"I always took a tape recorder in my travels as a teenager, and now hear the recording is wonderful. It may be good idea to keep one in my travels."
Yes, it is always good to remember that different parts of the brain experience, and especially remember things differently based on the mode of experience and recording. If you want a multi-faceted , and even original experience, mix in some other modes.
I have done a good bit of sketching on trips, and my experience and memory of a particular landscape or scene is totally different than when I take a photo. If I look at a sketch of a particular scene and a photo of the same scene taken at the same time my memory is completely different. The memories get recorded in your brain differently, and both the process and method of recording draws out different details. Sounds weird (but pretty commonplace for people who draw) but when I look at a sketch, and especially while I am doing it, it is like my left hand is touching the scene. So there is even a bit of the tactile in there. A photo has a way of picking up small, sometimes trivial details in a scene that when you are there your brain doesn't want to see, like novelty maps – "New Yorker's Map of the USA" where Manhattan is huge, there are a few other small dots like LA, and the entire Midwest is missing. Somehow when the brain looks at a 2d image it then "sees" those detail. Having recordings from years ago must trigger a ton of stuff. Wish I had a few as well.
Too bad we don't have smell recording devices. Our memory seems to be wired in a very powerful way for smells – possibly some leftover circuitry from way back in the evolutionary tree. The classic example everyone knows about is when you smell a food from your childhood and it triggers a huge bundle of non-smell memories along with it. I wonder what a bear's sense memory of smells is like? It must be overpowering. I'd love to have a recording (scratch and sniff?) of juniper and sage from one of my trips, or the first time I experienced the smell of a little rain hitting very dry earth in Santa Fe, NM. It is a very particular earthy smell with no name, equal parts mineral, dried plant stuff, and something else totally unidentifiable, but very powerful. I occasionally smell it in very different places, and then I remember walking in Santa Fe in the place I first smelled it, exactly how it looked and the way it felt to me at the time, and not just the smell. Very weird and cool.
The present experience also depends on memory, and not always in a subtle way. For example, it is pretty well established that under the right conditions if a person eats a food that is tainted, especially for the first time, that food can actually TASTE bad to that person forever after, and I don't mean just lead to bad memories of barfing. The individual will actually report that it tastes bad and is inedible. I guess this would explain a lot about difference in what people like.
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