You walk through the grocery store past the meat section. You see chicken, beef, pork-some frozen, some cooked. And then you see it, a freshly cooked warm turkey. As the scent hits you you’re taken back to memories of Thanksgiving night years ago. Every moment of the memory is clear as a crystal. Your senses are directly linked to your memory, as recent studies show.

Studies done at the National Institute of Neuroscience in Turin, Italy were done to test this theory. A sound was played for a group of rats and right after they would get shocked. Every time the sound was played the rats would freeze, showing their association of the sound with their memory of getting shocked. A small group from those rats had lesions created in their auditory cortex, and those rats would not freeze up as often when hearing the sound.

Your sense of smell is thought to be the strongest sense when it comes to your memory. Whether it’s the scent of peppermint reminding you of Christmas, or the scent of alcohol reminding you of your first blackout, scents can remind us of many experiences. This has many practical uses too and can help to treat anxiety disorders and other things. It could be through using sprays that remind an individual of good memories or listening to music (a method of coping used by many already), there are many ways we can use this information to do good.

The ability for the human brain to maintain vivid memories, is one of the many factors that separates us from animals, and these vivid memories can be triggered by our senses. Our ability to feel certain emotions tied to an experience with a certain sense changes the way we act in certain situations. For example, the comforting scent of your room might automatically make you feel drowsy due to your memories of always smelling that same scent before, during, and after sleeping.

In conclusion, our senses are utterly important to our lives, due to their ability to remind us of certain memories, and manipulate our brains into feeling a certain way, and using this information we can develop many ways to alter the way we act.

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