In another study three years after the attacks, Phelps used functional MRI to monitor the brain activity of New Yorkers as they recalled the events of 9/11, along with other personal, life-changing events from the same period. A weak emotional memory could also be useful in getting over tragic events. “People tended to have around 80 per cent accuracy in their place memories, but were only 40 per cent accurate at remembering their emotions,” says Phelps, who is writing up the finding. When Phelps reassessed the survey responses recently, she found that people’s memories of where they were on 9/11 have stayed consistent, though how they felt is harder to recall. Keeping the memory malleable to some extent can have benefits: “If a group arrives at a memory of shared suffering, it could be a positive thing in terms of group spirit and identity, and could pull the community together,” says Hirst. These vivid yet inaccurate memories might well be the brain’s best way of dealing with an emotional, life-changing event, says Phelps. The group found that while older people with frontal lobe damage struggled to remember other personal events, they remembered 9/11 as well as young people, suggesting that flashbulb memories might be uniquely impervious to ageing ( Neuropsychology, Development and Cognition, DOI: 10.1080/13825580490904192). But that didn’t affect how vividly people recalled the day, or how much faith they had in the details of their memories ( Journal of Experimental Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0015527).īut evidence that flashbulb memories might be processed differently to other types of memory was provided by Patrick Davidson‘s team at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who investigated whether memories for 9/11 degraded in the same way as other memories in older individuals. “People were about 60 per cent right about the details of the event after about a year, and this dropped to 50 per cent after three years,” suggesting flashbulb memories are no more accurate than other types of memory, says Phelps. To find out whether the memories formed would be lasting ones, the group sent out the same survey to the same participants again 11 months later, and once more 35 months after the attacks. ![]() Participants were asked to note all the details they could remember of the day itself, their personal circumstances at the time, and how they felt. ![]() The study involved surveying over 3000 Americans from seven different cities, including New York, within two to three days of the attack. “It struck us that 9/11 was probably one of the best examples of a public tragedy that we could use ,” says Hirst. When fellow neuroscientist John Gabrieli called to check on her they “decided to put together a consortium of memory researchers, and started collecting data within a week”. Elizabeth Phelps of New York University was in Manhattan on 9/11 and saw the attack.
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