Wired has done an amazing piece on Margaret McKinnon, a researcher who survived a traumatic plane crash, then went on to become a leader in the field of memory and trauma. The article starts off with a harrowing recounting of the accident, but then goes on to explain her research around it, as she gathered other survivors from the crash to conduct a study on how people remember a disaster — one which she participated in.
And so it was that, in 2004, as a guinea pig in her own research, McKinnon found herself lying face-up inside of a magnetic resonance imaging machine, staring up at a mirror reflecting a projection of B-roll from Dateline NBC: A plane taking off from a runway. A map of the flight route. Clips from Chocolat interspersed…