Reading Steiner

The Reading Steiner is a term referring to Rintaro Okabe's ability to, after switching world lines, retain his memory of events that have occurred (from his point of view) before the switch. In 1.382733β, this ability is referred to as President's Disease, as those with this ability remember Puchin as the President of Russia instead of General Secretary of the Soviet Union.

Deja Vu is one of the main factors for Reading Steiner as it was stated in the anime that the Deja Vu and Reading Steiner are highly related.

World lines can be switched by altering the past, for example through the use of D-mails.

While no other members of the cast have this immediate knowledge of a switch having occurred or any recollection of what happened in another World Line, they seem to regain fragments of these memories occasionally.


 * Faris remembers sending the D-Mail that prevented her father's death after escaping the Viral Attackers with Okabe in 0.409431α.
 * Lukako remembers her first meeting with Okabe as a male in 0.456914α.
 * Mayuri, visiting her grandmother's grave in 0.571046α, remembers "Nightmares" in which she dies in a multitude of ways.
 * Katsumi Nakase gains this ability during November 2010 in 1.129848β. Yuki pretends to have Reading Steiner to help her hide it in 1.382733β.
 * Kurisu remembers some of her Alpha worldline memories in the Steins Gate worldline.

The ability plays a major role in the plot, most prominently in allowing Rintarou to undo the changes caused by the D-Mails and not losing track after each switch.

In the anime, there is a visual distortion every time a Reading is activated, usually following the sending of a D-mail.

Trivia
The actual explanation for all of these phenomena is that people simply have false memories, and that sometimes many people have the same collective false memories, for a variety of reasons. For instance, in the case of the Berenstain Bears being misremembered as the Berenstein Bears, this is because names ending with -stein are much more common than names ending with -stain, and children are usually not that good at spelling, and when someone remembers their childhood as an adult, their adult brain fills in missing details. In the case of the fictional Sinbad movie “Shazaam”, people are actually remembering the Shaquille O’Neal movie Kazaam where Shaq played a genie, but Shazaam is a more common word for magicians to use than Kazaam, Shaq was mostly a basketball player who did not do much acting, and Sinbad did plenty of comedic acting around that time. In the case of Nelson Mandela, people are likely misremembering him being released from prison in 1990 as him dying in the 1980s, because news stories about people dying are more common than news stories about people being released from prison, Nelson Mandela was already fairly old at this time, and as far as getting the date wrong, 1990 was several decades ago and practically in the 80s. Pretty much all examples of the Mandela effect have very easy logical explanations like this. However, the Mandela effect is notable in that it works in the exact same way as Reading Steiner, namely someone having memories of an alternate reality as part of a multiverse, with their consciousness and memories having shifted from one universe/worldline to another. The fact that a popular Mandela effect conspiracy theory involves CERN (equivalent to SERN in Steins;Gate) doing experiments that result in shifting from one universe/worldline to another is also notable. Since the Mandela effect was thought of independently from Reading Steiner around the same time, and works in the same way, this is an example of synchronicity, an idea that Rintarou Okabe is fond of using to explain coincidences, which is also one of the 11 articles on We-Key Pedophilia, the Science Adventure Series in-universe parody version of Wikipedia.
 * The movie Steins;Gate: Fuka Ryouiki no Deja Vu features the Reading Steiner as an important plot element, as Kurisu and Mayuri use recollection of the pre-Steins Gate world lines to piece together information about Rintarou.
 * The movie Steins;Gate: Fuka Ryouiki no Deja Vu confirms that the Deja vu is a part of the Reading Steiner ability.
 * In popular culture, the Mandela effect is equivalent to Reading Steiner. The term “Mandela effect” was coined in 2010 by self-proclaimed “paranormal researcher” Fiona Broome in 2010 and has become popular. It refers to memories people have which are apparently false in our universe, but which they believe are correct in some parallel universe, and believers in the Mandela effect typically believe that they were originally in a universe where those memories were correct, but then somehow got transported to our current universe where their memories differ with reality. Several examples of the Mandela effect are remembering Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, remembering The Berenstain Bears books being spelled as The Berenstein Bears, remembering Looney Tunes cartoons being called Looney Toons, remembering Billy Graham dying in the 1990s, and remembering a 1990s movie staring Sinbad called “Shazaam” where Sinbad played a genie. In 2017, believers in the Mandela effect even theorized that experiments by CERN resulted in the Donald Trump from a parallel universe becoming President of the United States in our universe.