Somehow many people have the notion that, because September 11 was such a disastrous and horrible event, we all recall it just as it occurred 11 years ago. However, that's not what the research shows.
And if many people cannot recall with precision or accuracy that very memorable day in September, imagine how the memories of events leading up to a dispute can shift, twist, change, deteriorate.
When I tell people in my seminars about this memory research, they often respond with something like: "Oh, no, I know exactly what I was doing, wearing, feeling." And there is a good chance that knowledge about which they are so certain is faulty.
One can find many, many articles about the research on how our memories of 9/11 and other tragic events change with such factors as time, retelling, our current circumstances and mood. Here are two.
"Seared in our memories" (Monitor of the American Psychological Association)
Millions of Americans have vivid remembrances of decades-old traumatic events, including John F. Kennedy's assassination, the Challenger space shuttle explosion and, more recently, the 9/11 attacks. Known as "flashbulb memories," these detailed recollections can be as clear as something that happened yesterday, right down to the dialogue, the weather and even what people were wearing when they heard the news.
...
Talarico and Rubin's findings square with results from the biggest 9/11 study done to date—the one led by Hirst of the New School for Social Research. In this seven-city investigation, 3,000 adults answered survey questions about their memories of learning about the attacks at three points in time: one week, 11 months and 35 months later. Hirst and his team looked at how people's flashbulb recollections, such as where and from whom they learned of the attacks, compared with their factual
recollections, such as which airlines and how many airplanes were involved.
It turned out that the rate of forgetting for both types of memory slowed and stabilized after a year. But overall flashbulb recollections declined more than factual recollections, possibly because nonstop media coverage bolstered people's factual memories ... .
"What we're really looking at in flashbulb studies is consistency of people's stories, and we found a dramatic inconsistency in what people report after one week and after 36 months," Hirst says of the results, which were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Vol. 138, No. 2). "People are changing who they were with, how they found out about the attacks, those sorts of aspects."
"How Our Brains Make Memories" (Smithsonian Magazine)
Like millions of people, [Karim] Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections.
Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news.) But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.
Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.
Of course, my memories of 9/11 are very vivid. How accurate is my recollection? I don't know. Probably not as accurate as part of me believes. That part says, "I know exactly what I was doing, wearing, feeling." And the rest of me knows better.
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