Counting Down the Days

June 9: A Sense

 Every sense serves a different purpose in relation to time.

Touch, of course, is the least evocative. It feels the most real in the moment, but it doesn't carry over well in the long run. That is because touch is a sense of the moment. Touch is for reminding you that you exist in the present and that the world around you is real.

Taste is somewhat nostalgic in that people grow attached to tastes. They remember their favorite meals and associate them with certain places and times. But when they finally have that meal again they are not overcome with nostalgia. They do not close their eyes and remember every moment when they have encountered that taste—they simply remember how good the meal is. Taste is not for going back in time. Rather, taste is for bringing the past forward.

Smell and hearing are similar to each other in that they both are the reverse of taste; Taste brings the past into the present, while smell and hearing drag the person into the past. But they are different in that they work with different kinds of memories. 

Smell paints in broad strokes. It works with general, cumulative memories rather than specific ones; Summers smell of sunscreen and chlorine and ozone. Fall smells of dry, spicy leaves and cold air. These sorts of memories build on each other year after year, and when you smell them again they all come rushing back at once.

Sounds don't tend to occur repeatedly in the way that smells do. When they do—the sound of a beach or rain against a window—they tend to behave similarly to smells. However, hearing usually deals with specific memories: singing a song in the car with friends, or perhaps the cracking snail shells from that trip to England in 2009.

Finally we have sight. Unlike any other sense, sight deals with the future. Sight is meant for collecting new information, finding new patterns. When one sees an old sight, they might think about the other times they saw it, but at the end of the day sight is always forward-looking (pun intended). The person will interpret it differently every time they see it, even when they are reminded of the past.

Unsurprisingly, sight is the strongest human sense.