30-year-old smells?

[rucciface]

Last night, I was sitting in front of the TV, minding my own business and not thinking of anything in particular, when out of the clear blue, the smell of my elementary school cafeteria filled my head. The cafeteria that I haven't been in in almost 30 years. To which I haven't given a single thought in almost 30 years.

When I focused on it, I realized I couldn't physically smell anything, but that the smell was inside my head. Just a memory. I conjured it back for just a moment, then it slipped away again, permanently. Now, I can't willingly recall it at all.

I'm looking around on the net for stuff about odor and memory, but it's pretty tedious. And boring. And I'd rather talk to you guys, so here I am. What do you know about such things? Is there a name for it? Has it ever happened to you?

[cher3]

It's happened to me, but I don't know any particular name for it. Once, in a psychology seminar, the instructor read us a list of sensory experiences and had us spend a moment trying to imagine them as vividly possible. I recall being able to call up tastes and smells almost as if they were really there.

I wish I could somehow use this as a weight loss tool--virtual snacking--but it doesn't seem to work that way.

[KneadToKnow]

Odor information is easily stored in long-term memory and has strong connections to emotional memory. This is possibly due to the olfactory system's close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that have long been known to be involved in emotion and place memory, respectively.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfaction).

K-Mart stores used to have delis in them; I'm talking mid-1970s here. The right mix of cheese, meat, and industrial floor cleaner still smells like K-Mart to me.

[Huerta88]

Has it ever happened to you?
I think it's happened to everyone. Famously, it happened to Proust:

http://www.hhmi.org/senses/d110.html

[Hypno-Toad]

This topic was my very first OP! Here (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=277116&highlight=Scent) it is.

[kenobi 65]

K-Mart stores used to have delis in them; I'm talking mid-1970s here. The right mix of cheese, meat, and industrial floor cleaner still smells like K-Mart to me.

The smell of mothballs always evokes Kmart for me. :)

[ralph124c]

Reminds me of my grandmother's china cabinet-she's been dead for 33 years now 9the cabinet is at my brother's home). I duck my head inside-take a whiff-and i am back in my Grandfather's house!

[teela brown]

If I happen to smell bologna and bananas at the same time, it'll take me right back to grade school. The "lunch cabinet" where we all put our brown bag lunches reeked of warm bologna and overripe bananas. In summertime, when it was opened at noon for us to rummage, the reek could knock you over.

[maladroit]

My neighbors had bushels of home-grown peaches on their back porch 50 years ago and I can still remember the smell if I focus.

[Anaamika]

There are certain smells that take me right back to my visits to India, which I loved and which were the happiest times in my teenage life. For a moment it's like snap! I'm there. And then I'm back.

[Swallowed My Cellphone]

If I happen to smell bologna and bananas at the same time, it'll take me right back to grade school. The "lunch cabinet" where we all put our brown bag lunches reeked of warm bologna and overripe bananas. In summertime, when it was opened at noon for us to rummage, the reek could knock you over.Yes, there the plastic lunchbox smell that instantly transports me back to grade school. I have a huge fondness for the comforting smells of Play-Dough and plasticine. And there is a smell of vinyl, like the kind from inflatable pool accessories, like water-wings, that I always find comforting because it reminds me of lazy summers from my pre-school days.

[Unintentionally Blank]

While working out in the basement, I spy the Miller Beer boxes in the corner that my parents used to store records in. I go over and they smell _woody_....and immediately remind me of the smell of the back of the wife's hobbycar: a 1966 Cadillac Hearse. It also has a gorgeous wood floor, which is something I guess I don't often smell.

She thinks the car smells like 'old guy'.

[Ann Onimous]

Diesel fumes take me back to first grade. Our normal school bus was bus 6: it was one of the newer ones, and really nice for a school bus. But there were days when it was taken out of rotation for field trips and stuff, so we'd get bus 4. Bus 4 was a diesel burning demon from the deepest pits of Hell. It had been around so long that my mother rode it, and had written "Helen loves Tommy" on the back wall. You could hear it coming before it crested the hill, and smell it coming for longer.

[Sublata]

Even now I can remember the peculiar, indescribable smell that always hit me when I walked into my paternal grandparents' back porch, on our annual trips to southern Missouri to visit them throughout my earliest childhood. I haven't smelled it since I was eleven (when my widowed grandmother died), I've never smelled it anywhere else and probably never will as long as I live, can't identify its source(s) or describe it well enough that it could be recreated, and so can't say in what sense exactly I "remember" it, but I do, and it's all bound up in the visual memory of that wooden back porch seen from the perspective of my three-foot-tall self, and the emotional memory of relief at the end of a two-day road trip that finished up going through the Ozark foothills on two-lane blacktop, talk about carsick!, and joy at the prospect of a week's playing on the propane tank out back and the swing in the vacant lot next door and with the neighbor kids and their donkey, and there are my grandparents' waists and their arms stretching toward me for the obligatory hug, and that odd but not-unpleasant sour-woodsy smell that always made me think of berries, somehow.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Diesel fumes take me back to first grade. Our normal school bus was bus 6: it was one of the newer ones, and really nice for a school bus. But there were days when it was taken out of rotation for field trips and stuff, so we'd get bus 4. Bus 4 was a diesel burning demon from the deepest pits of Hell. It had been around so long that my mother rode it, and had written "Helen loves Tommy" on the back wall. You could hear it coming before it crested the hill, and smell it coming for longer.

This. in 4th, 5th and 6th grades I went skiiing every weekend through a program through the local Rec. Center...Smelling idling busses takes me back there.

edit: Is Helen married to Tommy?

[clayton_e]

I'm 23 and very rarely, maybe once or twice a year, I get a whiff of a smell that is something along the lines of baking and either cleaner or something that has a metalish smell (like.. oh.. its so tough to describe.. its a weird mix).

It brings me back to a specific day in Kindergarten and I can relive almost second for second three scenes of that day. Going to the BOCES kitchen (in the same building) and cooking cupcakes. The second is getting off the bus and being jokingly tackled by my dad and wrestling him in the yard then realizing "OH NO! I HAVE CUPCAKES IN MY BACKPACK!" The third is being by the dinner table and eating crushed cupcakes with my parents while we all decided that they were still really good even if they were a bit smooshed.

I can only recall about a second from each part but when I get that smell that was in that kitchen somehow stuck in my head from some trigger the whole thing comes back.

[Johnny L.A.]

When I was looking for an MGB to replace one I sold 15 years earlier, I test-drove one a guy was selling on eBay. The smell hit me as I got in, and I thought to myself 'This smells like an MGB!' The one I have now smells the same. And I used to have a '48 Willy CJ-2A. When I got my '46 I had the same reaction.

[notfrommensa]

When I was kid, my mother made curtains for the living room and dining room. shw worked hours and hours making those curtains and she was very proud of them.

We moved out of that house in 1973. Several years ago, my sister bought a new house and I went to visit. When I walked in the house, I said to her that this house smelled like the one when I was a kid. As I toured the house, in her master bedroom she had those curtains, which I didn't even know that she had. I recognized the aroma of those curtains, immediately as I entered the house, 25-30 yrs later.

[Nutty Bunny]

I was thinking of starting this same topic (inspired by the sounds of your childhood (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=504222) thread).

My family had an air freshener in the early 80s that was attached to the wall and you could spray the scent by pressing on it. Every once in a while I'll get a whiff of something that smells like it and I always think of "The One Thing" by INXS.

Does anyone else associate smells with songs, too? Or is it just me? My husband thinks that's weird, but I can't be alone, right?

[Daylate]

There is a certain type of roll made from yeast dough that will take me back like a shot to a restaurant in Houston, TX, and I can actually see clearly in my mind's eye the waiter bring the bread tray. The thing about this is that meal was sometime during the summer of 1936.

I think this was the same day we saw the first release of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". In Technicolor and with air conditioning! Heaven!!

[movingfinger]

On hot summer days we would use the garden hose to wet down the concrete driveway to play in, and for some reason the smell of water on very sun-warmed concrete was a very specific childhood in summer smell.

[Jamicat]

What about 40 year old smells?

I smell Sanfransico on people at the airport or things that come from there...
I haven't been there since I was 2 years old...1968...I smell the snails.

One other smell that has been notorious to me is a 1965/66 Thunderbird...the one with all the chrome...every time I see one they all still smell like 1965/66 (even after being redone)...
My Grand Parents had one the year I was born.

These 2 smells are entrench in my memory to date...

I can't recall the smells unless I have contact with whatever chemical molecules contact whatever receptor neurons.

:dubious:

[Ann Onimous]

edit: Is Helen married to Tommy?

She was. They were my parents. She remarried, then died in 2000.

[Unintentionally Blank]

She was. They were my parents. She remarried, then died in 2000.

Ooof. We need a pregnant pause emoticon.

[AHunter3]

When I was 5, our family was moving; things that had totally been Permanent Fixtures were being taken away and put into boxes and everyone was kind of busy and impatient with me. We had a cat, normally well-behaved but who also got confused and upset and did something he never did, pee on the floor, in the back closet, where I found the puddle.

Whenever I smell concentrated smell of cat pee, it's the smell of confusion and things being taken away and everything is bad and ominous, even down to the cat behaving badly, and I am 5 again.

[Pyper]

Okay, this is going to sound a bit weird. When I was in junior high, I had a pet rat who was the first pet I had that was mine exclusively. He had an odor that was sort of a combination of rat pee, cedar shavings, and rat musk. Throughout my day at school and other times when I was away from him, I would get a whiff of his scent. Since he died, though, I can't really "smell" his scent like I did when he was alive. It was an actual sensory experience, like he was in front of me, not just a memory.

[salinqmind]

Just recently I had a chance to sniff the same perfume I used to wear in high school, and boy howdy, did that take me back! All of a sudden I was 16 again, nervously tugging down the hemline of my micro mini-skirt, wondering if Johnny would ask me to the prom...And I sniffed another perfume that my mother used to wear, that conjured up stilettos, pencil skirt, white gloves, and a pillbox hat... The scent of Juicy Fruit gum is a tiny trip back in time, too - riding (without seatbelts!) in the big old station wagon on the way to grandma's.

[Ann Onimous]

Ooof. We need a pregnant pause emoticon.

You asked. :D

[freckafree]

rucciface, I can conjur that cafeteria smell. As a smell, it is neither good nor bad, but it does not engender happy feelings. It makes me vaguely anxious and sad.

"Off" insect repellent, worms, and fish slime -- the utmost carefree childhood happiness of fishing in the lake at my cousins' farm

Every once in a while, I'll get a whiff of diesel exhaust combined with charcoal grill -- Olangapo City in the Philippines

I have lots of memory triggers associated with perfume. Love's Fresh Lemon -- junior high, making out with Tommy Kirk (he was in high school!) at a friend's party. That's a smell I can conjur in my memory, too.

[panache45]

I remember what ether smells like, and the only time I've ever smelled ether was when I had my tonsils out. That was 56 years ago.

And I remember the smell of a room in the YMCA in downtown St. Louis, from 1965.

[minor7flat5]

The smell of mothballs always evokes Kmart for me. :)The smell of mothballs evokes the memory of my first day in boot camp, over 20 years ago. It wasn't a happy day.

Our brand-new uniforms had that smell all over them, and it was the first time I had smelled it, since my mom never used mothballs in my house.

[Dolores Reborn]

The smell of diesel engines reminds me of back in my twenties when I hitchhiked across the country.

Old Spice aftershave reminds me of my Dad.

[Napier]

O my yes.

Boxwood transports me back to Grandmother's house.

Crayola brand crayons take me back to childhood, and they do this so well for many other people that I have kept a box around the house just for treating people to the feeling.

And patchouli absolutely sends me - bringing back the sweetest and richest memories of a beautiful smiling girl with long hair and a long hippie style dress trotting toward me in the sunshine, filling me with inexpressible longing.

This last one is painful, too, very bittersweet, because as an intellectual matter I am completely certain that this experience never happened to me, no matter how much I wish the memory was real. God dammit.

[gravitycrash]

My memory trigger from thirty years ago is also from perfume. It originates from my first kiss, it was a magical moment for me and I'll never forget the scent. Occasionally when I'm in the mall or a department store I'll get a whiff of that scent and I am immediately transported back in time.
I have no idea what the name of it is, I've been so tempted to ask the woman who is wearing it what the name of it is but I'm afraid of getting slapped.

[stucky]

I have the same problem, every time I open a can of tuna, for some reason I think of an old girlfriend I used to have.

[Hypno-Toad]

Cut grass and gasoline on a hot day take me back to my teen years. It's like I'm back mowing the lawn. The smell of a garage does it too, since I haven't had a garage since I was 18. Or mown any lawns for that matter. The smell of Tamiya-brand model paints is distinctive takes me back as well. Specifically, it brings up the memory of sitting in front of the air hockey table in the basement of my first house, looking through Tamiya paint and model catalogs. I think I used a red American Tourister suitcase for a stool.

[Winnie]

Perfumes really evoke memories for me. I was in drugstore recently and came across a package of Love's Baby Soft. Oh. My. Gosh. One whiff and I was back in Junior High, suddenly worried about makeup, if my pegged acid washed jeans were cool enough, if Tim would talk to me on the bus. My mother has worn Shalimar nearly every day of her life and if I smell it somewhere I remember being little and burying my head in her hair when I was upset or scared.

My grandma still lives in the same house since my dad was born (1949) and these days she's barely "with us", as she suffers from late stage dementia. However when I go to visit her and the sadness of her condition is overwhelming to me, one smell of her house brings me back to such happy, joyful memories of being with her in her better years when she was the kindest, most generous, gentle, and loving person I could ever imagine knowing.

[Ann Onimous]

The smell of diesel engines reminds me of back in my twenties when I hitchhiked across the country.

That sounds like an unforgettable experience. Have you considered a thread on that? I know it's not a safe thing now: but my mom did a lot of hitchhiking when she was younger and had some interesting stories.

Perfumes really evoke memories for me. I was in drugstore recently and came across a package of Love's Baby Soft. Oh. My. Gosh. One whiff and I was back in Junior High, suddenly worried about makeup, if my pegged acid washed jeans were cool enough, if Tim would talk to me on the bus.

My best friend in high school got me hooked on that, and I still wear it to this day. My daughter wears it now, too. She has to be careful, though: she tends to marinate in it, and that's a whole totally different smell altogether.

[Sternvogel]

I'll occasionally smell my elementary school (circa 1965) when I catch a whiff of a certain combination of what's apparently industrial floor cleaner and cooking creamed chicken and biscuits.


There is a certain type of roll made from yeast dough that will take me back like a shot to a restaurant in Houston, TX, and I can actually see clearly in my mind's eye the waiter bring the bread tray. The thing about this is that meal was sometime during the summer of 1936.

I think this was the same day we saw the first release of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". In Technicolor and with air conditioning! Heaven!!

You've apparently conflated two memories -- Snow White was released in December 1937, so the first summer during which you could have seen it was 1938's.

[Uncle Brother Walker]

The smell of salt water - reminds me of growing up near the Gulf of Mexico during my formative years. I have had the chance to hit several other beaches, but none invoke the same memories as the smell of the Gulf of Mexico.

Not even Galveston. Ewwww. But this was during the 70's oil industry.