Schema Theory and Visual Memory

Hey there. It's Robin from PRX and I want to take a moment to tell you about a big year long series from this day, a history podcast here at Radio Topia. twenty twenty six is America's two hundred fiftieth birthday this is where. And folks over at this day have requested that I try and say semi quincentennial ten times fast . Anyway, it's been two hundred and fifty years since the Declaration of Independence and over at this day they are in the middle of a year long series called Fifty Weeks That Shaped America . This day is doing deep dives each week on the stories from two hundred fifty years of US history that brought us to this very complicated moment. Some of them are new perspectives on huge moments like the Civil War or Prohibition . Others are lesser discussed stories that still had a massive impact, like the Transcontinental Railroad or the so called hard hat riots of the nineteen seventies. 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It includes new primitives that allow systems to sync any data source into Nionot, build any tool for your Notion Agents, and orchestrate any agent in Notion. Plus, it's easy to use. CLI authenticates in one line, workers deploy without provisioning infrastructure, and with a cloud based zero infrastructure path, you can just write your code, deploy, and you're done. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at notion dot com slash purx. That's all lowercase letters, notion dot com slash purx to try notions developer platform today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems big and small and I solve them, or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week , brain squash . So right out of the gate, there are two things you should know about this week's listener, Matt. The first is that he recently became a father to and primary caretaker of a pair of twin girls. The other thing that you should know about Matt is that he's a deeply skeptical person. I'm not the type of person who believes in like the paranormal or like weird phenomenons. Like I have friends who will be like, oh yeah, my grandfather definitely comes back from like the dead and does weird things around our house. And I'm just like, no, I don't really vibe with that. I don't think that's how it works. I think that there is an explanation for pretty much everything, even if there's no explanation for that right now and I kind of don't let weird esoteric things get in into my head . But recently, Matt had an experience that felt like a defied explanation, at least logical explanation, at least as far as he's concerned . And as a result of that experience, one of those weird, esoteric things that he doesn't let into his head got into his head , and it's been driving him nuts . So he came to us hoping we could sort it out . It all started about a year ago, shortly after Matt's daughters were born. When my daughters were born, you know, I didn't go out and I'm also one of those people that like can't have like no sound happening around me. I need music or TV or something. So I threw on a show called Bob's Burgers. In case you've never heard of this show, Bob's Burgers is an animated sitcom in the tradition of the Simpsons. It follows a family of five, two parents, three kids , who run a struggling burger joint in a seaside town. And the show is very funny and very sweet, and its creators are famous for their playful approach to the show's form as well as its content . Like there are entire musical episodes of the show, for example. Okay, back to Matt . So I watched it a little bit back when I was in high school and I enjoyed it and now it's been on for like twelve or thirteen years and I was like, oh, I've never watched this show in its entirety. Let me throw it on. So I start watching it, but I'm doing dad stuff in between. So I'm only like half paying attention to all of it. And then as soon as I finished the whole show, I was like, I don't know, I'm just gonna throw it on again. And then it kind of spiraled and I watched it about four or five times . So here's Matt, new data twins, watching Bob's Burgers on a loop, but really only partially paying attention to it , until one day when he notices something strange about one of the episodes . I think it was the season eight episode one episode called Brunch Squatch. Brun ch Squ isashes kind of well known because they got like a hundred different animators to animate different bits of the episode and it cuts in randomly throughout all these animators. It's a really cool episode. So Matt is watching Brunch Squatch for the ump teenth time. He's looking at the way all these different animation styles are getting remixed together, how they're changing from one moment to the next, seemingly without any rhyme or reason, and suddenly it strikes him . I've seen a different version of this episode . I was like, wait a second , I've seen this episode with original animation . Matt felt certain that he had seen a version of Brunch Squatch without the fan art, this episode that is famous for its use of fan art . In fact, he had very clear memories of seeing specific scenes drawn in the standard everyday Bobsg'er B stury le of animation . But when he went looking for that version of the episode, he couldn't find it anywhere. It was like it never existed . And that was so confusing to him because he was certain he'd seen this alternate version . And it turns out he wasn't the only person who felt that way. So I Google it and a bunch of people online are like, Hey , why can't I find the original un Bchrwatch episode of Bob's Burgers. I know it exists, I know I saw it . And then a whole bunch of people start being like, Me too , this is definitely the Mandela effect, which is something that I'm very, very aware of and think is very, very stupid and fake. Are you guys aware of the Mandela effect ? The Mandela effect is this name given to a very particular phenomenon in which a large group of people share the same vivid but provided false memory . The term was coined back in twenty ten when a paranormal researcher named Fiona Brune realized that she and countless other people shared crystal clear memories of Nelson Mandela dying in prison while fighting apartheid . The reason this was so striking, of course, was that at the time of this realization , Neelson Mandela was still very much alive . In fact, he died three years later at home of a lung infection . Since then, there have been countless examples of this false memory phenomenon, and some of them are really very compelling . So why would Matt be bristling about this ? Well, the thing is that the most popular theory about why so many people share these false memories is that they're actually true memories from another dimension and that at some point some of us were pulled into this dimension , where everything is the same except for these small and generally inconsequential details. And of course, my skeptic brain is trying to be like, okay, well let's break down why I definitely didn't see the original brunchwatch or why it probably doesn't exist. And I made this up essentially my head is the first thing that I told myself. So Matt's like, okay, first off, I was super sleep deprived while I was watching the show. Second of all, I was only half paying attention while I watched it. And third, all of the characters that get introduced in this episode do appear in other episodes , so I have seen them drawn in the traditional Bobsberger style of animation. To Matt, all of those explanations made rational sense. So for a while , that was enough to convince him that he'd made the whole thing up. But I couldn't stop like thinking about it and I kept on Googling like Brunchwatch, original animation, and people on Reddit and Facebook are like, yes, I saw this, I remember this . And all the Reddit posts, all the Facebook posts are from like this year. And the episode is from like at least like six or seven years ago . So I really was like just like driving myself insane trying to like figure out like maybe they did make an original episode or and then I really would lose my mind. I'd end up on like the Wikipedia for parallel universe theory and try to read that and understand it. And then I would get so angry that I'd put it away because like I don't want to be the type of person that believes that I somehow passed into a parallel universe where the only difference is a goddamn episode of Bob's Burgers . But then recently Matt threw on Bob's Burgers again. And the Brunch Squash episode just happened to play . And it stir red up all these old questions that he'd pushed into the back of his mind . And serendipitously, right after that, Hyperfix posted a call out asking listeners to write in with their most intractable problems. And I was like, you know, it's screw it. They're not going to get back to me. It's a dumb question . And you know, clearly here we are. But like , like, that's the thing. I don't even know what my question is. Like what is it that I am , is it possible that I did see this episode? I don't think I think it exists. That is one thing that I'm pretty positive on. I don't think original brunchwatch Bob's burgers exists . But so what does that mean that I believe that I passed into a parallel universe . I feel nuts that I am even somewhat considering the idea . Listening to Matt, I could hear him strain under the silliness of his own question . And I empathize with him because it sucks when the logical and illogical parts of your mind are at war . And I wanted to help him settle that. Let's go with percentages here. How what percentage certain are you? This episode exists . Little . Like based on how tired I was and all of that , I think that it is like eighty percent likely that I made it up, but how do you explain all the people online? That's exactly what I was going to say . But if this thing does exist, why would Fox spend the time and money it takes to make the thing and then bury it? I mean the only thing I can think is that there was some kind of rights issue . But even that doesn't really make any sense. Like that's the thing. I think this is like an interesting rabbit hole to dive down, but like the reason why I really questioned even reaching out to you guys is like I don't think this has an answer and like what's the point of the show if the question doesn't have an answer? Well, I mean, it does have an answer. The answer is yes or no . Yeah . The answer is it existed or it didn't. Yeah. But like, I think a more interesting question is what would cause a delusion like what would cause dozens , if not hundreds of people to share this opinion? Did they all have twins recently . Okay, so let's recap this whole thing. Brunch Squash is an episode of Bob's Burgers that came out in twenty seventeen. But the first time Matt saw it was last year. The episode is unique in that it cycles through dozens of styles of fan ar t in twenty two minutes. But Matt and a bunch of other people online feels certain that they've seen a version of this episode drawn in the original Bob's Bergers animation style. In other words, no fan art , and some of them also believe that this is evidence of an interdimensional jump. But one of the most convincing pieces of evidence for this theory is that all of the Reddit posts about this seem to have been posted in the last year , even though again the e,pisode came out nearly eight years ago, and it's left Matt feeling crazy . And it is our job to convince him that he isn't, either by proving that there is an alternate version of this episode or finding a better explanation for why Matt and so many other people feel convinced that they've seen something that doesn't exist, assuming it doesn't. So we start with the easy stuff . The only definitive way to confirm the existence of an al t version of Brun Squatch is to talk to the people who created it . So we emailed animators and executives and left messages with the show's production company and its publicists . But we did this around the holidays when nobody was in any kind of rush to get back to anybody . So while we waited for them to get back to us, we decided to explore this other explanation for what was happening , which was that this brunch squash confusion was another manifestation of the false memory phenomenon known as the Mandela effect. So do you know what the monopoly man looks like ? I mean in my head he has a mustache and a top hat and a monoc le and a suit. Okay , well, you're wrong. Oh , he doesn't have a monocle, but that's a really common false memory that people have that he has a monocle. Oh , this delightful human is Wilm a Bainbridge. She's a professor of psychology and the founder of the Brain Bridge Lab at the University of Chicago. She also holds the distinction of leading the first truly academic study of the Mandela effect, which means her job is to identify and study collective false memories , like this one about the monopoly man wearing a monocle. So I know that your research focuses on the connection between human memory and perception , but like how did you decide to start working on the Mandela effect specifically? Yeah, so when I was scrolling on Reddit one day, this was actually right before starting my lab at the University of Chicago. I was about to become a new professor, and I saw this Reddit post about the Mandela effect. This post Wilm is talking about showed different versions of various pop cultural icons that are often falsely remembered. There were three versions of the Monopoly man, three versions of the fruit of the loom logo, three Pikach u three's C three POs, which by the way is a very hard thing to say. Like my mouth wants to just call them three POs . This reminds me of how my son used to call R two D two RT Anyway , the post invited her to choose which of these three versions is the real one. It's like a quiz. And Wilma makes her choices. She chooses the Monopoly Man with a monocle, the fruit of the loom logo with a cornicopia, the Pikachu with a yellow tail, and the all gold version of C three PO . And because Wilma is very familiar with these images, she feels very confident about her choices . But when she looks at the answers , I was shocked by how I wildly failed it. Like I was convinced the Monopoly man had a monocle, that the free of the Loom logo had a cornucopia . I fell for almost all of them except for the Pikachu one because I'm like a huge Pokemon fan so I knew Pikachu very correctly . But being a huge fan does not necessarily protect you from the Jedi mind trickery of the Mandela effect . Because when I took this quiz , I got all of them wrong, including C three PO , who apparently has a silver leg that I somehow never registered during the six hundred million hours I've spent watching Star Wars . But even more baffling than the fact that Wilma and I and so many other people seem to get these wrong is the fact that we seem to be getting them wrong in exactly the same way . So what 's going on there? Like why is this thing that I'm obvious these things that I'm all of which I'm obviously well enough acquainted with, that I've seen dozens, if not hundreds of times. Why am I not remembering pieces that feel pretty elemental to them? Yeah, so this is what we were really interested in looking at in our study where we looked at the visual Mandela effect . So there's two possible explanations of the Mendel effect One is that it is a false memory phenomenon . Another explanation is that we leaped across dimensions in the mid twenty ten s. Have you heard about this? I've never heard this, but I mean it just requires a sort of herculae level of belief that I just do not have. , yeah, but so many people on the internet think that these like how could so many people have the same false memory? The only possible explanation is that we change dimensions parry through. So unfortunately for those folks, our study does have evidence against the interdimensional timely hypothesis. What is the evidence? Oh, okay. Well, maybe I'll start with that and I'll work backwards from there. So we ran four experiments in our study. In one experiment, we're curious, do people spontaneously produce these mandela effects even if it's their first time learning about this character? Like maybe it's something about like people have seen the monopoly men so many times that there's more opportunities for the memory to get warped. So in our experiment, we took people who didn't know any of the icons, like for example, someone who didn't know what the monopoly men looked like, and we showed someone the correct picture of the monopoly man for the first time, like here he is, no monocle. This is a correct version. We then had them do another task for a minute or two. And then we asked them, draw that picture of the monopoly man that we just showed you . And in their drawings, sometimes they would still put in a monocle , even though they had just learned what the correct version was for the first time. If we had jumped dimensions in the mid twenty ten s, then people wouldn't have made that mistake. They would like have a correct memory of that image they just saw. And it's also unlikely that we just jumped dimensions in that brief few minute gap between them seeing the picture and drawing the picture. So the only possible explanation is that people are actually having an error in their memories that's causing them to insert the monocle on the icon . But what is causing that error in people's memories? What's making people add a monocle to a character they've just been introduced to that does not have a monocle? And the truth is, Willm te'ams still hasn't been able to figure it out, at least not entirely. But through their experiments, they have been able to disprove some of the most popular theories about the Mandela effect , including my theory about why I got the C three PO question wrong, which by the way also happened to be my theory about why Matt misremembered this episode . That is that neither of us were paying close enough attention to what we were watching. Totally, yeah. So then our next question was it that people are just not looking at that Mandelific part? Like for C three PO, you're probably looking at people's faces, right? You're not looking at his legs during the movie . So is it just people are not looking at the feature and then filling it in from memory? For this experiment, Wilma's lab used eye tracking technology, which allowed them to see in a kind of heat seeking map kind of way exactly which features the participants were looking at and then they tested the participants' memory . And we found even when they look at C three PO's leg and see that it's silver, they still make that Mandela effect error moments later saying that he's all gold. So even if you look at the feature, you still make the error. For the next experiment, they looked at the theory that these false memories were actually being caused by exposure to the Mandela effect , meaning like the more times people repost these false versions of the Monopoly man with a monocle. The more people see them, the more likely it is that the false images will become so familiar that it will replace the correct image in our memories. Luckily when we ran the study five years ago , it was a little bit less popular. And so at that time, like we quantified basically if you search on Google Monopoly man, where proportion are him with a monocle , like a false image versus how many are correct. And for these icons, overwhelmingly, a majority were the correct version. At least at that time, it was not that people had been like infected by this social media phenomenon. Now for the final experiment, Wilm team' tsested this theory that at the time felt like the best and most scientific explanation for what was happening with the visual mandela effect . It's called schema theory. But as someone who works and communicates information outside of the sci ences, it doesn't entirely feel right to call it a theory. I mean, at least not while I'm also talking about an interdimensional leap theory . Because even though schema theory is somewhat abstract and not entirely testable . It is still the best explanation that we have for understanding the way that our brains process, interpret, and recall information. So the idea is that when we remember things, we don't remember picture perfect images . We remember sort of like the gists or templates of things, right? So for the Monopoly man, you don't remember a photograph of the Monopoly man. You just remember him as fitting the template of like a rich older guy , right? And so the idea is then when you remember him later, you're filling in details from that schema or that template, and that's why you insert a monocle 'cause a monocle is part of your schema of like a rich older guy. Does that make sense? Yes, that does make sense. And that, yeah, that does make a lot of sense for a lot of these Mandola effects, but it can't explain all of them . In particular, the fruit of the loom logo . is One really perplexing because when do you ever see cornicopia in real life? Like we see fruit all the time. It's never with a cornucopia . So our final takeaway is that it is not that people are not looking at the future. It's not that these effects happen because they've been infected by social media, and it's not necessarily that we're filling in from schemas . So what is going on here? Right now, their best guess is that there's something specific about these images that causes false memories . And that's something we're working on studying now. So we're interesting. Yeah, we're working on building an AI model that can detect false memories from images. These AI models called convolutional neural networks are different from the large language models that power programs like Chat GBT and that instead of dealing with sequential information, they work best on static things like images. It basically applies a lot of filters to the image , sort of like Photoshop filters , but then it applies these filters in a way that's similar to how our brain's neurons work where based on like a region of the image it decides whether it's to fire or not. And then you have many layers of these artificial neurons that then filter down to a final response on whatever your task is like predict. The false memories of this image or predict what's in the image . And these have been shown to be really good models of the human visual system . From this AI model, Wilma and her colleagues have been learning about what makes an image more or less like ly to produce false memories. And so far, there seems to be a correlation between images that are forgetable and images that produce false memories. And that may seem super obvious, but what isn't obvious is the qualities that they found that make something forgetable . It seems that jarring, novel, or weird images are actually the most forgettable, and the images that are easiest for us to remember are generally the ones that are easiest for us to understand. It's because they're easy for the brain to process. Like we don't have to use up a lot of brain power to understand what's going on. So it's almost like it can get compressed and sa ved in the brain . The thing is , all of the tests they've been running and the models they've been building have been done on still images. None of this work has been done on moving images, let alone an animated TV series with three hundred episodes in his catalog . So it's unclear how some of these discoveries might apply to this episode of Bob's Burgers . But based on everything that Wilma told us, we were starting to wonder if maybe the issue with B urnt Squatch was that the fan animation was simply less memorable than the original Bob's Burger style of animation , maybe it was just too weird, too jarring, too novel . And when we explained Matt's quest ion to Wilma, she volunteered to put brunch squatch to the test. If it would be at all interesting , we could try running some of the fan art scenes versus some of the original art scenes through our AI model that we develop'reing to see if it flags the fan art ones as being more false memory inducing ? Yes. That be helpful or interesting? Yes, absolutely. What would you need from us to do that? Just some pictures of either type of art. So you just need still images . Still images. Yeah. It might not work because it seems like there's also like the whole narrative and story and our AI can't capture that. But yeah, maybe it could be like those fan art styles are just not so memorable and cause a lot of false memories . After our call with Wilma, we center a series of still images, showcasing both the traditional style of animation on the show as well as select pieces of fan art pulled from the Brunt Squash episode . And while we waited for the results of her test, we turned our attention back to answering the most burning question of all. Is it possible that this episode exists in its original format ? Is it possible that there was a normal version of brunch squash , that it was released and then buried or leaked and then removed? Or is this really a giant collective delusion . The only people who could answer this question for us were people who worked on the show , and they still hadn't responded to our outreach . So we adjusted our approach a little bit. During our first round of outreach, we'd focus primarily on people who would have been most directly involved with or looped in on a creative decision like this . We reached out to animators, executive producers, the show's publicist . This time, however, we focused on performers on the show , on the actors who voice the characters . And to our great and very welcome surprise , someone responded immediately . And because the universe is cute sometimes . This person just happens to play one of the twins on this show . Oh, hi, it's Laura. Is this Amore? Yes, this is Amore. Hi, Laura. Hi, how are you? This is Laura Silverman, who along with, her real life sister Sarah, Silver man, play the cartoon twin brothers, Andy and Ollie on Bob's Burgers. When Hyperfix producer Amore Yates first wrote to her asking about brunch squatch, Laura emailed back saying, Sorry, but she doesn't know anything about the episode. But then like fifteen minutes later, she emailed back again, saying, Hey, can you get on a phone call? I have an answer for you. Okay , so this is kind of exciting to like me doing this new thing. Like at first I was like , you're asking the wrong person I don't know anything, you know , but then I sort of you know, I looked it up and I'm like, oh all these people talking about it and having like this phenomenon happen, it's sort of interesting. So Laura took it upon herself to do a little sleuthing. I called John Schrader, who is a writer producer on the show, married to Nora Smith, of course , who is like super badass writer and pretty much here on the show . And he was sort of confused. He's never heard of this. So in his confusion, he kind of tipped What might be an explanation for this phenomenon? So first of all, the answer to the question is no , a regular animation version of what's it called brunch squash? Yes, brunch squash. Yes, does not exist. There is not one . Okay, so that's the answer to that question. Completely one hundred percent . As to the question of why so many people thought there was a regular animation version of Brunch Squash. John's best theory was that people were conflating it with an earlier episode called Beef Squatch, which has some overlapping themes and images , including that of Jean, the son of the family , wearing a sasquatch mask to drum up customers for the restaurant. But when Amore told Laura about our conversation with Wilma about how weird images are actually less likely to be stored in the brain, that idea totally resonated with her experience of watching brunch squatch for the first time at the season eight premiere party, which was at an arcade, by the way. I remember standing and watching it and I found it very disorienting . Like it almost made me feel like I was gonna pass out or love and walk away because I also didn't know . I had no idea it was fan art. I don't know things . You know , I'm not proactive. No one tells me anything. So I just showed up because it was like a kid's thing. And I started watching it and I was like, Is it me? Like, is there something wrong with me am I having a stroke . And then yeah, I found out. I found it very disappointing, but I thought it was the coolest idea, and I think the fan are amazing. It goes by so fast and it's one style to the next seems to seem Like you're not gonna remember unless you like look back at it or you look at the fan art laid out because it is kind of like a roller coaster of sorts . But that's interesting I'm not super into reddit, but recently I have started getting into reddit and I never had a single like or whatever like barrel up and I see people that have the preferred answer or the winner answer and I was like, man, like I take this opportunity to have the winning answer. Oh yeah, you have the winning answer. You have the winning answer. But I feel like I probably would just like write it and then go like, oh yeah, right . Like you know , like I wouldn't even get it. Well, now you're gonna be on a podcast, so now everyone's gonna know you had the winning answer. She got everybody on and I knew somebody who knew . Finally, we had a definitive answer. There was only ever one version of brunch squash . And I want the Reddit records to show that Laura Silverman is the one who should get credit for reporting this. But as to the question of why Matt and so many other people fought there were two , we only have the faintest outline of a theory . And when Wilmay emailed us with the results of the test sheet run , it started to feel like we had even less than that. That's after the break Welcome back to the show. So before the break , we confirmed that there was only one version of Brunsquatch, and that was the version of it that cycled through dozens of different styles of fan art . Which beg the question that started this journey to begin with. Why did Matt and so many other people feel convinced that they'd seen a different version, a version that was animated in the show's traditional style of animation? After speaking with psychology professor Wilma Bainbridge about the common causes of the visual mandela effect , we started to suspect that perhaps the cause of all this confusion was that the fan animation was simply less memorable than the traditional style of Bob's animation and that its forgettability was causing these false memories. So Wilma offered to test that theory using the AI program her lab had designed to measure memorability . And after a couple weeks, she emailed em more the results of the test. Okay, so as you know, we sent Wilma some stills of the animation from the Brunch Gotch episode, as well as stills from a normal Bobsbergers episode. And the idea was that she was gonna run both sets of images through this program that she and her postdoc created. And the program would test the images' memorability . And hopefully she'd be able to tell us that the reason why people are misremembering brunch squash was because this fan art was measurably less memorable than the normal animation. Right, so give me the bad news . Okay, so she ran the still through the program and sure enough, the Fan Art images were less memorable. Okay , but not by much. Okay . And definitely not enough for us to confidently explain what's happening here. Okay , so does that mean that we have no explanation for why brunch squatch is producing so many false memories? Actually we, do . And it may be even simpler than the explanation for all that other stuff we were talking about earlier. Okay , so after Wilma told me that the fan art was only slightly less memorable than the normal art. I was like, okay, so what's going on here? Why are we seeing so many false memories? And although she couldn't say for sure, Wilma theorized that this particular false memory phenomenon has less to do with the style of the animation than with the fact that the style keeps changing without any rhyme or reason . Apparently there's a lot of work in the memory field about how boundaries impact memory . What does that mean? What are boundaries? Okay, I'll get to that in a second . So what researchers have found is that boundaries can essentially like flush your memory . For example, when you're walking through a doorway, it's more likely that you're going to forget what just happened than walking the same distance in a single room. That is unbelievable. I know, isn't that crazy? But even more fascinating is the fact that these boundaries don't have to be physical and you don't have to be the one crossing them. Apparently, if you're just watching TV and the scene changes, that creates a boundary. If a new character gets introduced, that creates a boundary. If the character changes locations , that creates a boundary. But if my memory's getting flushed every time a scene changes , how am I able to hold the continuity of an entire television show in my brain? Yeah, that's a very, very valid quest ion. And that's because not everything is getting flushed. Okay. So you remember earlier when we were talking about schemas, like this whole thing about how instead of remembering the thing as an is , we remember a template for it. And then we fill in from that template . Well, the reason why we do that is because our brains can't hold every single detail of everything we see and experience. So the pieces we hold onto are the pieces that are getting coded as being important or essential to the thing . And the same thing happens when you're watching a TV show and every time you cross a boundary, like important details stay, incidental details get flushed . And because this is happening subconsciously, you don't know which details are getting coded as important and which aren't. So because the animation changes aren't actually tied to the story in any way , you think that they might be getting cod ed as incidental and then flushed? Yes, exactly. Also, I took note of every time the animation style changes, and for a twenty two minute episode, there are over thirty five animation style changes . And sometimes animation is changing in the middle of a scene, which creates yet another boundary event in the middle of this otherwise continuous action Damn, I mean, okay. Okay, so going back to schema theory, if the changes in animation are the incidental things getting flushed. And again, this is happening over and over and over again in this episode, then our brains would fill in from the schema, which is the normal Bob Sberger style of animation. I mean, it does sound like you solved it. I mean, ultimately, this is just a really compelling theory . But so is most of this stuff. I mean, the reason why researchers haven't nailed down an explanation for the Mandela effect is because the human memory is like a very complicated system with lots of variables and interconnected parts . But all that said , yeah, I think this is definitely better and more logical than the interdimensional jump theory. So do I. do you think we're ready to follow up with Matt? Yeah, I do. I just hope that he's not super disappointed about the fact that this really just boils down to your brain is playing tricks on you . This is the outcome that I expected. When we reconnected with Matt, we told him about everything we'd learned. We explained schema theory and boundaries and flushing . But the headline of all of our findings was that Matt had not jumped between dimensions and he was not going crazy. His mind was simply playing tricks on him. And to further corroborate this, we found Reddit posts about people experiencing this phenomenon dating as far back as six years ago. I was curious if I would talk to you and I'd be like, wow, I am, I am in a parallel universe. This is crazy. This is just a false memory which it is. I'm not in a parallel universe. It's a false memory. Me and a bunch of other people share this very odd, specific memory . And now I want to meet these people. They're like my brothers All right. Matt, thank you so much. I'm glad that we can assure you that you're not insane and that you aren't dimension hopping. There's always a chance that we're wrong. Yeah, no, maybe I am in a separate dimension. I'll figure it outomed say, I'm sure. I mean, actually, I think the likelihood is pretty slim that you would figure it out. I think you're just gonna have to live in the uncertainty for the rest of your life. No , I'm built different. I'll figure it out. All right, well, thanks so much . Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amore Yates, and Sarisophersenik. It was engineered this week by Noah Smith , music is by the Mysterious Brick Master Cylinder and me. Special thanks this week to Wilma Bainbridge, Anastasia Mikarova, Lora Silverman, John Schroeder, and CM. You can get bonus episodes, access our discord and much more by becoming a premium hyperfix member at hyperfixpod. com slash join . We also have merch like t shirts, sweatshirts, hats, mugs at merch dot hyperfixpod. com prem andium memb ers get a fifteen percent discount on everything . So definitely go get stuff. It supports the show, you'll be the envy of all your friends and peers . It's a win win for everybody. Hyperfixed is a proud member of radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent creator owned listener supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm . Thanks so much for listening.