Memory of the Senses

It is not possible for the mind to produce information about the physical world without the senses. A physical connection is established with the information coming from the outside world through neurons, and it reaches the hippocampus, amygdala and other structures of the nervous system through cortical connections. Having knowledge of what and where an object is in order to understand the world and structure the environment is possible by filtering and coding some of the enormous amount of data through the senses. By smelling, seeing, tasting and feeling, stimuli are interpreted, coded and grouped in the brain, information is stored and reactions are formed. The human brain uses these sensory records to obtain the most accurate result from uncertain and competing data coming from the environment. Sensory inputs reach the cortex to create a specific representation through five basic systems: vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. These systems are indispensable and of particular importance in the perception of the physical world, and each new stimulus creates new symbols, enabling the organism to obtain data about the outside world. The inputs are analyzed and coded, fed by past judgments and teachings, and finally a series of interpretations about the outside world emerges. This process requires a rather complex series of operations. Neuroanatomy classifies the brain into four basic parts. Although the lobes work together, a certain region stands out in some mental processes. Thalamus is the structure that manages cognitive processes where data from all other sensory organs except smell are controlled. While the hippocampus is the center where the process of content analysis of the information received, comparison with past experiences, and storage of information is carried out, the Amygdala is the area responsible for recognizing and expressing the senses. Senses are an economic tool in developing perceptions and attitudes towards events, people, objects and the outside world. It facilitates human adaptation to the environment, and the organism has the opportunity to respond very quickly to vital information, especially because it selects critical information that will help survival and records it more strongly in memory. The existing stored information uses perception to provide the best inference that is efficient, error-free and compatible with the situation experienced. It is suitable for the changing structure of the physical world and changes the organism. It seems that some systems have come to the fore to take into account the needs of humans. In this context, we encounter important signs that the sense of smell has evolved to increase the chance of survival and has maintained its highly developed structure until today. Compared to other senses, the olfactory system is more economical to collect information about the environment thanks to its direct connections with metacognition. offers an opportunity. In this context, the neural pathways and mechanisms that mediate the olfactory process differ significantly from the anatomical organization of other sensory systems. While sensation is the process of converting physical energy reaching the sensory organs from the outside world into neural energy, perception corresponds to the activity of interpreting sensory input and covers a higher level of cognition and a more complex process compared to sensation. Therefore, we can say that senses and perception are in a relationship of interaction and transfer. People's subjective designs, the tendency to group and integrate stimuli, impressions obtained from past experiences, and the presence of mental health pathologies such as trauma and depression shape perception. Perception is greatly affected by past experiences, beliefs, cultural values, learned information, presuppositions, and the initial structuring of the brain. It is also affected by immediate factors such as smell. New incoming sensory data restructures the perception process. Data, thoughts, perceptions and experiences collected from the environment through sensory organs are stored in memory for reuse. Materials that need to be remembered are remembered by scanning the long-term memory store and finding the necessary information. Memory, controlled by a distributed network system, is a very complex system that provides a database for metacognitive activities by interacting with sensory systems and perception processes. Research has shown behavioral findings revealing the connection between smell, emotion and memory, and neurological findings showing the neural connections that distinguish the sense of smell from other senses. -shows that the images overlap. Apart from visual and auditory mechanisms, there is evidence that the sense of smell is very effective in automatic processes. Behavioral changes seen in scented environments Most of it occurs automatically. The sense of smell is thought to be the oldest system that humans have, which is evolutionarily preserved. Thanks to the biological simplicity of the olfactory system and the anatomical connections it establishes with metacognition, the sense of smell is a very fast tool for gathering information about the environment. Olfactory experience is experienced primarily as hedonic or aesthetic. When the organism perceives a scent coded with a known and pleasant experience, it develops a different reaction than when it perceives an unknown scent. The amygdala, a part of our brain associated with emotions, is directly related to our sense of smell. For example, the amygdala shows higher activation to unknown odor. Amygdala ensures that sensory content is stored more vividly by the hippocampus. It is accepted that the memory encoded with smell consists of more vivid memories thanks to these cortical connections. In their study, Linda Buck and Richard Axel discovered the gene family consisting of 1000 genes encoding the olfactory receptor proteins of mice. Olfactory sensitivity allows the discrimination of many more odor molecules than the existing olfactory receptors. Olfactory system pheromones enable interspecies communication, stimulating instinctive behaviors such as hormonal changes, choosing a suitable mate, and aggression, enabling people to make decisions and behave in accordance with the environment. This is where smells rule our lives. One of the most important areas: Mood. In fact, we wouldn't be wrong if we said that scent is one of the main elements that shape culture and society. This idea was previously expressed by scholars working in the field of cultural anthropology and everyday history research. Scents have attracted the attention of writers and poets throughout history. Researchers state that scents began to be included in literature from the 16th century. Since the 2000s, the phenomenon of smell has begun to be examined with an interdisciplinary approach both in the West and in Russia. Smell research conducted within the framework of literary science in Russia has gained momentum in these years and has created a separate research field defined as "olfactory literary science". The two-volume "Arom" published in Russia in 2003 The study titled "аты и запахи в культуре" introduced the research of Russian and European psychologists, biologists, anthropologists and scent experts, and we see that it is the first comprehensive study in this field in Russia. Smell as an aesthetic concept in Russian literature was introduced by Ivan Bunin. In his story "Antonov Apples" published in 1900, Bunin first showed that smell revives people's memories and creates the world of the past in memory. Story; It begins with the lines "... I remember the first days of sunny autumn (...) I remember the large, golden apple orchard, dried and sparse, the paths between the maples, the faint smell of fallen leaves and the smell of Antonov apples inhaled with the scent of honey and autumn freshness." Smells bring to life the sounds and images in the narrator's memories. The place becomes weak against time, but the smell keeps the places in the memories alive. In world literature, one of the most famous works in which the power of smell is demonstrated is Marcel Proust's novel "In Search of Lost Time". Marcel Proust, one of the most important stylistic writers of French and world literature, constructs the lives of hundreds of characters in his In Search of Lost Time series, which is the product of his fourteen years of effort, based on the cosmic and psychological perception of time. It examines humans within the unique movement of time. This novel, which shows what perceptions and habits can create with a madeleine, has significantly changed the literary understanding of modern times. The character, who will be known as the narrator in the first volume of Proust's novel, dips a madeleine into tea, captures his past in the taste of the madeleine, and the rest of the novel explains the cyclicality of time. and passes through the existence of the characters in time. The novel must be recreated in the eyes of the reader, and time is twisted, disassembled and recreated within the seven-volume series. This creation takes all the characters to different points than they are in real life, throughout the novel there are flashbacks to the present of the novel, and events are reshaped according to the effects of the twisted time. The room in the Grand Hotel, which reminds one of the madeleine dipped in tea and the narrator's grandmother, is created by the chronology of interrupted time. We can give this as an example. The narrator's remembrance of the changes in his life affects everyone, including the main character, and reveals the change of events over time. The fact that the room in Balbec creates two different emotions in two separate visits is a good example of the cyclicality of the space over time. We read that the journey in memory made with the madeleine cake dipped in tea is stimulated by the addition of feelings. While it is now known that some foods have flavor properties such as persistence and mouth fullness that cannot be explained by the five basic tastes alone, and that they increase the retronasal aroma sensation, one of the most striking parts of the novel related to this subject is a paragraph in which Proust describes that human memory exists thanks to the senses of smell and taste: what is there? When nothing remains of the distant past, after men have died and objects have vanished, only smell and taste, which are more fragile, but longer lasting, more immaterial, more permanent, more faithful, will last longer, like souls. "They continue to remember, wait, hope (…) carry the gigantic structure of memory on the ruins of everything else." Opinions about whether they will exist forever in need of each other have created an independent discipline that brings with it original and unanswered questions. Some smells really remind us of something. Why do we experience the reflections of the smell in our memory rather than experiencing it as it is? So, are we always aware of what smells remind us of? Or do scents touch us in our daily lives without us realizing it? The answer to this question is “Yes!” we can say. It can even be said that smells “rule our lives” even while we are asleep. In a study conducted by Ritter, Strick, Bos, Van Baaren, and Dijksterhuis (2012), a scent was sprayed into the environment while some information to be considered was presented to the participants. In other words, information and smell are paired. By presenting the same scent again while the participants were sleeping at night, the creativity task performed the next day (the right to think about the topic)

Read: 0

yodax