Do you remember where you were on Sept. 11, 2001, when you heard that the first airplane hit the World Trade Center? You wouldn’t be alone. A Pew Research Center released a poll recently saying 91 percent of Americans recall exactly what they were doing at that moment.
But what about since then? After the attacks, President George W. Bush gave an impassioned speech, with his arm wrapped around a New York fireman, declaring that the terrorists will hear America’s mighty response. The government mobilized. The military was quickly sent to Afghanistan, the base of the Al Qaeda operatives. The Department of Homeland Security was formed in a matter of months. A senior intelligence chief was appointed on top of the central intelligence director.
The actions had the effect that it intended. In late 2001, 88 percent of people said the government was doing well in addressing terrorism. Unfortunately, that number dropped to a low of 52 percent in December 2015 following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
A lot has passed since those early post-attack days. A lot of politics has gotten in the way of solutions, and a lot of highs and lows have occurred in all of our lives. Americans, like others around the world, learned to cope with the day-to-day of living with threats. We love, laugh, work, argue, struggle, and sleep, among other things.
But our resilience is not merely time. In fact, research shows that we remember 9/11 — and other shocking or traumatic events — because of a neurological process in which emotionally arousing events trigger activity in the amygdala, which is involved in emotional learning and memory.
The interaction then triggers production of a protein called Arc in neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in processing long-term memory.
The scientists think the Arc protein helps store certain memories by strengthening synapses, the connections between neurons in the brain.
Emotionally neutral events generally are not stored as long-term memories,” said Christa McIntyre, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine. “On the other hand, emotionally arousing events, such as those of Sept. 11, tend to be well-remembered after a single experience because they activate the amygdala.”
On the flip side, while many of us may remember it like it was yesterday, some, like those who were particularly close to the terror, may not remember the details. That’s because that same part of our brain is also designed to store feelings, but not necessarily facts.
(I)t has been shown that when we have a traumatic event in our lives, the body produces major amounts of glucocorticoids. This helps to calm us down so we can cope. It also gives us that ‘numb’ feeling that many people describe during stress. But glucocorticoids have a transverse effect. They destroy neurons in the hippocampus. This means that the more stress we are under, the less we will be able to store the traumatic event in long-term memory. This partially explains how some people who endured years of trauma through abuse have very little memory of the entire season of events.
However, there is one other effect of Glucocorticoids. They enhance the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system helps us store our emotional reactions in events. Our brains can actually store our emotional output during a traumatic event much more completely than we can store the facts of the event.
Of course, being bombarded with images of that horrific day helps to keep the memories alive, if not distorted, as they are adapted to suit imaginary narratives produced in art, film, and history-making. But even when we can’t remember exactly the details, our instincts remind us that we must never forget.
