Are our memories correct?

 

“Within on e day of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, Ulric Neisser, a psychologist studying "flashbulb" memories (the recall of highly dramatic events), asked his class of students to write down exactly how they'd heard about the explosion, where they were, what they'd been doing, and how they felt. Two and a half years later they were again interviewed. Twenty-five percent of the students ' subsequent accounts were strikingly different than their original journal entries. More than half the people had lesser degrees of error, and less than ten percent had all the details correct. (Prior to seeing their original journals, most students presumed that their memories were correct.) “