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

[quisalan.livejournal.com]

There is actually a theory that you should try and wear the same perfume when you revise huge block topics for this purpose.

You then have different dabs of perfume on you in the exam; ie on each wrist, back of each hand, on a seperate pen.

The only problem is that:
1) you can't use more than about 6 smells before your nose gets confused
2) You smell very strange to the uninitiated
3) If everyone did it, the entirety of Schools would smell and one candidates perfume would cancel out anothers!

Oh dear

[venta.livejournal.com]

The phrase

your nose gets confused

immediately made me think of davefish.

:)