Deep Memories

When you smell something that "takes you back", as we say, you're experiencing the hardwired memories from the specific moment you first encountered an odor...maybe that flower reminds us of the summers of our youth; maybe the smell of chlorine reminds us swimming pools. This is not an unfamiliar concept. What's happening is that the olfactory bulb in the brain is close to, and actually inter-wired with, both the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning. Having a sensory organ's processor that intertwined with those two specific members of the limbic system causes those "takes you back" moments.

While those moments tend to be confined to the olfactory sense, I have experienced similar memory moments with visual cues. For me, and most people of my generation, instead of paintings or pictures, these cues are probably from television and film. Specifically for me, the opening credits of Danger Mouse, or the opening of You Can't do That on Television tend to trigger childhood memories.

And then another visual cue I found triggered those same types of memories. Actually my brother Dan found the source, photographed it, and sent it to me. When we were kids, the local Fox affiliate was on the UHF dial, on channel 40. What follows is a picture of the affiliate's call logo, which we remember quite well, and anyone around the age of thirty growing up in Sacramento, Stockton, or Modesto might recognize with similar nostalgia.

Good find, my eagle-eyed brother.