On the Berenstein Bears Switcheroo (2014) | Hacker News Reader

On the Berenstein Bears Switcheroo (2014)

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Posted in today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/nyregion/witness-accounts-...

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.

Which is exactly why all cops should be wearing video cameras.

It protects the cops as much as it protects the public.

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

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.

People can very easily remember things that didn't happen.

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.

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.

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.

This American Life has a funny story about a man's distinct memory of seeing Jackie Kennedy Onassis waving to his wife, but his wife insists he was not there when it happened. It's short and very amusing.

Animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxQ9Gx2-ceM

Transcript (the segment is about half way down the page): http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/226/t...

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.

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).

I grew up in Brisbane, as did my wife - we both support you being from an alternative universe.

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.

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".

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

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?)

Eerie timing - or inspiration?

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.

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.

That's the same conclusion I've come to.

I too was once in universe E.

Right there with ya, the release of the TV show and never hearing adults pronounce alternate spellings as a kid cemented it in my mind.

Looking at artwork and pictures of it, you'll notice the lowercase 'a' is used in the titles of the book, and this looks a lot like an 'e' in cursive, which furthered the confusion.

I was reading about it and caught a picture of a poster for the TV show on another website, and realized that when the words were written in title case or UPPER CASE, then all of a sudden the 'A' looked right and the 'E' looked wrong!

So my visual memory of the 'A' is intact, but only in the uppercase form, where the visual difference is stark.

In the lower-case cursive form (used on so many of the book titles from the time period I had them), it's so easy to see it as an 'E' when that's the pronounciation that everyone tended to use.

I mean do you know anyone with a last name ending in -stain vs. -stein or -stine?

Not me.

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.

This seems the most likely explanation -- compounded by the fact that us kids reading the books were just beginning to learn how to read.

After reading the article, I do vaguely recall some childhood cognitive dissonance over the fact that it was pronounced "steen" but spelled "stain"... but my main memory is of the pronunciation, not the spelling. If you'd asked me before reading this, I'd've sworn up and down it was spelled "Berenstein".

Holy crap...I distinctly remember it as Berenstein too...and now I wish I had all the books from my childhood (lost in a move during my teen years) so I can see just how warped my reality is.

The mind is a strange thing.

Nadya - To make this weirder, I distinctly remember having a conversation with you in person about the spelling of "Berenstein bears". Maybe it wasn't with you but with somebody else, and the surprise of seeing you in this comment thread on HN caused a false memory. Maybe it's time for me to lay off the Nootropics.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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 "Berenstein" to one where (s)he wrote down "Berenstain", 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 :)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!"

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.

Perhaps humans have really bad memories because universes keep splitting off all the time.

This is not a serious suggestion. (Although I'm not sure why not.)

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."

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

You may wish to read section 9 of the post, which explains that the multiple-universes idea was a bit of a joke. But nonetheless there is something very interesting going on here.

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.

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

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

I'm wondering if they're misremembering from TNG, Tasha Yar died in the first season but kept popping up through the rest of the series?

Bizarre, but to be fair, I distinctly remember watching a version of Star Trek Generations in theaters which was apparently never released in theaters - it included the full scene of Soran torturing Geordi, and explaining the nano probe (so Dr. Crusher's explanation of removing it actually made sense), the last fight scene going differently (Kirk escaped the breaking bridge only to get shot in the back and fall onto it, causing it to fall with him), and the missile flying into the ground instead of exploding. But I know this wasn't just mentally interpolating the deleted scenes I saw later, because it didn't include the orbital skydiving scene, for instance, and I remember on watching the VHS being very confused that the torture scene was missing.

The only remotely reasonable explanation I've come up with, besides sliding between universes, is that my dad and I actually went to a test screening instead of the actual theatrical release, but I think the last time I asked my dad about it, he _didn't_ remember those additional scenes, and there's no reason that a test screening should have been happening in my hometown. Another less likely explanation is that the theater was shipped a test screening print rather than what was actually released. Neither is particularly satisfactory, since I definitely hadn't seen the orbital skydiving scene which was ostensibly in the test screening prints.

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."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels_%28Star_Trek:_The_N...

What's your point? I've seen that episode. Unfortunately, Whorf does not discover the A in "Berenstain Bears" and then discover that it's due to manipulation of the timeline and violation of the temporal directive and then go on a mission to repair the timeline and replace the A with an E. But that would be really awesome.

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.

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

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