ABOVE: People in Paris placed flowers to commemorate victims of the terror attacks in November 2015.
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November 13, 2015, will be remembered in France and around the world as the day that Paris fell under attack by a group of terrorists. More than 130 people died. Many others survived to carry on lives in the wake of this categorically traumatic experience. “When you listen to the reports . . . of the survivors, it was shocking,” says Karen Ersche, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. “It was gruesome. It was worse than a horror film.”
The head of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the time, Alain Fuchs, wrote a letter imploring researchers to respond to the attacks with science. After reading the letter, cognitive neuroscientist Pierre Gagnepain felt moved to do something. Although he didn’t study post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), his work was ...
