Your memories of how you heard about 9/11 may well be wrong – we’ve been asking the same people what they remember for 25 years

Memory researchers who began surveying Americans days after the September 11 attacks report that after just one year, about 40% of people's details about how they learned of the attacks no longer matched their original accounts. People remembered being at work instead of on a train, or with a husband instead of a son, yet remained highly confident their memory was correct.

The errors, once set, tended to stay put. Whatever a person misremembered after a year became the fixed version they carried for a decade and presumably still carry today, twenty-five years on.

The researchers link this to flashbulb memories, the vivid recollections people form around emotional, socially shared events, and note the same pattern applies to memories of the JFK assassination, Princess Diana's death, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the last of which was remembered far more by Black Americans than white Americans in a 1970s survey.

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