Sometimes we experience an event and forget it almost before we’ve ended the experience. Other events live in our memories for years. Even decades.
It’s been 21 years since terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most of the days in those 21 years have long faded into obscurity. Yet 9/11 remains as vivid as ever in my mind, down to what bag I carried to work, what I wore, and who I stood with on the plaza of the GM building in midtown Manhattan, as the world changed in the blink of an eye.
I recall my parents and other “adults” telling me that I would remember this day forever. That I’d remember where I was, what I was doing. The way they remembered the assassination of JFK.
At age 26, I found that hard to imagine. I could hardly remember what I did the day before.
But they were right. 21 years later, I remember. Not just on 9/11.
I remember any time I see a plane flying too low in the sky, even if I’m not in NYC.
I remember whenever I look up at the Freedom Tower.
And any fall day that greets me with a clear blue sky and crisp autumn air, the way that day greeted me.
9/11 isn’t just one day. It’s a full-body memory that arises whenever the conditions align.
When people start sharing the “never forget” memes at this time of year, I wonder,
How could I forget?
Memory vs Recall
Dr. Gabor Maté, who specializes in trauma and how it impacts us, makes an important distinction between memory and recall.
Recall is in the mind.
Memory is in the body.
When we suffer traumas as young children, the mind may forget, but the body remembers.
Learning how to identify the trauma memories that get triggered in my body has been part of my healing journey, as it is for so many people who have experienced early childhood trauma.
But 9/11 is different. Here I have recall and memory. What makes my mind hold onto this?
5 Factors That Create Lasting Vivid Memories
Here are 5 factors at play in why the details of 9/11 are still so vivid for me, even 21 years later:
(1) Age
In part, I believe age is a factor. People who were too young to know what was happening don’t have the same vivid recall, even if they harbor embodied memories.
I was fully aware of what was happening, paying attention to it in real time, living it as it unfolded.
(2) Proximity
I was there. Not in the towers, but in midtown. New York City was the epicenter of the 9/11 attacks. It shook us to our core. It was like an earthquake to our hallowed ground.
Over the years, in talking to people outside New York, D.C. and outside the cities where the planes originated, I’ve learned that not everyone has the same visceral body memories or recall of 9/11.
For some people, it was an event that happened far away. Sure, they knew about it. Yes, they were shocked. But after a few days, life went back to normal.
Not so in NYC, where the attacks changed the energy and the dynamics of daily life for months after.
(3) Heightened Emotion
Research confirms that we have stronger memories of events that happen during heightened states of emotion, such as fear, anger, and joy.
According to one study, heightened emotion primes certain nerve receptors involved in the encoding of memory, literally making the neurons glide more smoothly in rewiring the brain to remember.
9/11 certainly had a lot of heightened emotion.
(4) Negative Experience
It’s not just the heightened emotion of an experience. Other research suggests that memories are more vividly encoded for negative experiences than for positive ones.
According to Elizabeth A. Kensinger, negative experiences are associated with increased engagement of sensory processes, which means we’re more likely to remember the details we took in with our senses.
This makes sense when we consider the role of negativity bias, our tendency to remember the negative things more than the positive things. It’s a built-in survival mechanism. Remembering the vivid details is how our nervous system attempts to prevent such experiences in the future.
(5) Novelty
A third element of 9/11 was its novelty.
The concept of “flashbulb memory” was introduced by Brown and Kulik in 1977.
They define “flashbulb memory” as
the memory of the circumstances in which one learned, for the first time, of a very surprising event with important consequences (or arousing great emotion).
According to this theory, a highly surprising event triggers a special memory mechanism that causes the event to be recorded in vivid detail.
This had never happened before. It was not just unexpected; it was unprecedented.
It was the type of event that most Americans could not imagine happening in our country. Even in the broader context of terrorist events that had previously occurred around the world, the idea that a group of people would hijack planes and fly them into a building was unthinkable.
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