I very clearly remember the sounds of bowling. When I was small, my mom belonged to a weekly bowling league. She would take me along and I would sit at a restaurant table, easily in view of the lanes, watching the game, creating stories about the women who played on her team, and reading once I had learned how. The sounds of bowling are distinct. I remember them faithfully. I heard them over and over again during the bowling season for eight years.

Memory fascinates me. Another one of my goals with this Gratitude Journal is to explore memories. But they cannot be only that this happened and that happened. What is our awareness of the senses involved in our memories?

Neuroscientist Mark D. Humphries writes, “But the brain is constantly surprising us. Things that we think must be true about how neurons work often end up trashed by reality. So it is not a foregone conclusion that the hippocampus must represent all the sights, sounds, and smells of the world. And we know less about the brain than you think. No, less than that. A bit less than that too.” Episodic memory. Echoic memory. Memories of sounds. Fascinating stuff. I am specifically grateful for the memory of sounds (and acutely aware that this is a gift not shared by everyone). [“The Sound of Memory,” Mark D. Humphries, Psychology Today, 16 Sept 2017 }