Could you recognize your parents by their perfume? Do you remember what your grandparents' house smelled like? Did you feel afraid when you smelled a dentist's office? Our sense of smell, along with the other senses, is strongly connected to a multitude of memories, and here we'll discuss why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Types of memory<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There are different types of memory: muscle memory, which occurs when our body acts reflexively; working memory, which occurs when we perform tasks such as reading or calculations; long-term memory, which stores information for recall even years later; and others. The variations in these types of memory have been studied over time by different academic fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the field of psychology and neuroscience, sensory memory and emotional memory are manifested in a complementary way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sensory system stores information that reaches us through the senses in a matter of milliseconds and interprets it in order to associate it with something we know, but this information will hardly be retained in such a pronounced or prolonged way if it is not connected with some emotion since there are thousands or millions of stimuli that reach us through the senses every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That's where emotional memory comes in, which is able to keep in our head the image of a person, a place, an experience or a moment due to the strong impression it had on us and how it made us feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n