Amazingly, the passengers walked away unscathed.
So scientists studied their brains by using MRI scanners, Yahoo! News reports.
The researchers asked eight of the survivors to watch news footage of their near-fatal crash and then talk about the event while they were inside a function magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The scientists also showed the passengers footage from the 9/11 attacks along with a neutral event to see how their brains responded, Science Alert reports.
While the passengers relived this traumatic experience, a network of regions inside the brain — areas known to be associated in emotional memory — lit up, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and midline frontal and posterior regions. When they just talked about neutral events, this didn’t happen.
“This traumatic incident still haunts passengers regardless of whether they have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or not,” lead author Daniela Palombo of Baycrest Health Science in Canada in a press release. “They remember the event as though it happened yesterday, when in fact it happened almost a decade ago (the scans were conducted in 2011). Other more mundane experiences tend to fade with the passage of time, but trauma leaves a lasting memory trace.”
Fourteen years after the near fatal crash, Elisa Benard, a passenger on the flight, can recall the accident as if it had just happened. She can remember hearing the people in back of her praying quietly. She can remember the fear on the flight attendant’s face, and the words of the pilot telling the passengers to brace themselves for impact, The Star reports.
She was 39, and she thought of her husband and stepdaughter, and other family members as well, and she resolved that this was not her time.
“I am not going to die today,” she told herself.
Nearly 12 days after the crash-landing in the Azores, when she returned to Canada, Benard was not in a good place. She was now experiencing symptoms of PTSD — disturbed sleep, crying bouts, and a fear of being left alone.
Then, only one week later, the Sept. 11 terror attacks occurred. That, Benard said, “sent me into a complete tailspin.”
“I developed survivor’s guilt.” She was thinking about all who had lost loved ones. She didn’t begin to heal until after she entered the first phase of the Baycrest study, all those years later.
Other survivors suffered this as well, and it was another interesting facet of the study,Yahoo! News reports. When the passengers were shown footage of the 911 attacks, their brains lit up in the same way that they did when they were reliving their own experiences.
The researchers then tested people who hadn’t experienced a personal trauma by showing them the same 9/11 footage and found that their brains didn’t illicit the same response.
This suggested to the researchers that the people involved in the Air Transat accident possessed a “carryover effect” that affected the way they viewed future events.
It’s thought that this is the first study to look at such a large group of individuals who have experienced exactly the same trauma at the same time, and it’s hoped this will give scientists a better understanding of the effects of traumatic events on the human brain.
