Nearly eighty years later, social psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term flashbulb memories to characterize these vivid, detailed memories for surprising and important events.35 The name, by analogy to photography, reflects the idea that the details surrounding surprising and emotionally significant events are preserved in the instant they occur: Events meriting permanent storage are imprinted in the brain just as a scene is imprinted onto film. According to Brown and Kulik, the memory is “very like a photograph that indiscriminately preserves the scene in which each of us
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