Many of us have seen Spongebob’s first foray onto the big screen that debuted back in 2004 with the ‘Spongebob Squarepants Movie’. But one specific detail has left people scratching their heads. Spongebob shredded on a peanut guitar during the end sequence!?
Many people, including myself, could have sworn it was something else entirely. Let’s look at why we may misremember such a seemingly obvious plot point.
The Mandela Effect
The Mandela Effect occurs when a population of people all misremember the same thing. Many of us lean into the paranormal side of theories when working out why this may happen but we are sticking strictly to facts today! In order to understand this Mandela Effect we need to know a little bit about how long term memory works.
In essence, memories aren’t perfect and many of us haven’t seen the Spongebob movie in years. Our brains are always on the lookout to prune information it deems irrelevant. This means after 10 or so years of feeding new information into your brain it may lose the exact specifics about an event such as a feature length film. In the end you have a vague mental map of events but cannot entirely recall it in exact.
Psychologists call this the ‘Fuzzy trace theory‘ which suggests that our brains have an easier time dealing with gist-like memories rather than exact literal memories. This leaves long-term memories to be open to interpretation by filling in the blanks as we remember more of a concept than an exact memory.
Spongebob’s V-shaped Guitar
This is where the Mandela Effect really comes into it’s own. Our brain has the uncanny ability to fill in the blanks with an educated guess of past gained knowledge when remembering the gist of something like an old film we watched. During the Goofy Goober ensemble Spongebob is doing an otherworldly shred… With a peanut!? Our brain is less likely to remember Spongebob donning a peanut shaped guitar when unsure of the specifics and more likely to imagine it as a guitar similar to one that the rock greats of the past have; For example the Gibson Flying-V guitar:
![](https://megasplain.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/gibson-flying-V-guitar-1024x338.png)
It can explain why so many people come to the same conclusion even if it appears not to match up with reality. In the western world we are flooded with media that depicts radical rock solo’s often played with radical guitars. If Jimi Hendrix and the every other guitarist in the world performed rock solo’s on a giant peanut then we would certainly be correctly remembering Spongebob’s peanut guitar.
We all have human brains with the same memory recall oddities and since everyone grew up associating V-shaped guitars with rock music shreds many of us are liable to inserting said guitar into rock music shreds! It is rather scary to realise that our memories are not perfect. Do we fill in the blanks more often than we think when looking far back into the past?
But that’s just what logic says. Many of us are staunch in exclaiming that it doesn’t quite add up. I must admit it certainly is strange that so many of us can’t remember something as goofy as the peanut guitar. Maybe there is something more to this… What do you think?