I haven’t talked about “The Mandela effect” in this column because it’s silly. People think they saw a movie called Shazaam where Sinbad played a Genie because there was a movie called Kazaam where Shaq played a genie. People remembered Nelson Mandela’s funeral before it happened because they half-watched coverage of Nelson Mandela being freed from prison years earlier and are remembering that. There’s no alternative universe necessary to explain any of it.
That said, it’s easy to explain away other people’s fake memories. When it comes to memories that I have, things get weird. I remember things I would have staked my life on, that are shared by thousands/millions of other people, yet all available evidence says they are false. I know that Johnny Carson’s co-host Ed McMahon did not appear in super bowl ads for Publisher’s Clearing House, but I remember the commercials anyway, and can describe the van, the house, and the bunch of balloons that Ed brought to go with the comically over-sized check. I know that in the James Bond movie Moonraker, there is no shot of Dolly, Jaw’s love interest, smiling at him to reveal that she wears braces. But I remember it.
There are explanations for both Moonraker and Ed McMahon, but personally accepting them instead of what I know I remember is difficult. Still, I can’t argue with the facts:
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The Publisher’s Clearing House commercials existed, but didn’t star McMahon. He was spokesperson for a rival, less well known company. So I’m mixing up his ads with theirs.
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Dolly isn’t wearing braces, but if you look at the scene, she clearly should be. This is a case where our collective memory improved a mistake by Moonraker’s producers.
But then there’s the Fruit of the Loom logo.
The enduring mystery of the Fruit of the Loom logo Mandela effect
That underwear vendor Fruit of the Loom’s logo once featured a cornucopia is as close to a universal Mandela Effect as I’ve seen. Just about everyone seems to remember it, but the company says it never happened. As this article on Snopes makes clear, there’s no evidence of this alternative logo ever having existed. There are photos (easily faked), and a supposed trademark application, but those fall apart under scrutiny.
Unlike most Mandela effects, there’s been actual research on the Fruit of the Loom logo. Overall, this University of Chicago study indicates that people are just bad at remembering logos, but the research can’t find any reason people tend to mis-remember logos in specific ways. I suspect some of it is like Moonraker, people substituting a “better” design—the Monopoly man should be sporting a monocle in keeping with his “old-timey-rich-guy” character—but why would we, collectively, put a cornucopia behind the fruit on our underwear? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cornucopia in real life, so I don’t associate it with fruit. When researchers showed study participants a Fruit of the Loom logo with a plate behind the fruit, (plates and fruit being something we’ve all seen linked) they still largely regarded the cornucopia as the legit Fruit of the Loom mark.
Underwear logos and the butterfly effect
I doubt we’re seeing an example of a parallel universe that’s just like ours, except the logo of an underwear company is different. I think we’re seeing something closer to the Butterfly Effect. Something happened, maybe some tiny thing, at some point in time, and it resonated within the complicated inter-connected systems that make up our collective memory and managed to create a strong enough signal that most people associate a cornucopia with the Fruit of the Loom logo. But no one has identified what that something is. It sounds crazy, but there’s at least one example that’s similar where the cause was found and identified.
The colors of letters and synesthesia
Research suggests that about 3% of the population have synesthesia, a phenomenon in which stimuli is perceived simultaneously through more than one pathway. Synesthetes might taste mint when they hear the word “floor,” or know what yellow sounds like. Certain kinds of connections are more common than others, and grapheme-color synesthesia, the association of colors with letters and numbers, is the most often reported. In 2012, MIT scientist Nathan Witthoft was studying this form of synesthesia and found that a greater-than-average number of participants grouped the same color and number, and the results became even more striking for people of specific ages.
(Before you read on, what color is E?)
Taken as a single data point, there’s no “this is silly” explanation for different people connecting the same letters with the same colors. You could account for this by theorizing a collective unconscious, or an as-yet-undocumented connection between different senses, but there’s a more mundane theory too: Fisher-Price magnetic letters.
Back in the early 1970s, Fisher-Price released its first set of magnetized alphabet letters. It became very popular. The E was blue, and that was the kind of connection that about 15% of participants born between 1970 and 1985 made. (It’s a little more complicated than this, as some researchers haven’t been able to make similar connections in other cultures, but for the sake of argument, it’s what I’m going with.)
So the release of a toy in the early 1970s determined generations of people’s ideas of what color different letters are, and helped explain aspects of synesthesia, but no one nailed it down for more than 40 years. So it is, I believe, with the cornucopia. There was some, maybe totally unrelated, cultural stimuli that was commonly experienced involving a cornucopia, maybe that connected it with briefs, but we collectively forgot about it, and now we only have the echoes left.
I associate cornucopias with Thanksgiving. It seems to be the only time they’re a “thing,” and Thanksgiving is exactly when Fruit of the Loom might have release commercials aimed at Christmas shoppers. So maybe that’s where this connection comes from. Or maybe it’s something else entirely.
