The Smell of the Sunflowers
Dear
Berna,
Hi! I've been a stepmom to my
boyfriend's child for three years now after he and his former wife separated. His child, Christine, was left by her mom when
she was just one and a half years old. For the past weeks, Christine has been
bugging me that there seems to be something so important that she cannot pull
out of her mind whenever she's smelling the sunflowers that I planted on our
backyard. Since she seems to be so occupied with it, I decided to ask Marko, my
boyfriend, if there is something about sunflowers before I met him. He told me
that his ex-wife's perfume is sunflowers' scent and maybe that's what Christine
has been recalling. My question is, is that normal? I mean, Is she supposed to
remember something about her mom even though she was not able to meet her?
Hoping you could help me with this question.
Confused and Hoping,
Nida
Hi, Nida!
Wow!
Sunflowers seem to be so emotion-inducing right now. It just so happened that
I've been hearing people here and there talking about sunflowers and I'm just
thinking, "Uhm, what's up with sunflowers?"
Putting
that aside, I think your story is very interesting considering that it involves
infantile memory and most people think that infantile memory is not stored in
our memory because of infantile amnesia (Meltzoff, 1995). However, we must
remember that a lot of stimuli can trigger us to remember things without us
wanting to and an example of this is the scents or odors we smell in our
environment.
Indeed,
it is possible that what Christine has been recalling with the scent of the
sunflowers is her mother's scent. However, as you can see, she cannot really
remember it since she was not able to encode in her mind the association of the
odor with her mother. She just know that there is something about the scent
that she seems to smell all the time when she was still young.
The
scents of different objects in our environment can help us retrieve memories
due to our sense of smell's connections to the different parts of our brain
that works whenever we encode and retrieve information. Moreover, Riggio (2012)
noted in his article that most often, the memories we retrieve through our
sense of smell are those that we had in our early years; that is, there is a
strong connection between the odors we smelled early in life, usually before
the age of five, and positive or pleasant memories. These memories, most of the
time, are also those that are emotion-laden (Shrode, 2012). For the recall of
information to occur, it is necessary that the scent is strongly present during
the encoding as well as the retrieval.
In
support with the information provided by Riggio (2012) and Shrode (2012), Chu
and Downes (1999) have also published articles proposing that our sense of
smell or olfaction is the most powerful sensory modality in bringing back
autobiographical information. This
ability of our sense of smell to recall autobiographical information is
referred to as the Proust or Proustinian phenomenon which is after Marcel
Proust, the man behind the concept (Collins, 2012).
Why
does our sense of smell have this very powerful ability of bringing back
memories? According to various articles such as that of Shrode (2012), our
olfactory bulb has connections both to hippocampus and amygdala. Hippocampus,
as we know, is responsible mainly for the formation of memories while amygdala serves
primarily as the emotion center of our brain (Riggio, 2012). This could be the
physiological explanation as to why we can easily associate certain scents to
memories especially those that are emotionally-laden. This ability of humans as
well as of many animals is known to be evolutionary and to serve survival
function since it enables us to easily associate scents to different objects
through our memories. We associate good scents with objects improving survival
and foul scents with objects that reduces survival.
This
could be why the smell of sunflowers lights -a-bulb-up in Christine's mind,
Nida. She might have learned the scent when she was a baby and associated it to
nurturance and to something that is always with her. However, since she was not
able to have a concrete memory of her mother considering she was not able to
meet her face-to-face when she was old enough, she cannot actually pull the
information out of her mind. No worries, Nida! It is not wrong to let Christine
know that the scent of the sunflowers is the scent of her mother's perfume.
Maybe doing that would actually help her answer the question running through
her mind for quite some time. I hope my answer helped you in any way.
Senserely
yours,
Bernadette
References
Chu,
S. & Downes, J.J. (1999). Odour-evoked autobiographical memories:
Psychological investigation of Proustian phenomena. Oxford Journal, 25(1), 111-116. Retrieved from chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/1/111.full
Collins,
N. (28 Jan 2012). Smells can trigger emotional memory, study finds. The Telegraph. Retrieved 22 March 2014,
from www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9042019/Smells-can-trigger-emotional-memories-study-finds.html
Meltzoff,
A.N. (1995). What infant memory tells us about infantile amnesia: Long-term
recall and deferred imitation. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology, 59, 497-515. Retrieved from http://ilabs.washington.edu/meltzoff/pdf/95Meltzoff_JECP.pdf
Riggio,
R.E. (1 May 2012). Why certain smells trigger positive emotions. Psychology Today. Retrieved 22 March
2014, from www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201205/why-certain-smells-trigger-positive-memories
Shrode,
L.R. (2012). The influence of odor and emotion in memory. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=psychology_students
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