Indian weddings are enormous spectacles of color, sound, sight, aroma, food, and meeting people. These weddings go way beyond being just an eternal celebration of love. The newlyweds are blessed by hundreds of guests, bedecked in their most ornate jewelry and dresses who together participate in several ceremonies and rituals, making it a few days of togetherness and frolic.
Recently, I had a chance to attend one such lavish wedding of my cousin back in India. Little did I realize that these weddings are such a graphic laboratory to understand how the sophisticated human brain and the nervous system function in the fields of sensation and perception, as well as memory, i.e., for retrieving old memories and blending them with newly formed memories.
I observed three primary forms of sensation (registration of information) and perception (interpretation of information) at this wedding. My vision was helping me appreciate the multitude of colors, ranging from the bridal deep red (due to light rays of the longest wavelength in the visible spectrum getting reflected from the dress and entering my eyes) to the lovely violet flowers (reflecting the shortest wavelength and highest frequency visible light rays) that decorated the marriage hall. During the daytime, the cones in my eyes acted as visual receptors to send signals about the colors to the bipolar cells, which in turn would send the impulse to ganglion cells that would finally reach the cerebral cortex for interpretation of the colors. The central area of the retina called the fovea has the greatest density of these cones as receptors and brought the detailed vision of the embroidery work on the bride’s lehenga. Late into the night, we danced and mingled together, when the rods in my eyes took over to adapt my vision in dim light.
In addition, the sensation and perception emanating from touch were omnipresent at the wedding. When relatives would meet, they would shake hands, hug each other, or traditionally greet each other with folded hands (called Namaste), while the younger ones would bend forward and touch the feet of their elders as a mark of respect. Touch from these activities generates different types of somatosensation known as proprioception (relating to the position), observable and interpreted by monitoring the position of the body, as well as kinesthesia (relating to the movement). Engaging in a conversation with friends and family involved maintaining an optimal distance to ensure appropriate eye contact while gesticulating with hands-involved movement that aided the perceptions caused by spoken words and facial expressions. I could notice subliminal perceptions at various times, such as everyone wearing a natural smile on happy faces when the friendly banter and fun games were on, while many wore a sad expression when it was time for the bride to bid goodbye and part from her family.
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Marriage functions pose a great test for people’s memory, to say the least. On one occasion, the bride called me up and hurriedly asked me to help her get over a dozen vanity items from the nearby mall. Despite trying hard, I could remember only the first 3-4 items (the primacy effect) and the last couple of items (the recency effect) from the list. Then again, one meets so many distant relatives and guests that remembering all the names proved to be a test of memory – a few names came to mind spontaneously (free recall), while the others came to mind as soon as the introducer started with the first syllable (cued recall). When I seemed unable to recollect the name of one of my relatives, he jokingly asked me to remember his name by picking from among three names he rattled off (recognition memory). On the dance floor, the singers were singing from their declarative memory (that can be described in words), while all the folk on the dance floor, including myself, were using our procedural memory (stemming from the motor skills used in the dance steps learned earlier). At the dinner table, while I was describing to my uncle my early experiences in college, I was vaguely over-hearing nearby conversations about the Indian Prime Minister’s recent visit to the US, which had an effect such that my own conversation with my uncle tilted towards Indian politics and how the re-elected Prime Minister is performing (implicit memory).
Everything we sense, perceive and remember go through three steps of memory – encoding, storage, and retrieval. I could observe that the sights of vivid color, the melodious sounds, and the innumerable new names of the relatives I had learned earlier in the day were perhaps stored only in sensory storage and my short-term memory (or working memory), and I had already begun to forget a few of those names. After a few days, it was the test of my long-term memory – could I retrieve the names of and conversations with so many new relatives I had met and spent time with? Despite trying, I could remember the names of only those people who evoked a good emotional conversation with me (emotionally arousal events), had left two- or three-lettered initials of their names (mnemonic memory), and with whom I had remembered something together during past events (association memory).
During the entire wedding celebration of my cousin, I was trying to recollect the wedding of my elder sister from a few years back, and I found that I actually remembered only a few events and episodes from that marriage, yet was able to reconstruct nearly the entire sequence of events and the happy stories from that wedding. I am told that such a type of reconstruction could be laced with ‘fabrications’ and ‘hindsight biases’!
While I may not remember all the rituals and ceremonies that an Indian wedding witnesses (relating to our semantic long-term memory), it is the specific events and experiences from these marriage functions that one remembers for a lifetime (emanating from the episodic long-term memory). I could see for myself that sensory memory – a type of memory that involves all our senses such as vision, touch, hearing, smell, and taste – plays such an important role. It appears to have an infinite capacity and has so far proven to be indelible for me.
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