It helps you sense where your fingers are so you can play the right notes. Haptic memory is also involved when you play a musical instrument. For example, when you feel a raindrop on your skin, your haptic memory records that sensation, helping you recognize what ‘s happening. Anything that uses the sensation of touch also uses your haptic memory. This form of memory records each syllable or sound and connects it to the next syllables, helping your brain recognize words and sentences that you can understand. A similar process happens with speech and echoic memory. ‌Īnother example is the ability to understand language.

Your echoic memory records each note and helps your brain connect the tones, allowing you to recognize it as a song. The ability to listen to a song and recognize it involves echoic memory. If you pass a row of businesses on a road, your short memory of which businesses were there and what their signs looked like is also an iconic memory. After you pass the field, the short memory that remains of the cows is an iconic memory. Or imagine that you’re riding in a car and see cows grazing in a field. When you flip a light switch, the brief image in your memory that remains of what you saw before you turned off the lights is an iconic memory. It helps you identify foods through the five basic flavors your tongue identifies through the gustatory receptor cells: Associated with taste, gustatory memory has a close relationship with olfactory memory. Without smell, you would only be able to taste basic flavors like sweetness. Olfactory memory helps you identify tastes because molecules from the food you chew go into your nose. Once you take in a smell, it travels quickly to the parts of the brain that help form long-term memories. Haptic memory allows you to identify things you’re touching. It can include sensations like pressure, pain, itching, or something that feels good. This type of memory is related to your sense of touch. Research shows that echoic memory is essential to learning a language and that people who have trouble speaking may store echoic memories for shorter amounts of time. Once the sound enters your ear, your temporal lobe processes it. Your brain takes a few seconds to process echoic memories. This is associated with sound and hearing. The brighter the image, the longer it stays in your iconic memory.Įchoic memory. It has a large amount of storage but stores the memory for less than a second. This is associated with things that you see. Types of Sensory MemoryĮach sense has a different type of sensory memory linked with it, including: They are then reprocessed and associated with a memory that may store in your short-term memory. They are stored only for as long as the sense is being stimulated. They come from the five senses: hearing, vision, touch, smell, and taste. Guided by the settler colonial environment of the American Heritage Center (AHC) and what remains of Hebard and Wergeland, I craft a queer sense of their “intimate friendship” and argue that perception of Hebard and Wergeland's intimate friendship takes shape through the sensory culture of the AHC and that their queerness is an effect of the archive.Sensory memories are stored for a few seconds at most.

This essay models a sensory engagement with archives at the American Heritage Center and Grace Hebard and Agnes Wergeland collections. Ambience reimagines invention and circulation as the relational materiality of bodies and as central to the generation of intimacies. I conceptualize the relation between archival environments, feeling, and memory as “archival ambience.” Ambience challenges modern theories of invention and foregrounds the entanglements of sensory culture, corporeality, sensation, feeling, and memory. The shift to archives as rhetorical places creates opportunities to examine environmental accessibility, the role of archives in legitimating official public memory, and tactics to evoke memory at the margins.

Sensory memory