On 24 August 2001 Air Transat Flight 236, carrying 306 passengers and crew from Toronto to Lisbon, hit trouble. Over the Atlantic Ocean, there was a fuel leak, then a power outage, and Captain Robert Piché and First Officer Dirk de Jager decided to make an emergency landing. But just after announcing the plane was about to go into the water, Piché spotted a runway in the Azores, the volcanic islands about 900 miles off the coast of Portugal.
Warning his passengers to brace, Piché aimed for the landing strip, and the plane hit it twice before the crew could bring the 200-ton aircraft to a halt. Miraculously, nobody died.
In the years since, the survivors have become a sort of lab experiment for researchers trying to understand the long-term consequences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study was proposed by Dr Margaret McKinnon, an associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada and a passenger on Flight 236. She developed PTSD after the harrowing landing.
In an initial experiment conducted three years after the traumatic incident, 15 passenger-participants – seven with PTSD – completed a memory test about the flight. Participants were also asked to recall two other events: their memories of the events of 9/11 and a neutral autobiographical event. These two other memories would serve as comparison points and help researchers understand how trauma affects memory.
"There were two main findings from that study," says Brian Levine, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and one of the researchers on the project. First, all the passengers remembered a remarkably large amount of detail from the Air Transat incident. The second was that the people with PTSD tended to veer off-topic about the near-crash, recalling additional irrelevant information, compared with the people without PTSD. Those with PTSD's memory of 9/11 and the neutral event were also cluttered with superfluous details.
Nearly a decade on, eight passengers agreed to return for a second chapter of the study. This group, who had a brain scan, ranged in age from thirties to sixties and included some diagnosed with PTSD. As the participants recalled the near-plane crash, emotional memory regions of their brains lit up – the amygdala, hippocampus, and midline frontal and posterior regions.
"The amygdala is involved in emotion, the hippocampus is important to memory. The posterior regions play a role in visual imagery and the prefrontal cortex is for self-referential processes" says lead author of the study Dr Daniela Palombo, a post-doctoral researcher at Boston University School of Medicine.
The participants' brain activity when discussing 9/11 was similar to what had occurred during their memories of the near-plane crash. These patterns were not evident in people who hadn't been involved in a near-plane crash, even when they recalled 9/11.
"People who have observed trauma might see the world differently," says Palombo. She believes the emergency landing scare may have changed the way the brains of those passengers process new information. Following trauma, we may be more sensitive to painful life experiences, Palombo suggests, and so we view the world through new lenses.
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