system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are smell/taste memories as fallible as memories of feelings and events?
gpt
I can't speak to the nature of sensory memories, but as someone who has studied cognitive  psychology quite a bit, the "weakness" of declarative memory that makes it vulnerable to manipulation is that it's tightly coupled with language. The memories themselves are stored symbolically, with words. Therefore, by accidentally accessing language that's not strictly tied to a real past event, you've now experienced a false memory.

In other words, when you access a declarative memory, it's not like you're accessing and replaying audiovisual security footage, but more like reading the notes of a stenographer. And it's easier than you might think to slip false facts into that stenographer's record. 

It seems unlikely to me that this same phenomenon could occur with a sensory memory that isn't intrinsically linked to language in that same way. Other commenters have pointed out several plausible mechanisms for experiencing seemingly different sensations than you remembered from a prior experience.