Senses and me

Given this site’s name, I think I need to expand on my personal interpretation of my senses and their effect on me. Most people seem to pay little attention to the nuances of sensory input: sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. I relish them all. I especially enjoy the opportunity to tease apart the layers of a particular smell, wade through the cacophony of sound from an orchestra to pick out a single clarinet, or delicately inspect an object’s features and surface with my hands. I’m sorry to use a cliché, but people need to stop and smell the roses, so to speak.

Today, I would like to speak about how closely tied senses are to memory. “Well, duh!” you mutter sarcastically. Senses are indeed how we perceive events that our brains eventually encode. Clearly, though, our brains do not encode each sense’s input at the time of an event. In fact, depending on the circumstances, our mind might focus on a sight or color if one were lost in the woods, single out the chlorine scent at a pool, or remember the sound of honking cars in a traffic jam. With each person, our experience is unique. The experts say that despite our rather weak olfaction capabilities, smell is the most closely linked to memory and to the recall of such.

As I mentioned, however, not every person is alike. Sound (in particular, music) has woven a rich fabric in my memory, closely associating melodies, classical movements, nuanced harmonies with events, people, and in particular, sights. I, for one, am not in the least surprised that sight and sound are so closely linked in my mind, as visual indicators are most often what you and I experience upon memory recall. I never cease to be amazed at the ease with which memories are triggered by sound. I love it! Recalling a particular day, a drive in the car, a sad moment: music accompanies so many memories. A mechanism clicks in my mind and a wave of euphoria overcomes me as images pass through me, set to music that was playing at the time. My strongest memories always come with music attached.

Well, that’s interesting, but why? Why not smell, like most other people? Actually, training. I had the opportunity to take fourteen years of piano lessons, playing in recitals and competitions. Clearly, by exercising my use of this sense in a repetitive fashion, I was able to increase the interconnectedness of the part of my brain responsible for understanding and interpreting sound as music (the temporal lobe, specifically the secondary auditory cortex). Areas very near here are also thought to be responsible for short-term memory or working memory. Interesting.

The vastness of the human mind and our capacity to store the complex variables our environment provides is astounding. Do not take it for granted and enjoy/focus on the nuances it provides. Also, try expanding one of your senses.