Remembering

What are the sounds that evoke emotions the most strongly for you?

Whenever I hear crickets, I get immediately and viscerally thrown into a certain mood that's connected strongly with certain memories. But it's not quite the same as hearing crickets and thinking of, say, camping one summer: it's more like the sound recalls an amalgamation of multiple memories and the emotions associated with all of them, blurred together into something equally composed of campfires, melancholy, darkness, solitude and perfect companionship at the same time.

Memories are complex, beautiful things. As a neurobio major, I get a lot of exposure to the functional side of memories - cases that proved the different types of memory, where those memories are "stored". At the broadest level, we have two categories of memories: implicit and explicit. Implicit memories can't be expressed verbally and include procedural memories, like how to ride a bike, as well as memories we associate with classical conditioning. Explicit memories can be communicated and are either semantic (facts) or episodic (tales of our lives). I wonder, though, where these visceral/emotional memories fall in this system. Maybe it's more accurate to call them them sensory memories.

I think there is a certain type of memory which you can describe, with difficulty, that stems from sensory stimuli, but doesn't match with a specific event or episodic story in your life. This type of memory is almost affect to affect matching, as in what you feel now maps to how you felt before, but maybe in multiple occasions. The smell of your elementary school. The sound of snowplows going by. A feeling-memory floods through your body and makes throws you into a different feeling. Many of my memories are like the synopsis of a book, or movie: "remember that time when..." and you recreate the scene, you see the people moving through it, you watch it play out. In comparison to the sensory memories, it's like describing a scene rather than experiencing it.

That ties into something I've wanted to convey for a very long time, but haven't attempted to because I don't think I can communicate it. But here goes. You're walking down a street in a city on a rainy day. You can experience this in two ways:

1. You think to yourself, "I am walking down this street on this rainy day."
2. You do not think, you simply walk down the street in the rain.

One is meta thinking, one is not. The first is oratory, descriptive, analytical and the second is experiential, sensory. To do the first requires distancing yourself from yourself but to do the second is to be yourself. People probably do not march down streets during rainstorms actively thinking about what they are doing but the principle can be extrapolated.

(Oh what you don't make pedantic and obscure lists about meta analysis for fun?)  Now I can't think of a way to return to a more concrete blog post. Curtain down! No transition!

Sensory/visceral memories are extremely fleeting and strangely, often sad for me. Are they for you? What stimuli send you into actually feeling what you have felt before?