Recall in Four Dimensions

As I was prepping to lead a “Family Holiday Tradition Storytelling” session, I naturally reflected a lot of on my own past holidays. We start these sessions by closing our eyes and going back in time to a past favorite holiday. I make purposefully vague suggestions to prompt participants to recall the holidays using all five of their senses. Everyone is always amazed at their level of recall detail!

Adults often over-rely on sight as we take in the world around us. For children, however, the world is so new and there’s so much they want to discover. They absorb new information about the world through all five of their senses. As they take in all this stimuli, they encode memories using all five senses. So, when, as adults, we are prompted to recall our childhood memories using all five senses, it’s amazing the specificity of detail that comes back!

In one session, I set the stage for the participants to go “back” to their childhood homes. When I prompted them to notice if there were any prominent aromas, one participant told me later, “I immediately smelled broccoli! I had forgotten we always had broccoli for [Christmas] dinner!”

I led myself through the visualization during my recent prep time, and suddenly, I smelled the potpourri balls my mom had my sisters and help with one Christmas. We pushed whole cloves into the skin of oranges creating patterns in the peels, and she put all of them in a decorative bowl on the dining room table. In my memories, I could smell the pungent aroma that wafted from the bowl. We only did that one year that I remember, and I haven’t thought about those potpourri balls in eons.

I also remembered how sharp the cloves were on our fingers as we pushed the points into the orange peel, and I felt the trickle of blood that dripped from one of my fingers as I poked relentlessly at one tough orange.

When I want to write about a particular event, I often do this exercise for myself before I start writing. It does help me to remember the event in three-dimensions, but it also brings many of my emotions at the time to the fore. The emotional resonance makes the memory four-dimensional, if that’s possible, and truly does give a depth to the experience that merely recalling the visuals of the past doesn’t evoke.

Visual cues are important to our memories and to our lives, but when you are exploring your past, don’t forget the treasure trove that you hold in sounds, textures, tastes, and aromas!