This is how your memories emerge at the most unexpected moment, thanks to the stimuli perceived by the 5 senses

You must have already gone through something similar: when crossing the street with someone who is wearing the same perfume as an ex-boyfriend, memories of the facts experienced with that person at the time immediately arise. Or else you walk past a shop window and see the same teapot your grandmother used to serve tea. At the time, those special moments that you lived together come to mind.

Thanks to some people who dedicated themselves to studies on mind and memory, like Aristotle, we know today that the senses play an important role in the process of creating memories in all human beings.

O awesome.club wants to reveal how each human sense plays a fundamental role in people’s memory.

Scents play an important role in creating memories, as the olfactory bulb acts as a direct intermediary between smells and the brain, specifically the hippocampus, which is in charge of dealing with memories. According to a study carried out by researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memorization at MIT, the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and amygdala are responsible for storing memories associated with emotions.

The relationship between smells and memories is so strong that practically any odor can generate a brain reaction, leading to the emergence of a link between present and past, making us remember something simple, like the perfume used by our mother, the smell of home where we spent our childhood and even the aroma that came out of our favorite dish when we were children.

Touch produces more direct and spontaneous memories related to moments, people or textures of things that we have already touched thanks to the nerve receptors present in the hands. It is one of the senses that least interacts with memory, but it is possible that, when combined with vision, it creates great connections with the past.

Craftsmen use tactile memory to know when the material for their creations is ready. That is, when working with clay, for example, these professionals use their hands not only to work the product, but also to feel the exact point to start modeling, based on their own experience. Cooks, on the other hand, use tactile memory to know if the ingredients they work with are in ideal condition.

Most people tend to be visual about everything. So much so that they need to see even the smallest detail to be able to understand and learn things better or even to be moved. Thus, vision has an essential function in memory, especially in the short term, keeping for a brief period the sensory stimuli that occur in the brain.

In reality, it is possible that, when seeing images of places, people or colors, we can immediately remember a trip to the beach, someone who caught our attention a lot or even the color of the room where we spent our childhood. Seeing something and remembering a related moment for a few minutes is also a type of sense-related remembering.

Sounds also have the ability to produce feelings such as sadness, happiness and discomfort due to the fact that the brain works together with the hippocampus to process and store a melody as a sound memory.

That’s why memory is so closely linked to music, so that when listening to a song or some other sound, different memories can arise, such as the night we spent singing our favorite songs while trying to recover from a disappointment. For the same reason, we can hear the voice of a stranger and confuse him with a friend, due to the similarity of timbre.

We all love to eat and indulge in the pleasure caused by food on the taste buds. In a way, food plays an important role in memory, because thanks to it, moments are created that are unlikely to be forgotten, given the strong connection that exists between flavors and the way they are processed in the brain.

There are dishes known to provoke sensations such as calm and joy, so much so that they are difficult to forget. Grandma’s recipes, that soup we have when we’re recovering from the flu or the delicacies prepared at Christmas are flavors that are stored in the brain. And, when we try something similar, the memory of those dishes comes back to mind.

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