had ever featured in the Fruit of the Loom logo and found it never had. Where did that idea come from? Is this evidence of a glitch in the Matrix? Those of you who spend any time on online forums will not be surprised to hear that many denizens of the internet think it constitutes evidence of parallel universes.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, what might be the implications for our memories? Will it become harder to prove the “real” version of events when false versions seem so genuine? Will fact and fiction blur to the extent that truth is no longer valued?
Or, conversely, could AI help us weed out fakery and historical revisionism via some kind of superintelligent fact-checking system, and reestablish in our collective consciousness memories of the truth? As an eternal optimist, I am going to go with the latter. But I will also hold on to my memory of Darcy in his dripping wet shirt, thanks.