I read somewhere that people cannot remember smells in the same way we remember visual and aural memories. But we do remember them. And a good thing too, as burning dinners and forgotten candles need to be identified. But it's harder to describe the memory of a smell unless you can relate to something else, I think.
One of my childhood memories is walking into my great-uncle Alvin's store in a tiny town in western Minnesota. We would visit relatives in that area every other summer. The store was mostly a clothing store, with men's on one side and either women's or children's on the other, I can't remember. I think there was a second floor, too. And another great-uncle had a jewelry counter in one corner. It was in an older wooden building and every time we walked in, the familiar, pleasant smell of the place would flood my memory. I would guess the smell came from a combination of the wood and the clothing.
It's been years since my Uncle Al passed away. (He was confident and somewhat reckless. He fell off his roof while trying to fix something.) I'm sure the building the store was in is gone.
But, I was curious about smell and memory. So I googled it.
I learned that "smells have a stronger link to memory and emotion than any of the other senses." (Google) I also read that: Olfactory memory is more difficult to study than visual or auditory memory. Due to limitations of human olfaction, memory for odors has generally been tested with recognition tests, not with recall tests (see Herz and Engen, 1996, for a review). Olfactory memories seem to differ in some ways from other forms of memory, such as a tendency of smells to be particularly evocative of emotional memories." (Sciencedirect.com)
And: "Odors take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory." (harvard.edu/gazette)
It's interesting to me that smell is such a strong sense, but it is so difficult to describe in the absence of the particular smell. I know we describe things as smelling burnt, sweet, sickly, and so on, but how to describe my uncle's store? I would know it anywhere, but I can't explain it enough that anyone else could recognize it.
Somehow I am not surprised by this. Whenever I smell freshly baked bread I am transported back to my grandmother's kitchen, the big black wrought iron stove dominating the space, and fresh bread being baked in the oven.
ReplyDeleteYes! It's like the smell sparks the memory rather than the memory recalling the smell.
ReplyDeleteThe smell of burnt toast takes me right to my grandmother's house in an instant, just as Old Spice and Lava soap bring back young girl memories with my dad. I was just reading in the book, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters, by Charan Ranganath, about this very phenonemen. You'll need to check out the book, Becky, or google him talking about his book on the podcast, A Good Life. You will love it - because I know you are a thinker-lady. :-)
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