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The use of sensations to improve retention of memories

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Samuel Bello

Samuel Bello Jul 31, 2021

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When you read a book while chewing a particular flavor of gum, the content of the book will be easier to recall when you chew that same type of chewing gum. Chewing gum will give you sensations of taste, smell and you can feel its texture too. This is not a new idea but we can improve its effectiveness by increasing the variety of sensations and record them so that the same sensations are recreated when we want to recall those memories.
A lot of innovations can be designed to have this specific effect. One could use an air freshener that changes smell over a cycle of 'say' a week so that when you read the memories are cemented by the effect of the smell. When the reader wants to recall what they have studied, they can have the same cycle of smells repeated. The cycle used for recalling should be much shorter than the one used for studying and the one-week cycle can be compressed into two hours so that your mind is flooded by the memories of what you studied several times until the fuzzy memories become clear and permanent memories. A series of smells can be organized to cover several months in public libraries so that the compressed versions of the days you visit the libraries can be recorded and sold to you. The sense of smell is closely linked with memory retention, some sources infer that smell, among other sensations, might have the strongest effect on memories. A development that could really help this type of innovation will be a standard olfactory classification system. There are some propositions to classify olfactory sensations but none of them is widely accepted because there is no standard way to describe odors accurately and measure the extent of similarity of odors. 

sensation memory

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Creative contributions

Music or sound is another sensation that can be used to improve memory retention

Samuel Bello

Samuel Bello Jul 31, 2021

The main idea is to create an endless soundtrack so that every part of the song is connected to a simple memory. The soundtrack can be based on musical notes that are dictated by the digits of an irrational number.
An irrational number can not be expressed as a ratio of two integers. When an irrational number is expressed as a decimal, it will have an infinite number of digits after the decimal point. Examples of irrational numbers are Pi, Euler's number, and the square roots of natural numbers that are not perfect squares.
The series of numbers can be used to create music or sound signals that will be played when the user studies. New e-books can be published with a default music series during production while older books can be paired with a random soundtrack. The use of these sensations can be extended to improving one's memory of real-life situations. Since the sound is endless it can be played at all times and the sound associated with a particular point in time can easily be deduced and replayed when you want to recall what happened at that time.
Another thing that can help the retention of memories is how funny the thing is. E-books can be designed to have more interactive, funny parts. For example, some of the alphabets can be cartooned to show expressions on their faces. F=ma will be easier to remember if the "m" was sleeping or the "a" sneezed every time you look at it.

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General comments

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