Wilkey,
I remember from my neuro-physiology that humans do not have a very good pain memory; otherwise no women would ever have more than one child. I'm wondering now about taste memory and how well developed it is, good, bad or indifferent. Can we really remember what something tasted like, accurately, a year or more ago? And are there any studies on taste memory that could allay my skepticism. There just seems to me, to be too many intervening variables especially with cigars. So many things can affect the taste. The time of day, what you've eaten and drank etc.
Thanks
Doc.
All very valid points, my good man.
Taste memory, like any other memory, is plastic and responds to pre and post priming*. And of course it's also liable to fading as well as modification through any number of mechanisms
(i.e., nostalgia). And so one might be led to believe that sensory memories might be so unreliable as to be of limited use or value. Clearly this is not the case as we are, each of us, walking testaments to a lifetime of accumulated sense memories.
When we talk about any individual's recollections of sense memories, we really do have to qualify the circumstances of their acquisition and recording in order to gauge how comparable observations over time might be. In my case, I take notes that cover not only the various sensory modalities
(taste, scent, appearance, texture) but also enough contextual information
(drink, food, time of day, what led me to smoke that cigar at that time) for me to reconstruct the experience in my mind. In other words, I do not rely exclusively on my internal memories which are based in the wetware between my ears and thus liable to distortion. I also employ specific journaling techniques to function as an adjunct, external supplement, one that is presumably unchanging over time.
I respect your skepticism, Doc. In fact, I am the first to apply that skepticism to any and all claims I care to make. It's the responsible thing to do and I feel it serves to "keep me honest" in the sense that I don't feel good about fooling myself and certainly wouldn't feel good about fooling others with questionable impressions.
Regarding studies of the persistence and malleability of sense memory, fuggedaboutit. The literature is so huge (though likely quite interesting) that I couldn't bring myself to get started on a literature search. It's a worthy idea though.
Wilkey
* priming, in this sense is used to mean a process whereby one's impression of a specific stimulus can be significantly modified by other stimuli presented either right before or right after the target stimuli. For example, I was at the Association for Psychological Sciences conference in Washington, D.C., this week and I saw a poster by researchers at BYU/Kalamzaoo College about interpretations of film characters' emotions as affected by the mood of the music (happiness, sadness, fear, anger) played either before of after you see the characters' faces. This group found that the same neutral expression could be reliably rated as displaying any one of the four emotions depending on which music they heard. The interesting part was that there was no music at all during the part of the clip where you saw the person. Only before or after when they appeared in the clip.
