Memories lingering...

Dear V,

I entered this particular shop in a mall yesterday that I had never entered before. I immediately had this weird lingering feeling of missing someone. I smell this weird blend of chamomile laced with hints of lilac and it made me stop for awhile. Memories of time with my first puppy crush in the meadows near our house when I was a kid rushed all of a sudden. This was a very long time ago and I can't help but miss those innocent moments. What's up with me?

- Doug

Yow Doug!

Wow! Good for you for having a meadow that has chamomile and lilac growing in it near your place!In any case, we've all experienced this at some point in our lifes -different smells whisking us away to re-live our past. What you really need to ask is why does this actually happen?

Smell is one of the oldest most primal of our senses. Smell is perhaps the sense we are least used to talking about. We are good at describing how things look or sound, but with smells we are reduced to labelling them according to things they are associated with like how you desribed the scent you smelled.

Anyways, we possess olfactory bulbs and when we smell something, the odorants stimulate olfactory receptor cells. These receptor cells are fascinating because they have different affinities for a wide range of odorants.

The axons from these receptor cells converge in the olfactory bulb, which forms the olfactory tract and converges in the piriform cortex.The olfactory tract also terminates in the medial amygdala and the entorhinal cortex.

The medial amygdala is involved in emotional learning which is responsible for pairing events with emotions. This is particularly important in social functions such as mating. While the entorhinal cortex is involved in memory. The amygdala also has a direct connection to the mammillary bodies, a region of the hypothalamus involved in recognition memory. Olfactory neurons are unmyelinated which means that smell is our slowest sense.

Interestingly, olfactory receptors are also our only sensory receptors exposed to the environment. This suggests their direct importance in the brain's coding of memories from our experiences and emotions.

With this in mind, it makes sense- the odorants in the shop matched those of your meadow's, sending the same signals via the same receptor cells to brain areas involved in memory and emotion which triggers that particularly cheezy and fond memory of yours.

We call this the "Proustian phenomenon" after French writer Marcel Proust, whose novel À la recherche du temps perdu depicts a character pining over his childhood after smelling a familiar tea-soaked madeleine biscuit.

Senseryly yours,

V

References:

Rabin, M., & Cain, W. (1984). Odor recognition: Familiarity, identifiability, and encoding consistency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10 (2), 316-325 DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.10.2.316

Chu, S., & Downes, J. J. (2000). Odour-evoked autobiographical memories: Psychological investigations of proustian phenomena. Chemical Senses, 25(1), 111-116. doi: 10.1093/chemse/25.1.111

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