Do you have the power to see with your eyes closed?
Can you hear, in silence, the voice of someone you miss? Have you ever traveled in the past feeling a special smell? Here are some of the powers of your sensory memory, which uses your five senses to capture, hold and recover your world. Discover in this article what is the sensory memory, the different types that exist (echoic, iconic, tactile, olfactory, taste) and how to improve it.
Sensory memory During every moment of an organism's life, sensory information is being taken in by sensory receptors and processed by the nervous system. Sensory information is stored in sensory memory just long enough to be transferred to short-term memory. wikipedia
Types of sensory memory
Our five senses conform to five types of sensory memory. Each has the power to recognize and remember perceived impressions and their importance at the moment they were perceived.
- Echoic or auditory sensory memory The main function of echo or auditory sensory memory is to capture sound and auditory experiences in order to extend their presence so that they can be captured by other response systems. This type of memory may be able to prolong the presence of a sound up to 10 seconds after it has finished. Sometimes we ask our interviewer to repeat his question, and when he does, we realize that in the end, we had heard the question. We were not aware of listening to the question, but our ears did their job well, just like our auditory memory, which sends us the information a few seconds later.
Iconic or visual sensory memory The iconic type of sensory memory (or visual memory ) intervenes in the register of visual sensory experiences. Our eyes work like photographic cameras that continually make snapshots. This system prolongs the duration of each captured representation for a few moments so that it can be linked to other images. The ability to extend the iconic memory is shorter than that of the echo memory, which can prolong the presence of an image around 250 milliseconds. This patentee prevents the system from overloading itself. Sometimes we store these images in our higher memory, unconsciously and unintentionally. Imagine that we are traveling on the subway for 40 minutes. During this journey, a person is sitting on the seat in front of us, to which we do not pay attention. The next day we find this same person at the supermarket and we recognize him. Snapshots taken in the subway the day before were processed and sent to other memory systems.
Sensory touch memory The sensory memory of the touch type allows the recording of information on the characteristics of the objects we touch and the sensations that it awakens in us. Bliss, Crane, Mansfield, and Townsendv (1966) have discovered in their studies the differences between congenital blind, late-sighted and those with normal vision regarding the capacity of this type of sensory memory. These differences reflect the great ability to improve this tactile sensory memory system through practice. Suppose we should take something in our closet, but the light has been cut off and our room is completely in the dark. We will certainly recognize most of our clothes by touching them. Even though we have never intentionally paid attention to feeling our clothes without seeing them, our tactile sense to do our work and our tactile sensory memory as well, so we remember the texture of our clothes without having it desired.
Olfactory sensory memory Olfactory sensory memory records information about the odors we perceive. Our sense of smell has the ability to distinguish a wide variety of flavors and detects the greatest variation of stimulation of all our senses. Moreover, he is able to connect the different situations and to retain his links in a prolonged way in time. Imagine we have a meal with several friends at home. The next day we find a jacket at the entrance that someone apparently has forgotten. We do not know who she belongs to, because her owner removed her before entering the living room so we did not see her. Feeling the jacket is our best resource to find out who it belongs to, as we surely store information about the smell of our friends unwittingly in our memory through our olfactory sensory memory.
Taste sensory memory The taste sensory memory participates in the capture of tastes, their subsequent classification and their recording in our memory. The sensations we experience the first time we perceive a taste stimulation usually mark our memory in a quasi-permanent way. In addition, taste sensory memory tends to create strong bonds with emotions, such as olfactory sensory memory, which allows us to remember it for a longer time. Often, tasting a food transports us to another time or situation concrete. Like tactile sensory memory, this type of taste memory is developed much through practice, which explains, for example, the ability of tasters to recognize different tastes. Suppose we spend some time in Germany and get used to drinking a certain brand of beer. When we come home, we stop eating it. After several years we find it in our local supermarket. While drinking it, we will certainly remember our experience in Germany, and sensations that are not necessarily directly related to beer.
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Sensory memory runs much like a transportation system, it is the initial level of your memory. Any memory that enters the brain must go through the processing center, or hub, which determines what will proceed and what will get thrown out. Because there is so much activity it is not able to hold anything there for more than a couple seconds before it needs to be passed along.
Finally, to complete the process of sensory memory, it is fundamental to develop our attention.
Poor attention makes perception difficult, and without good perception, it is difficult to create memories. It is true that, as we have mentioned above, that our senses capture a large number of stimulations without our being aware of it, but this is not always the case. Many people who suffer from a deficit of attention complain of having a bad memory. The problem is usually that they are unable to complete the steps necessary for their memory to remember what surrounds them. Seeing is not the same as watching, nor hearing the same thing as listening. By putting more intentionality in our sensory processes we can improve the results of this type of memory.
Thank you very much for reading this article, if something is not clear to you, if you have a question about sensory memory, or if you want to share your personal experiences, feel free to leave your comments below.
Citation
Sensory memory: → educationknow.com
Sensory Memory Is Your Brain Hub → memorise.org
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