Sixth sense

They’ll tell you that we only have the five senses (sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch). Culturally the “sixth sense” is often used to represent perception of things that we can not grasp with the standard five, things like precognition or the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead. I think we do have a sixth sense but that everyone is wrong about what it is.

The sixth sense is memory.

I smelled my ex-girlfriend on the street the other day. It wasn’t really her; in fact, the woman who smelled like her looked nothing like Aimee. Yet, one whiff of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door perfume and all the memories, both good and bad, came rushing back.

There was the time at the Copa in New York (yes, that Copa) during the 25th anniversary of Stonewall celebrations when the crowd parted and there she was, standing at the top of the stairs leading to the dance floor scanning the room for me her face lighting up in a huge smile when she finally saw me.

There was the time we decided to stay in, order pizza and watch a movie. She fell asleep with me spooned against her back, my arm around her waist, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand. The movie was Orlando and for reasons I still don’t fully understand I don’t think there was a time during our relationship when I loved her more than right at that moment.

Then there was the time I got called by the ex’s name in a particularly awkward situation. Yeah, that left a mark and I’ll definitely never forget the way the linens smelled, suffused with the scent she’d dab behind her ears and on her wrists.

Memory is an amalgam, like love, made up of both perception from the senses and interpretation based on previous experience, knowledge, wish fulfillment, desire, and self-delusion (OK, maybe only love includes that last one; a much longer debate I think). Sound, music in particular, has the ability to take you right back to a specific scenario complete with feelings and physical reactions.

The song that was on during an especially memorable romantic encounter or the one that was on the radio on the way home from the funeral of someone you loved deeply can bring back feelings that you thought you’d processed, forgotten, left behind, and bring them back with the same force they had when you first experienced them.

Yet, the song itself, the actual recording, has not changed. More interestingly, that same song can mean something completely different to the person sitting right next to you.

True, certain musical cues spur certain neuro-emotional responses – minor keys indicate sadness while consistent use of low tones trigger the fight or flight reaction – and the lyrics to a song can tell a story or set a mood but if you’ve associated that song with a particular point in time or event that mood goes beyond the text itself and becomes something more through your interpretation.

Smell, obviously, can do the same thing. Associative memories of cooking can take you back to pre-conscious memory childhood. One of my mother’s earliest memories, in fact, is sitting under the kitchen table while my grandmother made spaghetti sauce and listened to Madame Butterfly on the radio. My mother guesses she was probably about 2.5 years-old at the time.

The smell of baking sugar cookies always makes me think of Christmas. I can not slice a lime without at least brushing up against the memory of stealing fresh ones off a tree planted in the courtyard of a local office complex in the neighborhood where we lived in northern California when I was 9 years-old.

The smell of fresh bread on the air makes me think not of “Mom” and “home” but of summer early mornings when the sun shines bright with the promise of heat to come and new leaves turn on the tree branches because it is in the early summer that the industrial bakery in the neighborhood where I now live switches from day baking to overnight baking.

Let’s not even think about what spending my childhood growing up in the same neighborhood as a Frito plant did for my view of snack foods (thanks, I’ll skip the Frito pie). And, of course, there is the aforementioned perfume example.

Is the same true of color or texture, things that are perceived by sight or touch? Even though I don’t have many (and more to the point, none that I care to share here) memories of that type I would venture to say yes. It only stands to reason that information, text, taken in through those senses at particular points in time could have the same affect as smell or sound.

I’ve been avoiding a lot of my CD collection lately for a variety of reasons, chief among them is that much of what is in it reminds me of a friendship that I still feel I am on the verge of losing. It’s been nearly a year since my uncle died yet I can’t bring myself to watch Casablanca which was his favorite movie and one that I enjoy both as a movie in itself and as a film geek but also because it has always reminded me of him.

The question then becomes, how to reform these memories? Is it a simple matter of associating those cues with new memories?

I don’t think so. I want to hope so, but because it involves both external and internal elements, memory is a slippery thing, uncontrollable yet malleable at the same time. Something to think about as I try to be more careful how deeply I inhale in public from now on.