Posted in today's NY Times: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/nyregion/witness-accounts-in-midtown-hammer-attack-show-the-power-of-false-memory.html?ref=nyregion" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/nyregion/witness-accounts-...</a><p>NYPD shoot a man wielding a hammer in midtown. One witness says he was shot while fleeing. One says he was shot while lying down and handcuffed. Only they have a surveillance video that clearly shows him swinging his hammer at the other cop when he is shot. The problem is your brains.
I thought it was -stein too, but I posit that we all think this way because surnames ending in -stein are very common, while surnames ending in -stain are rare. We mentally corrected the obscure variant spelling we only see in one place for one we see everywhere else. Hell, my own cousins had a -stein name, so it's definitely something I would've been exposed to a lot.<p>And I always did pronounce it Bernstein as a kid, so my memories are just crap in general.
I came up with the same theory independently. There used to be a restaurant here in Brisbane Australia called Pastoodles. I know the road where it was, the exact shop, I drove past it many times intending to go there. One day it wasn't there any more. In its place was a different shop that had obviously been there for years. Google doesn't remember Pastoodles, nor do old paper copies of the white/yellow pages, nor do registered business listings from the years I passed it. I have looked into this. My best friend and I discussed going there multiple times but she has no memory of the conversations. The only conclusion I can come to is that Pastoodles exists in an alternate universe and I've traveled between the two.
And then, as you stare blankly at the evidence, unyielding and undeniable in its contradiction like the ocean before the shore, you realize that reality as you knew it has never been more than an elaborate fiction, and not even one that cares to tell you the truth.<p><i>Berenstain.</i>
I think a large part of it is due to some sort of quirk in how we read words.<p>In the word "Berenstain", the first two vowels are e's, and I think the brain naturally expects the next vowel to be an e as well. Also, it's a show/book series aimed at children, and children are much more likely to misread/misspell/misremember things. It'd be interesting to see the demographics of people who remember the "E" spelling vs. those who remember the "A" spelling.<p>It doesn't help that some people, like myself, only ever read the books, and never heard it pronounced on the TV show. And even then, the "ain" pronunciation is still plausible for the "E" spelling (like "vein").<p>This is all purely theoretical, and I'm no expert, but it seems plausible. I experienced a similar effect when I realised I'd been spelling and pronouncing "Seinfeld" as "Seinfield" for a long time. I was much more willing to accept that I'd been wrong about that though, since, once I started listening a bit closer, I realised there was no way you could pronounce "SeinFIELD" as "SeinFELD".
Eerie timing - or inspiration?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9552210" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9552210</a><p>It bothers me I remember it distinctly as "Berenstein", but I try not to dwell on that too much.
I would have sworn up and down, and bet all my money it was Berenstien, but when I see the Photoshopped logo, it looks... wrong. The e doesn't mesh with how I remember it looking.<p>It's like when you scratch a bug bite, but then it starts bleeding.
I thought it was "Ford Perfect" for a decade before realizing it's spelled "Ford Prefect" in all the HHGTTG books. The mind sees what it wants to see.
This is fascinating. I remember Berenstein myself, probably owing to the fact that that's how we pronounced it ("steen") and when I first encountered them, I couldn't read.<p>I'm going to ask some people tonight out at the bars to write the word and see if they'll put money on their spelling, which will likely be wrong if we're any indication (don't worry, I won't take it).
I'd extend this further and suggest that our existence in Universe A instead of Universe E hinged entirely on the attentiveness of an unknown immigration officer when attempting to understand a Jewish surname. Somehow a bunch of us shifted from one universe where (s)he wrote down "Berenst<i>e</i>in" to one where (s)he wrote down "Berenst<i>a</i>in", and now - thanks to that random stranger from the 19th century - thousands (perhaps even millions; I've yet to encounter anyone in the wild prior to today who didn't spell it or pronounce it "Berenstein") of folks are rather lost.<p>It doesn't help that - in the videos - "Berenst*in" is spoken with an Appalachian (?) accent, making it incredibly ambiguous what the normalized pronunciation would be.<p>Whether or not this is a case of quantum physics or social psychology at work seems to be elusive, to say the least :)
I <i>insisted</i> to my high school drama teacher that Neil Simon was not just a playwright but also a famous songwriter. I guess Neil Diamond and Paul Simon got crossed in my brain somewhere.
I've noticed this phenomenon with titles that might contain plurals or articles, but also might not: e.g. "Sid Meier's Civilizations" or "Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome". It's typical to eliminate these elements for brevity, but more jarring when people remember them when they aren't there.
This reminds me of the people who swear that the old cartoon Captain Pugwash was a cesspool of filthy double entendres.<p><a href="http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/pugwash.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/pugwash.asp</a>
I get this sort of feeling with audiobooks a lot, due to word pronunciations. I grew up saying and hearing a word a specific way for years of my life, then this audiobook professional reads it in a different way, but I have to accept him as the authority, since he's the official "reader", and I can only assume got the correct pronunciations from the author(s).<p>One instance was the word "sietch" from the Dune series. I had always pronounced it as one syllable, 'seetch', but the audiobook said 'see-itch'. And this was the multiple-cast series, and different voice actors said it 'see-itch'. I was actually yelling at them: "NO! It's SEETCH!"
This whole "universe splitting" theory seems like a load of utter hogwash trying to explain the simple fact that humans tend to have really bad memories.
Similarly, I was absolutely baffled when looking back at 80's history that the TV show and pop icon named Max Headroom, was not, as I remembered and would insist as being named: Max Head-rom
They should make a Star Trek time travel episode to explain this.<p>Most of the Star Trek time travel stuff is already pretty stupid, so that's not a reason to not do it.
reminiscent of the Marshall McLuhan "medium is the massage" thing. Everybody "knows" it's the medium is the "message" because, of course, it's about media and communications... But that pesky objective external physical reality keeps sneaking back up and proving long held memories to be bogus.