One morning I was in the bathroom when I heard my grandmother speaking on the phone, I did not pay much attention then. To begin with, I was 11 or 12 years old, and I was spending summer holidays at my grandparents’. In fact, I remember these events not completely vividly, yet I can recall some parts with surprising clarity. Therefore, it can be accepted that such type of memories has a lot in common with usual memories, yet differ by its nature.Īs for a personal example of flashbulb memory, I will focus on my memory connected with the death of my grandfather. In addition, people tend to confuse flashbulb memories with time, so that a person cannot tell precisely the difference between the first and the second times they heard the news. What is more, despite being exceptional for people’s brain, such type of memories was proved to be declining with the same speed as commonplace memories (Hirst & Phelps, (2016), p. Such type of memories is often compared with a snapshot – one recalls a surprisingly detailed description of what happened to them and what surrounded them in a particular moment when they heard or read some news.Īlthough flashbulb memories represent many details about a particular time, studies show that these details tend to be rather inaccurate, especially if news or event was emotional. In other words, human memory is a mixture of processes that happen to the information which people consumed at some point in their past and consume during their life.Īs for flashbulb memories (or FBMs), they are special memories that a person has according to the moment in that they found out about shocking and consequential news or event (Mushtaq & Riaz, (2019), p. According to Feldman (2019), memory can be comprehended as “the process by which we encode, store, and retrieve information” (p. Firstly, it seems significant to define the notions of memory and flashbulb memories in particular.

Flashbulb memory