Where were you when you first learned of the attacks of September 11, 2001?
This is something everyone seems to think they remember. My memory goes like this. I was on the campus of the college I was attending at the time. A commuter student, I had arrived early and was sitting in a mostly empty lobby or lounge area, preparing for a 9 a.m. class. There were two young women sitting a little ways away, and one of them somehow learned and said something aloud about a plane having crashed into a building in New York. (American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.)
Curious to learn more and soon needing to get to my class anyway, I gathered my things and walked down to the offices of the student newspaper, where I was on staff. There, one of the other reporters and I tried to load CNN's website to learn more about what I assumed was some sort of accident. CNN wouldn't load, so I left for class. Although today I would consider it worrying for a website like CNN's to simply not load, I don't recall deciding that this had dire implications. In 2001, it was not exactly surprising when a website didn't seem to be working properly.
At the classroom, I told the professor what I'd heard. It seemed to be new information to her, and although she was somewhat taken aback, it was only in the abstract manner of anyone learning of a major accident of some kind. There was a TV hanging from the ceiling, and, with the professor's permission, I tried briefly to find a working channel. But the TV was only there for professors to show videos to their classes and had no reception in this windowless classroom in the basement of a sturdy brick building.
As I fiddled with the TV, the rest of the class filed in. I do not recall having the slightest sense that any of the other students, as they took their seats, knew anything about this incident, and as far as I could tell no one received any information about it during class. (More below on how they probably couldn't have received any such information.) In other words, it is my firm sense that, until this class ended, none of us had the slightest idea that a coordinated and multipart terrorist attack was unfolding.
When the class ended, I walked to an office of the education department where I had a part-time job and was friendly with the professors and staff. There, I joined a crowd standing around a television set and learned all at once that a second WTC tower and the Pentagon had been struck and one of the two towers had already collapsed. Were there more hijacked planes? The news anchors would have been entertaining the possibility, of course, even if specifics were not yet known. Had fighter pilots been authorized to shoot down hijacked planes? They either had or they were maybe going to be.
And then I was right there in the room watching as the TV news anchors were suddenly scrambling to report that the second tower was now collapsing.
Or that's what I remember. The findings of a particular arm of research into the functioning of human memory suggest that there is good reason to doubt these memories, especially because I am so confident they are correct.
Scientists who study memory refer to our recollections of events such as 9/11 as flashbulb memories, or memories of how, when, and where we learned of a public event—more especially, an emotionally intense event resulting in widely shared trauma. These memories are distinguished from our memories of the events themselves, for which these scientists use the term event memory. (And both of these are distinct from run-of-the-mill autobiographical memory, that is, our recollections of personal and private experiences.)
A week after September 11, 2001, researchers asked more than 3,000 people from across the country to describe where they were and what they were doing at the moment they first heard that a plane had struck one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The researchers asked the same question a year later, then three years later, and then ten years later (but always a month before the actual anniversary). Although many people dropped out of the study, 202 responded to all four surveys.
One year later, just 63 percent of participants' responses matched what they had related in the interview that had occurred one week after the event. Think about that. Presuming that the memories from a week after the incident were accurate, it took just a year for well over a third of respondents to forget significant details. Three years later, this rate had fallen to 57 percent, and then there was not much further change by the time of the ten-year interviews.
To be clear, the forgetting that occurred was of a very specific kind. Most people remembered the key facts of the day reasonably well—that there was an attack, in the first place, and then how many planes were involved, the various significant locations, etc. What people tended to forget most easily was how they had described their emotional state at the time they learned of the attacks. And although a strong majority remembered where they were and who they were with when they learned of the attacks, almost 20 percent of respondents were getting this wrong by the time of the third survey.
This is a striking point, because—until you examine this kind of research—I don't think it would occur to anyone that someone could ever get such details wrong. Forgetting an emotional state, okay, maybe, but descriptions of emotions are so subjective and it is not really possible to remember a feeling. But where one was? Who one was with? Good luck trying to convince someone that there is actually a good chance they are remembering those sorts of things incorrectly.
Indeed, along with asking people what they remembered, researchers also asked people to rate their confidence in their recollections on a scale from 1 to 5. Throughout the course of the project, the average rating remained higher than 4. This result—baselessly high confidence in our memories—is apparently more or less expected in this kind of research. The implication seems to be that, when our memories are tinged by strong emotions, we are much more confident about the accuracy of those memories and, it would seem, more confident than we should be. The fact is that we do remember such events more easily than we remember less consequential events, such as, perhaps, how we celebrated our birthday in a given year. That is, we really do get more right about the flashbulb events. But nonetheless we get a lot less right than we think we do.
It is true that the closer I look at my memories of 9/11, the fuzzier and more unclear they become, as if I am standing too close to a painting or a photograph and seeing not the overall image but the brush strokes or pixels that make it up.
For example, how did those two women learn of the first crash, anyway? Nowadays there would have been any number of ways, from receiving a text message to seeing someone else's post about it on Facebook. But that year there were no smart phones yet and no Facebook, and the women could not even have received an email on a WiFi-connected laptop, there being no such thing as WiFi yet, either.
Or so I remembered before looking into it. A quick internet search just now finds that, as with so many computer technologies that feel relatively new, some version of WiFi has been around since the 1970s, and a Wired article from 2003, entitled "The WiFi Revolution," states that "over the past two years, [WiFi's] become one of the fastest-growing electronics technologies in history." I still think it unlikely that my university, a public one, of the "land grant" variety, would already have stood up a wireless network on campus by 2001. And even if they had, connecting to it would have required special equipment. From the Wired article, which, again, was published in 2003: "The next laptop you buy will probably have WiFi built in." Until WiFi capability became standard in portable computers, making use of WiFi required one to buy a special card. I don't remember any of this going on while I attended that school, from which I graduated in 2002, so I don't think that they saw the news either online or in an email they'd received.
Could one of the women have received a text message? Like WiFi, SMS messaging turns out to have been around since the early 1990s, at least in prototype form. As for when it really took off, the year 2001 seems to fall in a fuzzy segment of the sweep of the history of this form of communication. Most of the articles I can find describe halting steps forward during the 1990s and various reasons, including lack of inter-network compatibility, that the service did not at first become widespread in the United States. (Europe adopted it earlier, apparently.)
By 2007, SMS messaging had become the most popular mobile data service, in use by three quarters of worldwide mobile phone users. I can't find an article that nails down exactly what the state of things would have been in 2001. If I had to rely on memory alone, I would say that it finally started to seem an inevitable part of the communication landscape in 2003. I remember transitioning from scorn at what seemed a pointless shiny bauble to making my own grudging first uses of the service toward the end of that year. (My guess is that I would have been neither an early nor especially late adopter.)
One of the articles I found mentions that, in November of 2001, AT&T released an inter-carrier text messaging program, which suggests that these young women could only have received notification from someone with a phone on the same network. But then, that would in all likelihood describe family members, exactly the sort of person who might notify you of what at first seemed merely a strange sad accident.
At any rate, as I think through these possibilities, it seems increasingly hard to see how the woman would have received notification of this event, except perhaps via an actual phone call, and my memory refuses to accept that there could have been one. Could a TV have been on in the corner? But if I learned of the initial attack via TV, why are the two young women so strongly engrained on my memory of how I first learned of the events of 9/11, and why wouldn't I have just stayed there to keep watching, if I wanted more information?
It seems possible that my memory formed blocks in a sense, e.g., a block of "somehow these women found out," and later, since the actual way they found out is relatively unimportant, filled in generically with the possibilities that exist now.
Memory researchers tend to say that we really do remember what is important, with "important" defined in this context as the kinds of details that might help us survive later similar events. Who cares who was with us or what our emotional state was when the lion attacked? The important things to remember are that lions do attack and that certain particular sounds or sights occur first. The hidden hand of nature—of our natures—is indifferent to the work of writers and other spelunkers of memory, who probably should be considered pathological in evolutionary biological terms. In terms of getting one's DNA into a new generation, there is no need for the level of detail we are after.
And yet the accuracy of memory is a central concern for those of us who, if only pathologically, feel compelled to write ours down. It is disconcerting to learn that we might not be able to trust our recollections of the only kinds of details that can make writings about such recollection worth reading. For a list of the events of 9/11, you can turn to an encyclopedia. But for a sense of how particular humans responded and what we can learn from their experiences, well—it is disconcerting to think how many of our stories along these lines can be wrong.
We scribblers should, apparently, approach memory with all humility. We cannot present what we remember as certain. We can only paint the flashes that come to us, and be honest that it could all be quite mistaken. This fact seems to be as much a part of the essential human experience as anything, that as we look across the still blue water we have little to no idea what lies beneath.
