
On the Berenstein Bears Switcheroo (2014) - sea6ear
http://woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.com/2014/06/commenting-on-berenstein-bears.html
======
tootie
Posted in today's NY Times:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/nyregion/witness-
accounts-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/nyregion/witness-accounts-in-
midtown-hammer-attack-show-the-power-of-false-memory.html?ref=nyregion)

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.

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
Sorry if I'm missing something, but what does that have to do with the
Berenstein Bears article which this is a comment to?

~~~
DanBC
When something happens (911; a crime you witness; a cop shooting someone that
you witness) you get a bunch of people to write down, as soon as possible
after the event, what happened and what they were doing and where they were.

You then check again 5 years later. You'll find a lot of differences between
the two accounts.

What's weird though is when you show people their original account, in their
own handwriting, and those people will deny the original account. "Oh no, I
must have been mistaken when I wrote that" they'll say.

In the case of the books people are _convinced_ that they have some special
version of the book with the Berenstein spelling, and they can't believe that
their book is just like every other book with the Berenstain name. They'll
argue about it, tell you you're wrong, and then dig out a box from the attic
and discover that actually they're wrong.

This is a useful natural experiment that lets us know that eye witnesses are
not reliable, especially when time has passed.

------
amyjess
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.

And I always did pronounce it Bernstein as a kid, so my memories are just crap
in general.

------
suprjami
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.

~~~
morganvachon
I don't know about alternate universes (though it's a cool theory), but apart
from the Berenstein/stain thing, I've also had so-called "false memories" from
time to time. I'll bring up conversations I would swear on my life I've had
with someone, and they won't have a clue what I'm talking about. It has
happened to other family members too; sometimes my mother will bring up a past
event or conversation and the rest of the family will assure her it never
happened. My sister can remember things from our childhood that none of the
rest of us do, and we don't believe her until she breaks out an old diary and
it's there in black and white.

Another example of the brain playing tricks: There are so, so many times I get
stopped in public or at my job by a customer, someone who swears they know me
from somewhere, or that I must be related to so-and-so, when there is no
actual connection. Apparently I have "one of those faces" and I seem familiar
to many people. One of the most interesting times that happened was when I was
18 and browsing around in the local Head shop, this girl came up and hugged me
from behind. I didn't recognize her, but she started asking me when I moved to
the little Georgia town we were in, or was I just there to visit her? Despite
my protests, she swore I was her high school sweetheart from Oregon, right
down to my accent, mannerisms, smile, eyes, and build. I had to show her my
license before she could accept I wasn't him. I would have thought she had a
mental disorder if not for her best friend right beside her going on and on
about how I could be his twin.

I'm sure a geneticist or anthropologist could offer a theory on my uncanny
resemblance to her friend in that particular instance (that, or my mother had
twins and never told anyone), but it doesn't explain why so many other people
see a familiar face when they look at me. Maybe I'm just that plain-faced that
it's easy for others to project a known face onto mine.

~~~
cubix
Once, as a child, I recall waking-up and running to the cupboard expecting to
find it recently replenished with food, only to discover it was bare. My mom
was still out shopping. I realized that I had only dreamt about her returning
home with groceries.

It's probably not applicable in the Berenstein/stain case, but I've long
suspected that a lot of false memories originate in dreams that I've forgotten
about having. The contents of the dream lives on, along side legitimate
memories, while the fact that it was a dream fades away.

The empty cupboard experience was unique because the dream was recent enough
for me to recognize the false memory as a dream I had just had.

~~~
morganvachon
I think a lot of it is indeed half-remembered dreams. I've woken from dreams
believing that what happened was a memory, convinced of it, even though I was
aware it was also a dream. Usually this only happens when I'm physically ill
(I've been fighting a bad sinus infection and I've had some hyper-realistic
dreams all week).

------
krapp
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.

 _Berenstain._

------
barbs
I think a large part of it is due to some sort of quirk in how we read words.

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.

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").

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".

~~~
fl0wenol
If you listen closely, when it comes to the show you can hear them pronounce
it two different ways; as -stein in the opening segment, and then as -stain on
the network bump before commercial. As a kid I'd probably have paid more
attention to the one in the show.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9lB57IQco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9lB57IQco)

At the least we have indication that some adults wanted to say it as "-stein"
around the time of the TV show's creation.

(Stan and Jan pronounced their name '-stain', so that is correct, but it just
doesn't roll off the tongue, does it?)

------
Nadya
Eerie timing - or inspiration?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9552210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9552210)

It bothers me I remember it distinctly as "Berenstein", but I try not to dwell
on that too much.

~~~
sea6ear
Yes, your comment was the inspiration, I went to google the spelling because I
vaguely remembered Berenstein, and got sucked into reading about the issue.

I think the most plausible explanation for me is that they pronounced it
"Bear-en-steen" in the videos so as a kid I just assumed that was reflected in
the actual spelling.

~~~
fiblye
I remember my (first grade?) teacher made a point to tell us that even though
the name was written with an "a", it was read as an "e" to demonstrate how
English violates so many of its supposed rules.

So thankfully I never struggled with the actual spelling and questioning my
sanity over it.

------
dimino
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.

It's like when you scratch a bug bite, but then it starts bleeding.

------
mperham
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.

~~~
derekp7
Now I'm afraid to look -- is it LiberOffice, or LibreOffice? Spellcheck says
the second one, but...

~~~
sp332
LibreOffice. I remember at the time everyone complaining that it's very
inconvenient to pronounce.

------
devindotcom
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.

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).

------
yellowapple
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 _e_ in" to one where
(s)he wrote down "Berenst _a_ 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.

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.

Whether or not this is a case of quantum physics or social psychology at work
seems to be elusive, to say the least :)

------
kragen
I _insisted_ 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.

------
javert
How long til the copyright expires? Then we can print new editions that make
the requisite correction.

------
chipsy
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.

~~~
lotharbot
A common example: the last book of the Bible is often mistakenly referred to
as "Revelations".

------
anabis
Probably lossy compression. The memory was reconstructed from incomplete
memory and adult knowledge of nomenclature.

------
Pinatubo
This reminds me of the people who swear that the old cartoon Captain Pugwash
was a cesspool of filthy double entendres.

[http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/pugwash.asp](http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/pugwash.asp)

------
legohead
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).

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!"

------
powera
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.

~~~
IvyMike
Somebody didn't get to point 9: "I don't really believe we switched universes.
Obviously, with my rational mind, I understand that the most reasonable
explanation is that I misremembered. Occam's Razor and all that."

~~~
wickedlogic
#9 was absent in his universe, no such key exists on his keyboard.

------
fishanz
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

------
javert
They should make a Star Trek time travel episode to explain this.

Most of the Star Trek time travel stuff is already pretty stupid, so that's
not a reason to not do it.

~~~
Nadya
There's actually a Mandela Effect regarding a Star Trek episode!

There is a following of people who believe a certain character was killed off
on a very specific episode. The thing is that the write of Star Trek claims
that character was never killed off.

[http://mandelaeffect.com/star-treks-chakotay-story-
line](http://mandelaeffect.com/star-treks-chakotay-story-line)

~~~
javert
I am actually working my way through that series right now.

I think there may have been a confusing episode where it seems like he dies,
but he didn't if you pay close enough attention.

Because I do remember being confused at one point and thinking he was dead,
but I think my confusion got cleared up somehow.

Star Trek tends to do things like that. e.g. the episode opens and bad stuff
happens, but then you find out it was in the holodeck. Or a dream. Or alien
brain manipulation.

In fact there was an episode where Chakotay led a rebellion against the
captain and (probably) died (I don't remember now), but it turned out to be a
"holonovel."

------
rlucas
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.

------
proksoup
My last name is Bredensteiner (and was when I was a child reading the books)
--- It is and was always stein in my head.

