Imagine being held up at gunpoint. Do you trust you could remember the perpetrator’s face? The gun? Or would you have a better recollection of how loud the birds were chirping at that moment?
“The memory does not operate like a videotape machine faithfully recording every single detail,” said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Remembering Trauma.”
“The thing that is happening is that you’re focusing on the most dangerous thing,” he said. “That is the function of fear: to alert you to imminent threats.”
[For more on this story by Sandra E. Garcia, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...ewitness-events.html]
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