Close your eyes. Think about the winter holidays of your past. What triggers your memories? What smells, sounds, tastes, touches, and sights come to mind? Do you smell cinnamon from cookies baking or the scent of fir boughs? Do you hear Christmas music? Do you see your family gathered to watch a favorite holiday movie together? Of course, not all memories that are triggered by the winter holidays are pleasant. Still, some memories will be nostalgic and sweet. What senses connect you to your happiest winter holiday memories?
In the article, “The Memories Evoked by Our Five Senses”, the authors share, “We have all experienced a smell, a sound, a taste, or an image that sends us to a world of memories.
The senses can very clearly and touchingly evoke memories from our past, freeing positive emotions like pleasure or happiness, or negative ones like fear or anger. A song can remind us of a special moment with a special person, or of a trip with friends. A landscape can take us back to the memories of our adolescence and what we experienced in a certain place.
Of the five senses, smell is one of the most powerful when it comes to evoking memories. A simple odor can unleash a cascade of feelings, the aroma of coffee, the smell of wet grass, the fragrance of perfume. They shoot our imagination off and they are capable of transporting us instantly to another place and another time. Smell is the sense that is most closely connected to the hippocampus, one of the brain structures responsible for our memory . It is also connected to the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. The rest of our senses (sight, hearing, taste, or touch) have to travel down a long path to reach the parts of the brain responsible for our memory and emotions.
This is why smell can awaken very vivid memories and reproduce sensations that contain that mixture of sensitivity and sadness that we call nostalgia.
A study performed by psychologist Silvia Álava called “Smells and Emotions” showed that people remember 35% of what they smell and only 5% of what they see. 1,000 people of both sexes between the ages of 25 and 45 years old participated in this study, and they arrived to the conclusion that memory is capable of perceiving up to 10,000 distinct aromas, but it is only capable of recognizing 200 smells.
According to the study, when we smell a perfume, that scent is registered in the brain, but it is also registered with an association to an emotion that we are feeling at that very moment, so when we evoke the smell, the emotion will also come back to us. Returning to the study, 83% of the participants confirmed that happy moments were called back with certain smells and 46.3% recognized that enjoying a familiar scent again influences them more than seeing an object that brought them memories” (qtd. in https://exploringyourmind.com/memories-evoked-five-senses/#google_vignette). The rest of the article explores research on how the other senses evoke memories for you. Fascinating stuff.
Dr. Andrew Budson researched and explained “…how multi sensory cues can shape and strengthen our recollections of the past” (https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/harnessing-senses-improve-memory) in the article, “Harnessing the Senses to Improve Memory.” Here’s what he encountered: “How do the senses shape memory formation? As long as we’re awake and alert, we have information always coming in through our senses. And there are parts of the brain — the hippocampus and some structures related to it — that are taking this information in and potentially getting ready to store it.
Now, we’ll form a memory for only the parts that we pay attention to. If we pay attention to sensory information, then the hippocampus records that information and we’re able to remember it for the next, say, couple of days. And if it’s something important to us, it can be tagged as important while the memory is being created over the next week or so, which can generate a long-lasting memory that can be stored and retrieved over weeks, months, or years.
The way this works is that our senses generate electrochemical activity — brain cells firing, typically in the cerebral cortex. And there are links from the cerebral cortex to the hippocampus, which takes separate sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, and feelings and binds them together into something coherent. And another part of the hippocampus gives this information an index of sorts so it can be found later.
I recently joined a tea-of-the-month club. Right now, I’m having some black tea from China with a very distinctive smell and flavor. And I feel confident that if I have this same tea in a couple of months, I’ll be able to pull up not only the memory of that tea, but also of this conversation, because my hippocampus is binding together the taste of the tea and the other things happening right now as I drink it” (qtd. in https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/harnessing-senses-improve-memory).
What senses connect you to your happiest winter holiday memories? Please share your stories, thoughts, insights, and suggestions by either commenting below this post if you are reading this on social media, or, if you are reading this through your email subscription, please share, by emailing me, at reimaginelife22@gmail.com.
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