Remember that smell…

When we started talking about our sense of smell this week, I began thinking about all of the ways in which smell affects our lives. Smell can protect us from eating rotten food, entering areas with potentially harmful, noxious odors, and alert us to other dangers in our environment (fires, gas leaks, etc..) long before any of our other senses alert us to them. But the aspect of smell that I find the most interesting is the connection between smell and memory.

Almost every memory has an aspect of smell to it. When I think about my dog, or my house, or my parents, or my dorm room, or the golf course that I play when I’m at home, I can almost always associate a smell with them. With the exception of particularly strong smelling things, like my dog or dorm room, the smell might not be a major factor in a memory, it often is something that I have to think specifically about, but it is always there. Smells can also conjure memories unintentionally. How are memory centers in the brain connected so that if I pass a complete stranger who is wearing the same perfume that my mother wears, I have to turn around to make sure that my mom isn’t in Nashville? And why, for that matter, is smell the only sense that can do that? No other sense has the ability to evoke a completely random memory like smell can. The other day I was having dinner with a few of my friends, and the smell of the food suddenly made me think about my grandmother’s funeral, which happened my freshman year of high school.

As we continue to look at the olfactory system, I will be interested to see how the memory centers in the brain are connected, so that a smell, even a faint one, can evoke strong, sometimes long-forgoten memories so quickly.

Feb. 2, 2:32pm