"Where were you when the world stopped turning...?"

About three weeks ago or so, we honored the nearly 3,000 men and women who were killed in the deadliest terrorist attack in history on September 11, 2001.  All of us who were alive on that day were changed forever.  September 11, 2021 marked twenty years since that fateful day, and it is surreal to think that there are young adults today who weren't even alive at that time.  The pivotal event in history for them will likely be the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The country music singer, Alan Jackson, released a song shortly after 9/11/2001 called "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" that perfectly (at least in my mind) encapsulated what a lot of us were feeling at that time.  Most of us who were old enough to remember the events that day felt that we would never forget what we were doing or who we were with at the moment that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were attacked.  Even now, over 20 years later, I can play back those events in my mind like it was a movie, recalling exactly how the events unfolded throughout the day from minute to minute, or hour to hour.

Or so I believe.  As it turns out, there is a whole body of research on this topic - the investigators in this area use the term flashbulb memory (originally coined by the investigators, Roger Brown and James Kulik in 1977) to describe a highly vivid and detailed memory of a moment in time in which a consequential, surprising, or emotionally arousing piece of news was either experienced or learned.  For example, the original study by Brown and Kulik starts out as follows:

"Hardly a man is now alive" who cannot recall the circumstances in which he first heard John Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  Not just the fact that John Kennedy was shot and died...but the memory of one's own circumstances on first hearing the news.

The term that Kulik and Brown used (flashbulb memory) builds upon the concept of a photographic memory (long before the digital age, cameras used a flashbulb as a light source).  Individuals with an eidetic, or photographic, memory can recall things from their memory in almost perfect detail even after seeing it only once.  The concept of a flashbulb memory comes from the observation that individuals can relate their experiences of a particularly consequential or newsworthy event (like the Kennedy Assassination), similar to an individual with a photographic memory.  However, as opposed to a photographic memory where all items can be recalled, the event triggering the flashbulb memory must be consequential, newsworthy, and otherwise very important.  

Here's the tricky part.  Our recollection of events in the past - even ones that supposedly lead to flashbulb memories - isn't as good as we think.  Take, for example, the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.  The American teacher Christa McAuliffe was one of the seven astronauts on that particular Challenger mission, so it is not an exaggeration to say that almost every school classroom in America was watching the disaster unfold on live television.  The psychologist Ulric Neisser (known as the "father of cognitive psychology") surveyed the students in his college class about their memories of the event the day after the disaster and then again three years later.  Contrary to the discussion above on flashbulb memories, less than 7% of the memories three years later matched the ones on the day after the disaster.  Fifty percent of the memories were wrong in the majority (2/3) of the reported details, while 25 percent were wrong in every single detail.  In other words, Neisser found very little evidence to support the flasbulb memory phenomenon.

If I were to be completely honest, other than knowing that the Challenger disaster occurred when I was in college, I don't really remember too many details of that day either.  But what about the events that occured on 9/11/2001?  How accurate were the flashbulb memories associated with that day?  As it turns out, our recollections of the details on even this momentous occasion are not as accurate as we think.  A group of psychologists from across the country surveyed over 3,000 individuals from 7 different U.S. cities to find out how well they remembered details on 9/11/2001 at 1 week, 11 months, and 35 months after the event.   The results of this study were similar to Neisser's Challenger study above.  Our flashbulb memories aren't as accurate as we think.

All of this is very interesting, but what's the point?  What I take away from this discussion is that if we can't recall an event as powerfully historical as the terrorist attacks on 9/11, then why would we expect that our memories of less momentous occasions be any better?  In fact, they are likely to be a whole lot worse.  I don't think that this should come as a surprise - after all, we are only human.  And humans are known to make mistakes.  In fact, making mistakes is part of what makes us human - "Fallor, ergo sum."