Noses know

[venta]

I've spent the last hour or so feeling randomly nostalgic about a particular period of my life. Well, not nostalgic, exactly, since it's not a time I look at with fondness, but unexpectedly reminded of it.

I've just worked out why. Last time I had on the jumper I'm wearing, I must also have been wearing a particular perfume. The jumper smells faintly of it, and it's a perfume I used to wear a lot at the time I'm remembering.

I find smell an unexpectedly evocative sense, and am regularly yanked to a particular memory because of some scent drifting past. Sometimes I find it difficult to place why the smell and the memory go together.

I wonder whether it's possible to associate them deliberately, and then use a scent as a particular 'trigger' to retrieve a memory.

Me? Cheating in the exam? Oh no. I always carry 200 small vials around with me...

Comments

[zotz]

There are very sound neurobiological reasons for this. As I recall, the areas of the brain that deal with mood and memory developed out of those concerned with smell - hence the sense of smell being the most evocative.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

More precisely (but still *highly* speculatively) said areas probably developed out of the areas concerned with emotion. Initial evolutionary attempts at memory were probably simple associations- given a certain stimulus, run! This all goes on in the amygdala, which sits right under, and strongly influences, more recently evolved temporal structures dealing with full-on memory. Amygdala (and temporal cortex) are in fact linked to all sensory modalities one way or t'other, but you can argue that evolutionarily, smell is a good fight-or-flight cue, because many animals use it as such.

But like I said below, any modality will do.