Friday Musings: Return to Me
If you are a This Is Us fan, you know that last week’s episode was all about memories. I’m not giving anything away; I think we can safely expect that the focus of this entire season will have something to do with the things we remember. The concept of losing our memory in any way is a terrifying one. The life inside our heads is such an incredibly rich combination of all that we’ve learned, all that we’ve experienced, and all of the emotional reactions subsequently intertwined with both. This last component is a critical part of the equation. Almost every one of us can remember what the weather was like on the emotionally charged days when each of our children was born, but we might struggle to recall those same details from just last week. Scientists have learned that memories that have strong ties to feelings such as joy, shame, love, or grief are stored in a different part of the brain and tend to have the longest staying power. This emotional connection led me to wonder about how memories are tied to sensory experience, especially after writing last week’s post about how important the stimulation is that comes in through our five senses. A quick bit of research revealed that each sensory memory has its own name: visual is iconic, auditory is echoic, touch is haptic, smell is olfactory, and taste is gustatory. Because so much sensory input rains down upon us every day, these types of memories are not really built to be retained on their own. Most of them, in fact, will only last a few seconds. They are only moved into long term storage when they evoke a deep emotional response.
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