Report Links 9/11 Memories to Proximity

December 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The closer New Yorkers were to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the more vivid their memories are of the disaster that brought down the buildings.

For people close to the scene, memory of the event involves an emotion-recording portion of the brain, while those who were farther away involved other parts of the brain in the recollection, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

All of the 24 participants in the study were in Manhattan on 9/11. Three years later the recollections of those who were in lower Manhattan, closer to the World Trade Center, were more vivid, detailed, and confident than those who were farther away, said Elizabeth Phelps, a professor at New York University.

"The downtown subjects also reported seeing, hearing, and smelling what had happened. Subjects who were, on average, around midtown Manhattan reported experiencing the events second hand, such as on television or the Internet," explained Phelps.

Magnetic resonance imaging of their brains at the time of recall indicated that those closest to the scene involved the amygdala, a small portion of the brain involved in emotions. That was not the case for those farther away.

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-remembering-911,0,3746231.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

I suppose this bolsters the case for leaders visiting the scenes of disasters as quickly as possible - it really fixes ideas. Maybe if Bush would have gotten to New Orleans quicker...

fucking duh.