Extraordinary Memories for Exceptional Events: Essays in Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

The Apollo 11 moon landings. The Challenger space shuttle disaster. The 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks. Depending on your age, there’s a good chance you have a particularly vivid and highly detailed memory of at least one of these events. At the same time, your memory for the days immediately preceding, and following, these events is probably poor. Why is it that we are able to remember momentous events better than mundane events? And just how accurate are these exceptional memories that we create? These are the central questions addressed in ‘Extraordinary Memories for Exceptional Events’, by Stephen R. Schmidt, a timely consideration of the vast body of theoretical and empirical evidence that underpins our understanding of memory for exceptional events.