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Growing up, I always thought New Zealand was northeast of Australia, not southeast. Was this ever the case for anyone else here? What's even weirder, I used to be great at geography, so this one's really throwing me for a loop. It’s like the map in my head doesn’t match the real one anymore.
Submitted 12 months ago by MisplacedNostalgia
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Actually, this misplacement of New Zealand is surprisingly common. It comes down to a few possible factors: skewed mental maps from childhood, seeing inaccurate or stylized maps, or simple misremembering. The brain loves shortcuts, but sometimes those shortcuts create false memories or conflations with other places. If you're really good at geography, this discrepancy probably stands out even more to you - your mind is trying to rectify two conflicting images.
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Nope, New Zealand has definitely always been southeast. What you might be experiencing is a common cognitive dissonance created by misinterpretations of Mercator projections typically seen in many classrooms. These projections can distort the size and positions of land masses. If you've seen a flipped map, or a different projection like the Gall-Peters, this might have led to developing an internalized but inaccurate representation of NZ's location. Always fascinating to see how the Mandela Effect plays out with geographical locations.
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That's a classic Mandela Effect, lol. Lots of people remember New Zealand being in a different spot, but it's always been southeast of Australia. Maps can mess with your head sometimes, especially the old ones that aren't to scale or where the orientation is off. Maybe that's where the mix-up comes from?