3 Questions: John Gabrieli on studying traumatic memories
Sept. 11, 2001, is a day that lives in infamy. But how accurately do we remember it?
Starting just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, MIT neuroscientist John Gabrieli (who was then at Stanford University) and colleagues around the country undertook a large-scale survey of how people remembered the attacks. For decades, psychologists have theorized that such traumatic events become imprinted into the brain, creating memories much more vivid than our usual everyday ones. However, some studies have shown that these memories are not as accurate as we may believe them to be. Here, Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience, discusses what the 9/11 study tells us about such “flashbulb” memories.
Q. How did you and your colleagues decide to undertake this survey? What did you hope to learn from it?
A. Like everybody else, we were moved by the tragedy of 9/11. As memory researchers, we were aware that important public events like 9/11 offer a rare opportunity to examine scientifically how people remember emotionally powerful events over time. (We cannot create such events in a laboratory, and other emotionally powerful experiences occur in private and highly variable ways in each person’s life). So Elizabeth Phelps, at New York University, and I reached out to our colleagues in memory research across the nation in places that were directly attacked (New York and Washington); a place that was involved (Boston, where flights originated); and four other cities across the country.