Hyperfixed - Brainsquatch

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

This week, Bob's Burgers has Matt questioning his sanity.Please sign up for Hyperfixed Premium! https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/joinLINKS:Brain Bridge Lab: https://brainbridgelab.uchicago.edu/ Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Articles of Interest is a show about clothing for people who don't necessarily think they're interested in clothing. My name is Avery Truffleman. I make the show, and I just finished a whole season about the intersection between the military and the outdoor industry. Would you believe they are deeply, deeply interwoven? And this year in 26, there are going to be new episodes about tattoos and what they mean for our self-expression, about bras and whether or not their technology is outdewven. dated, an episode about the greatest designer you've never heard of, and a look at what it means to make clothes truly accessible for everyone. If you're ready to change your relationship with the clothes you wear every day, check out articles of interest wherever you get your podcasts. 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 squatch. 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. I have friends who will be like, oh, yeah, my grandfather definitely comes back from

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 like weird or esoteric things get 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, it 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,

I didn't go out, and I'm also one of those people that can't have like no sound happening around me. I need music or TV or something. So I threw on the 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's 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 12 or 13 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 like 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'm just going to 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 8 episode one episode called Brunch Squatch. Brunch Squatch is 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 umpteenth 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 Bob's Berger style 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 brunch squash 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 provably false memory. The term was coined back in 2010 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, Nelson 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 brunch watch 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 Bob's Berger 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 thinking about it and I kept on Googling like brunch squash, original animation. And people on Reddit and Facebook are like, yes, I saw this. I remember this. And all 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 Squatch episode just happened to play. And it stirred up all these old questions that he'd pushed into the back of his mind. And serendipitously, right after that, Hyperfix posted a callout asking listeners to write in with their most intractable problems.

And I was like, you know, 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, 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 it exists.

That is one thing that I'm pretty positive on. I don't think original brunch watch 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 with the logical and illogical parts of your mind are at war. And I wanted to help and settle that. Let's go with percentages here.

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, 80% 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 like rabbit hole to dive down. But like the reason why I really questioned even reaching out to you guys is

like, 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, you know, dozens of, if not hundreds of people to share this opinion? Did they all have twins recently? Okay. So let's recap this whole thing. Brunch Squatch is an episode of Bob's Burgers that came out in 2017. But the first time Matt saw it was last year. The episode is unique in that it cycles through dozens of styles of fan art in 22 minutes. But Matt and a bunch of other people online feel certain that they've seen a version of this episode

drawn in the original Bob's Berger's animation style. In other words, no fan art. And some of them also believe that this is evidence of an interdimensional jump. But what are the most convincing pieces of evidence for this thing? theory is that all of the Reddit posts about this seem to have been posted in the last year, even though, again, the episode 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 alt version of Brunch 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 publicist. 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 Squatch 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 monocle and a suit. Okay. Well, you're wrong. Oh, no.

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 Wilma Bainbridge. She's a professor of psychology and the founder of the Brainbridge 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 effects 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, Willma's 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 Pikachu's, three C3POs, which, by the way, is a very hard thing to say. Like, my mouth wants to just call them three-threes. This reminds me of how my son used to call

R2D2 RTDuty. 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 Loon logo with a cornucopia, the Pikachu with a yellow tail, and the all-gold version of C-3PO. 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 C3PO, who apparently has a silver leg that I somehow never registered during the 600. 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-2010s.

Have you heard about this? I've heard this, but I mean, it just requires a sort of Herculane level of belief that I just do not have. Okay, yeah, but so many people on the internet think that these, how could so many people have the same false memory? The only possible explanation is that we change dimensions prior way 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, produces Mandela effects, even if it's their first time learning about this character. 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 Men for the first time.

Like, here he is, no monocle, this is the correct version. We then had them do another task for like a minute or two, and then we asked them, draw that picture of the Monopoly Man that we just showed you. And in their drawing, 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-2010s, then people wouldn't have made that mistake.

They would 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, Wilma's team 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 C3PO 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, is it that people are just not looking at that Mandela Effect part? Like for C3PO, you're probably looking at people's faces. 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 participant's memory. And we found even when they look at C-3PO's leg and see that it's silver, they still make that Mendela Effect error moments later

saying that he's all gold. So even if you look at the future, 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. Likely, 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, Wilma's team tested 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 sciences, 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? 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 because 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 Mandela

effects, but it can't explain all of them. In particular, the Fruit of the Loom logo, one is really perplexing because when do you ever see a cornucopia 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. 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 brains and neurons work, where based on like a region of the image, it decides whether 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 likely to produce false memories. And so far, there seems to be a correlation between images that are forgettable and images that produce false memories. And that may seem super obvious, but what isn't obvious is the qualities that they've found that makes something forgettable. 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 saved 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 300 episodes in his catalog. So it's unclear how some of these discoveries might apply to this episode of Bob's Berger's. But based on everything that Wilma told us, we were starting to wonder if maybe the issue with Brunch 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 question 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're developing

to see if it flags the fan art ones as being more false memory-inducing. Would 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 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 sent her 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 Brunch Squatch 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 Squatch, 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. During our first round of outreach, we'd focused 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 voiced 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 it Amor? Yes, this is Amor. Hi, Laura. Hi, how are you?

This is Laura Silverman, who, along with her real-life sister, Sarah Silverman, 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, 15 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, be doing this flu thing. Like, at first I was like, you're asking the wrong person. I don't know anything, you know? But then I thought, you know, I looked it up and I'm like, 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 Trader, who is a writer-producer on the show, married to Nora Smith, of course, who is, like, super badass writer and producer 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. phenomenal. 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 100%. 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 Gene, the son of the family, wearing a Sasquatch mask to drum up customers for the restaurant. But when Amor 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 8 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 going to pass hours real up and had to 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's helping 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? why having a stroke.

And then, yeah, I found out. I found it very different thing, but I thought it was the coolest idea, and I think the fan art is amazing. But it goes by so fast, and it's one style to the next, scene to scene. So, like, you're not going to remember unless you, like, look back at it or you look at the fan art, you know, laid out, because it is kind of like a roller poster of sorts. But that's interesting.

I was not super into Reddit, but recently I have started getting into Reddit. Yeah. And I've never had a single like or whatever, like arrow up. And I see people that have the preferred answer or the winner answer. And I was like, man, like I could 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, yeah. now you're going to be on a podcast, so now everyone's going to know you had the winning answer. Yes, everybody won't know, and I knew somebody who knew. Finally, we had a definitive answer. There was only ever one version of Brunch Squatch.

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 thought there were two, we only had the faintest outline of a theory. And when Wilma 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. Hey, it's Christopher Kimball from Mill Street Radio. Sounds like I'm bragging, and I am,

we're the number one most downloaded food podcast in America. You know, Melstereo Radio travels the world in search of the very best food stories. You'll hear about smuggling eels on the black market, the secret intelligence of plants, and insider tips to eating in Paris. In every week, listeners call in with their toughest culinary mysteries. Discover a world of food stories by searching your podcast app for Mill Street Radio. Welcome back to the show.

So before the break, we confirmed that there was only one version of brunch squash, and that was the version of it that cycled through dozens of different styles of fan art, which begged 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 forgetability 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 more the results of the test. Okay, so as you know, we sent Wilma some stills of the animation from the Brunch Squatch episode, as well as stills from a normal Bob Spurger's episode. And the idea was that she was going to 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 Squatch 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 stills through the program, and sure enough, the fan art images were less memorable, 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 squash 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. Oh. Apparently, there's a lot of work in the memory field about how boundaries impact memory. 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 is 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 question. 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 it is, we remember a template for it. And then we fill in from that template. Yeah.

Well, the reason why we do that is because our brains can't hold every single detail, everything we see and experience. So the pieces we hold on to 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 coded as incidental and then flushed? Yes, exactly. Also, I took note of every time the animation style changes, and for a 22-minute episode, there are over 35 animation style changes. And sometimes the 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 Bobzberger 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 complex. 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. So 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 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 out someday, I'm sure. I mean, actually, I think the likelihood is pretty slim that you would figure it out. I think you're just going to 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, Amory Yates, and Sarisoffer Sukenik. It was engineered this week by Noah Smith. Music is by the mysterious brakemaster cylinder and me. Special thanks this week to Wilma Bainbridge, Anastasia Mikhailova, Laura Silverman, John Schroeder, and CM. You can get bonus episodes, access our Discord, and much more, by becoming a premium Hyperfixed member at Hyperfixedpod.com slash join. We also have merch, like t-shirt, sweatshirts, hats, mugs,

atmerch.com, and Premium members get a 15% 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. Speaking of squirrels and how much we hate them, I go for a lot of walks, and I go for a lot of walks in Prospect Park. And every time I am about to approach a squirrel, and if I'm alone, I will go the other direction. direction because I am really afraid of them. And I think people are way too casual about how squirrels are like, they're brave. This is such like an L.A. person opinion.

Squirrels are. Nothing to do with me being coming on. Come on. Come on. If you grow up in a place like Ann Arbor, Michigan, you know what the arbor is for? It's for trees. There's squirrels fucking everywhere. And they want nothing to do with you unless they're rabid, at which point, run.

Otherwise, they are totally harmless. You don't know that until it's too late. You could just be like listening to some music and you walk up and then you suddenly interact with a squirrel that has other plans. So you don't know that until it's already happening. Do you want to hear absolutely one of the most horrifying experiences of my life? And I'm sorry, Matt. We'll get to your interview in just a second. But this is really important stuff we're doing here.

Sorry, I'm loving this. My interactions with squirrels are like orders of magnitude more complex and developed than yours. You're assuming so many things about my relationship with squirrels. Squirrels. I lived in a house that backed right up to a woods. What do you think was in that woods? Turtles and squirrels. That's it.

That's all we had. But when I lived in Queens, I used to ride my bike to WNYC, which is downtown Manhattan. And so my bike ride every day was like six miles or something. It was pretty hefty. But I also am a clumsy idiot. And at one time I broke my glasses and had to get home. So I was like biking half blind. but I was riding my bike down the road

and I remember it so clearly because there was a car right near me blasting it was right when 808 and heartbreak came out so partless by Kanye West was on the radio and a squirrel dashed out in front of my bike and I crushed it to death by riding my bicycle

over it horrible so scarring and I like stopped I was like oh my god is there anything I could do and then I turned back and there was a squirrel corpse that I had created with my bicycle.

You know what it sounds like when a car goes over? Do you know the crunch of a bicycle killing a squirrel? Horrible. Honestly, good. Oh, my God. We're lively this morning. Radiotopia.