by Ryan Kohlhof

You probably have heard of these fuzzy little critters somewhere, whether you watched the TV show or read the children’s stories, but can you recall their family name? The Berenstain Bears are iconic in this modern age. However, there is a problem. Loads of people remember these bears as being called Beren “stein,” but on the other hand, there are a few people out there who have no idea what the “Berensteinites” are talking about and believe it has always been Berenstain. Don’t shut down the idea too quickly, but this may be an alternate reality.
Several theorists have dubbed this conundrum The Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect pulls its name from when a bunch of people had memories of Nelson Mandela dying in prison around 1980. However, as is known, that was not the case at all and he didn’t die there. The theory is that if there is a large population of people who share a false memory, then the phenomenon is “related to alternate history and parallel realities.” This is either really messing with your thought process of the universe, or confusing you — hopefully the prior.
To help clear up confusion, I’ll start from the beginning. The first time someone noticed the change was back in 2009 when a user of a forum called Dreadlock Truth posted asking why the pronunciation had changed. Back then, no one understood the severity of this issue. The theory was soon swept under the rug until it emerged on a humorist website in 2011. The writer, jesting, blew the whole theory open. It goes as back between  1986 and 2011, when someone traveled back in time and inadvertently altered human history so that the Berenstein Bears became the Berenstain Bears. This would explain why everyone remembers the name incorrectly. It was Berenstein when we were kids, but at some point when everyone wasn’t paying attention, someone went back and rippled the fabric of time.
The next appearance of the theory came in a blog called The Wood Between World. It was broken down into mathematical terms. This proposed that the universe is a four-dimensional complex manifold consisting of, three space dimensions and a singular time dimension, which are themselves complex. So somehow we have undergone a π/2 phase change so that we moved to the stAin hexadectant (which is like a quadrant, except there are 16 of them), while the others move into our stEin hexadectant and they too are standing around wondering who changed the universe.
These “glitches in Time and Space” may be explained in a much simpler way. Human memory tends to be faulty. Human nature would have you deny the fact that your brain is playing tricks on you, when in fact that may be the case.
So which do you lean toward? Do you remember it as the Beren “stein” Bears, or the Beren “stain” Bears? Searching through books to find Beren”stein” will leave you even angrier as it is, in fact, Beren”stain,” whether or not it has always been like that, or the universe changed.