How Do Senses Affect Memory?

Smell and Memory Recall

• Smells, sounds and tastes can transport you back to a moment where you experienced the same sense before. This is how members of the animal kingdom work out connections when confronted with stimuli. In humans, your nose sends signals to your olfactory cortex in your brain so you can recognize the smell. From there, the information travels to limbic system of your brain, which links that smell to past events, bringing your memories to the forefront of your mind.

Sight and Recognition

• Sight is one of the senses humans rely on heavily, but it is not perfect when it comes to memory recall. You know this if you have ever struggled to recall the face of someone you meet again. There are times when your sense of sight serves you well, though. Information from your ocular organs travels to your temporal lobe, leaving an imprint on your brain. This information is what you use to recognize people and movements. Without this information, you wouldn't be able to recognize anyone you know by sight alone.

Memory and Touch

• Touch is an important sense that you use from birth to understand the world around you. Sensations from your skin stay with you in the form of impulses. For example, when you experience something painful like a burn, your mind will immediately associate the thing that burned you with pain. From that point, you will condition yourself to avoid that pain. You also do the same for pleasurable sensations like softness. The signals from your skin travel to the insula cortex in your brain and stay there for future reference.

Sound Recognition

• The human mind has the ability to recognize tune, rhythm and wording of a song after a great amount of time without hearing it. You may be familiar with these phenomena if you can recall old children's rhymes immediately when you hear them again. Not only does your brain remember the information from the songs well, but it also remembers voices well. For example, you may go a long time without hearing a certain voice, but you can recognize it immediately when you hear it again. Information attained from sound stores itself in the auditory cortex of the brain.