Essay On Flashbulb Memory

Where were you when the September 11 attacks happened? Where were you during the july 7th bombings? Can you be confident in your memories to stand up in a courtroom over 10 years later and demand that your memory is as clear and concise as it was when it was first created. In fact, many people who were not even present at these attacks still describe very clear memories of what they were doing when they found out about them. Why would somebody who was not directly affected by the event have such a clear memory of what they were doing and where they were at the time of it?
These experiences are called flashbulb memories and in these memories, we describe with supposed great detail of how we first learned of an event (Brown and Kulik 1977). In these memories, we describe where we were, what we were doing and usually appear to be as vivid and accurate as a photograph. What is suggested to make these events so memorable is the unusual intersection of the publicity of the event and the personal emotional reaction that it invokes. However, since flashbulb memory was first coined decades ago, …show more content…
In their interviewing of participants, they discovered that they claimed to have clear and vivid memories of what they were doing and where they were at the time of the events. From this, they developed the photographic model dictating that for a flashbulb memory to occur during a traumatic event, there must be a high level of surprise, consequentiality and emotional arousal. Through these results, Brown and Kulik theorised that there were special neural mechanisms through which when fired by a spontaneous and arousing public event, created this flashbulb memory. This special mechanism is what was said to separate these flashbulb accounts from normal autobiographical