Adult Brainrot: Mandela Effect, Misinformation & Conspiracies
The internet is a strange place — one moment you’re convinced the Starbucks logo never had a star on top, the next you’re knee-deep in a rumor that spreads everywhere at once, and before long you’re staring at a series of pictures that “prove” the moon landing was fake. These phenomena may look like pure nonsense, but they also show how perception, memory, and belief are shaped by our experiences, the hidden biases behind what we perceive, and the difficulty of stitching multiple pieces of information, sometimes conflicting, into a coherent story that fits the most into one’s worldview.
In this talk I introduce “adult brainrot” as a categorical framework for these inconsistencies. I will show how categorical models of quantum processes can capture order-sensitive memory and indistinguishable sources of misinformation, and how categorical notions of centers help explain why people’s theories sometimes fail to form a consistent picture of reality. The aim is to argue that quantum categorical structures offer a natural mathematical framework for modeling the inconsistencies and oddities of human perception and belief.