Why we still remember exactly where and how we heard bad news

I was looking for my shin guards and my parents called me to come to the living room. They were watching television, but not in the way they normally did.

I was fifteen years old and mainly focused on makeup, hockey, and the boys' teams on the hockey fields. In short, a teenager who didn't care much about the big outside world and what was happening there. But I knew right away: this is a big deal. Normally, my parents never watched the news in the middle of the day, but now they did. They were shocked when the second plane flew into the tower. Then they knew for sure: this was done on purpose. This was an attack. This would change the world forever.

I can still get goosebumps thinking about it, and what I find especially bizarre is that I can still remember it very well. The disaster of 9/11 was 18 years ago, and yet I still remember exactly that I couldn't find my shin guards. How is that possible? Why do I remember how, where, and what I was doing exactly? I'm not the only one. It seems like everyone can recount exactly what they were doing when the World Trade Centers in New York collapsed. And yet we can't recall other memories from when we were younger at all.

In Psychology calls what we can recall so vividly ‘flashbulb memories’. They are vivid memories because they a) shocked us and b) surprised us. The strange thing is that you still remember what shirt you were wearing that day and where you were with whom and what you said, but you might not remember exactly how many deaths occurred, how many floors the World Trade Center had, or what time it happened. But you still remember what you did.

So, the reason you can recount it well, 18 years later, is this:

• The ability to remember is related to the emotional intensity of the event.
• It also depends on the significance of the event, its impact on you and your loved ones.
• Furthermore, it matters how often you have talked about it with others or have had discussions about it. It gives you a feeling that you were part of it: because you talk about it so often, you make yourself a part of it.
• Moreover, it is important: how unique is it that something like this happens?
  And lastly, it is influenced by how severe you find the event and to what extent you never saw it coming.

So, it's not so strange that we all remember how that day was for us, September 11, 2001. It meets this entire list. In general, people remember negative events better than positive moments. This is because the surprise effect occurs more often with something traumatic, like a disaster, an accident, or an attack.

I still remember that we talked about it on the hockey field in the evening. ’How terrible, right, those towers completely gone, all those people who worked there...‘ And we obediently hit the ball into the goal and continued with makeup and boys. I was still just a bit too young to fully understand what that day would do to the world. Now I know better. Because the fact that we still discuss it 18 years later with a shiver down our spine says a lot.