It's because while words can excite the imagination, a picture stimulates the visual cortex and provides a much more clear understanding of the scene. The imagination is a function of the higher brain. The senses though, and instinct, are functions of the lower, primal brain. When our senses recieve direct stimuli, the effect the stimuli has on us can be far more powerful because it affects the part of us that is at our deepest core.
We remember in sensory layers, and in orders of significance.
When we think of an old lover, what do we immediately process? A visual memory. We remember what they look like. We remember their face, their body, their smile, their eyes, what they wore, and things they did, recorded in silence. What do we remember next? An aural memory. We remember what they sounded like. We remember their voice, their laugh, and conversations.
Beyond these two sense memories though, the others are difficult to consciously remember. Why? Because as humans, we don't rely on these senses to survive and so we don't record these sense memories. A dog would remember things by the way they smell. My neighbor's dog, gone blind years ago, remembers me by smell. Other animals would remember things by the way they feel, or taste.
Yet, buried in our subconsciousness, we still retain the sense memories that we can't recall in our conscious minds.
It takes direct stimulation from the same stimuli to bring those sense memories out of the subconscious mind; and when they are brought out, often times we are unprepared for them and they come out in a flood. We are used to being able to control the reactivation of sense memories from the senses we rely on; but when we are confronted with sense memories that we are not used to controlling, the effect is often overwhelming.
Taste is difficult to replicate. Everybody's biochemical composition creates a different taste. And even if taste could be replicated, I could not honestly tell the difference if you lined up three women from my past and told me to lick them all. Maybe a lizard could, but I can't.
Same goes with the sense of Touch, though we're not so incompetent with touch as we are with taste. There were certain ways that the individual women in my life would grab the corner of my arm, or stroke the side of my hand -- that if somebody else were to do it inadvertently, I would remember. But for the most part, these sense memories are beyond reach.
The sense memory that is not beyond reach, but is beneath the surface of the subconscious layer of our minds, is the sense of Smell.
And this sense is powerful.
Even ten years after the end of a relationship, if we are walking through a mall and we smell a certain perfume or cologne, we often find ourselves stopping in our tracks, or at least turning our heads out of instinct. We remember, subconsciously, what our lovers smelled like -- and while we cannot invoke those memories at will, when they are triggered by direct stimulation, we remember with the such clarity that it seems not a day has passed since we last saw that lover.
Although she stopped wearing it years ago, every time I smell l'eau d'Issey, I think of Mina.
Every time, without fail, that I smell Gucci Envy -- be it in a mall, in a club, anywhere; I expect to turn around and see Erin.
When the sense memory of Smell is activated, and we deprive ourselves of visual and aural input (closing the eyes, being in a quiet room), we can begin to experience the sense memories that are buried deeper; touch and taste. We begin to remember what it felt like for a lover to run their hands over the bare skin of our chests and shoulders. We begin to remember what it felt like for their lips to touch ours. And then the deepest sense memories come out and we remember, in the most powerful recollection of all, the taste of their kiss.
It's not an imagined memory that affects us so much. No, the roots are deeper. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a scent is worth a thousand pictures and the sensual memories so much more.
