Yet, interestingly enough, although most people believe that they remember these moments perfectly, people actually show frequent errors in their recall. In a landmark study on flashbulb memories from 1992, Neisser and Harsch asked students to write down the details about what they were doing when they found out that the Challenger had exploded within 24 hours of the “flashbulb” event in 1986. After two and a half years, the researchers asked the same people to recall these memories in as much detail as possible. Although all of the participants were equally confident in their memories and provided equally vivid memories after 24 hours and 2.5 years, the disparities were somewhat shocking. Only 7% of the students showed near-perfect recall of the day’s events (though even these reports had some minor inaccuracies), whereas 68% of the students reported memories that had a mix of accurate and inaccurate details. And then there was the most shocking finding of all — 25% of the students recalled memories that in no way matched the actual events that they had reported the day after the Challenger explosion. One student, 24 hours after the explosion, wrote a moving story in which she learned about the explosion in her religion class and felt sad for the school teacher (Christa McAuliffe) whose students had all been watching the event on television. Touching, right? The sort of story that you don’t easily forget. Except that the same student, 2.5 years later, reported learning about the explosion in her freshman dorm room with her roommate and then calling her parents.

Why would this happen? Of all of the memories that we can have, why would the ones that we most expect to be memorable be the ones that are prone to distortion?

It has to do with the nature of memory. Memory is not like a hard drive where we file away memories and then retrieve them with a simple double-click of the brain-mouse. Memory is an active, reconstructive process.