Memories?

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When you remember a memory, what is involved? Sight, sound, emotions, taste, smell...?

I'm trying to puzzle out whether I remember things by the same methods that other people do, or not.

For me memory is mainly triggered by a mental image.

I remember the aspects of an event that most impressed me. I can remember sounds, smells, views, and conversations, but seldom all of them regarding the same event.

A smell can trigger a memory, but I don't experience smells within the memory. It's similar from the emotional aspect too. If I remember it at all, it's like a movie that someone is playing on mute... and on an old TV with dodgy reception.

For me it comes complete, multi-sensory, sight, vision, smell, hearing, as if I am reliving the experience as it originally was lived. Total flashback mode. This made it very hard to recover from PTSD, though I eventually did reach significant recovery, after decades of struggle and keeping my mind clear of substances. I have always had this complete recall memory faculty, even in infancy I had it. Even when I used substances I had it. It's wired in there and always has been.

Interesting topic.

I think it depends. I remember the sight the sounds, the smells, texture of things I was wearing, tastes of food, etc. for many years.

I remember the exciting smell of my first day at my preschool that had a hot lunch served in a cafeteria every day. I remember the feeling of wet blood on my hands after I gashed my forehead on a desk as a 3 year old. I remember the feel and the close-up appearance of texture of the cushions on our old living room couch that I would pull myself up on when I was still unsteady on my feet. Sometimes, if I am listening to music or TV while drawing, I'll even look at that drawing and remember specific bits of the song or the episode when I look at certain pencil strokes. I've also been known to memorize numbers both by sound and appearance, then when I recall them I can get a sense of how reliable that particular memory is based on whether the sounds "one two five seven" match up with the images "1, 2, 5, 7" If they disagree, I know that I need to go back to check it.

My mind is definitely multi-modal.

My menories are like my imagination, not a lot of visual detail, a few strong auditory cues, a feeling of where it was, what part of my life it was, how I was feeling, often bits of conversations are pretty accurately preserved, a bit of colour, and smells.

What really stands out about my memory isn't what senses I use, it's what I make memories of I think. I have many fond memories of being alone, quiet moments of solitude that most people forget. I gather this is unusual for an NT person.

Memory is a visual imagery access system. I seriously visualize those old style library index cards and pull out the card of a memory. You remember those? Before computers in libraries, it was a file cabinet, with cards in it with a list of books and where they were located at in the Dewey system?

Smells definitely trigger memories for me, but I would say most of my memories have a significant emotional meaning to me.

"Memory" makes me think of the musical "Cats," which brings back memories of all of my own cats.