Introduction December 16, 2013
Senses: its effect on recalling information

Memory is the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms. It is the store of things learned and retained from an organism’s activity or experience as evidenced by modification of structure or behavior or by recall and recognition (Merriam-Webster, 2012).
Senses enable us to see, smell, hear and etc. but people usually rely on their eyesight and hearing to remember or recall things. People did not recognize the full potential of our memory, that the other senses also help us to remember and recall things for example of it is the sense of smell which is least recognized. We know the odor of a burning lumber because it is stored in our memory when we encounter it in the past like in cooking so when we smell a burning lumber in our home and we know that our home is made of lumber and none of the members of our family is cooking, we automatically think that our home might be in the process of burning.
The sense of smell is a model for the so-called physical sensors used for detecting chemicals in the atmosphere. Like a sound, an odor will intrude upon conscious awareness and affect it as long as the odor is there. The sense of smell constantly and automatically monitors the environment for odors. This monitoring is usually automatic, it is apparent in common experience, to detect odors even when attention is engaged in other ongoing tasks (Getchell, Dotvy, Bartoshuk, Snow, 1991). For example, while taking a test, a nose catches a smell of an armpit in which this odor is in the air and it is because the sense of smell monitors the smell around us.
The shape theory of olfaction states that a molecule’s particular smell is due to a lock and key mechanism by which a scent molecule fits into the olfactory