Where I live in California all of the lawns have been replace with “drought-tolerant” native plants - quite nice, actually, and I’ve come to see lawns as rather silly.
But on the now-rare occasion that I happen by a recently-mowed lawn I am transported back to my Little League baseball field. Oddly, I also vividly experience the smell of glove and ball leather (each quite distinct).
I have a pleasant memory that I think is of booze and cigarettes: it was the smell of a small 6 lane bowling alley my brother and I would bowl at occasionally. Occasionally I will wander past the opening to a bar and its smell will remind me of the bowling alley, but I don’t know of any liquor in particular it smells like. And not all bars smell like it. So maybe it’s some sort of other scent they share in common.
So did my grandmother. She must have had gallons of it since it was what we gave her at every gift-giving occasion. My grandfather perpetually got a can of Prince Albert pipe tobacco and my uncle got Aqua Velva aftershave as a result of reacting positively to the first such gift.
Agree with the hot electronics and pipe tobacco (burned and unburned) smemories.
Re grandmoms, I ghosted some poor girl that I had dated 1-2 times as a teenager…she smelled exactly like my grandmom.
CW
When in Grad School, I drove up the Sacramento valley on local roads to Chico. I smelled a smell I hadn’t smelled for a decade: a shit ton of prunes being dried at the Sunsweet plant in Colusa. Ughh, a nasty sweetish rotten plums smell. I think the road was at least 10 miles away. Gah, the instant I caught a waft, I was transported back to when I lived in Colusa and had to endure that putrid odor for about a month every harvest season.
One study exposed people to both smell and visual cues linked to a specific memory. Smell had a significantly greater effect on activity in the amygdala and the participants’ reported emotions.
This effect is likely due to how your brain processes smell versus your other senses. Nerve signals that relay information about sight, sound and touch typically go through the part of your brain called the thalamus. Think of your thalamus as a relay station that receives signals from all over and decides where those signals should go.
“Smell signals bypass the thalamus and go directly to the olfactory bulb and then quickly to the amygdala and hippocampus,” explains Dr. Cumming. “This unique wiring in your brain reflects the importance of smell throughout our evolutionary history.”
The amygdala is the emotional center of the brain and hippocampus the center for learning and memory. Scent goes directly to them, bypassing the gatekeeper of the thalamus.
My buddy’s barn. He was a farmer, and his barn smelled like so many barns that housed livestock. In his case, it smelled of horseshit, as he had a number of horses, including mine. To me, nowadays, horse shit doesn’t smell like anything that puts me off; rather, it brings back many happy memories of working with my horse, who boarded in Buddy’s barn.
My home, Zimbabwe, has summer rains. So it is hot, and the cumulo nimbus clouds form late afternoon.
There is a smell that arises from the rain hitting dry asphalt and rocks which is unmistakable. This is like, when you smell this, go inside.
I also lived much of my life at a school, so cut grass (soccer fields, rugby fields) is quite a great memory, too.
I should probably not mention this, but when I lived at home, I could identify when my mother was the last to use the toilet, due to her specific turd smell.
Quite a few smells conjure up memories. Here are the key ones:
Sometimes in public transport, I will feel the scent of menthol in the air (someone’s chewing gum?) and it will remind me of being in a bus as a child on a winter day.
The typical smell of a parking garage, which I assume is some mixture of burned fuel and stale air I actually don’t find unpleasant, because it reminds me of trips to places I liked (a shopping mall, the airport).
A similar smell hits you when you enter a Toronto subway station. I often watch videos that people make of walking through different parts of Toronto. When someone enters the subway and you hear the familiar chimes that accompany an announcement on the PA system, I have had light olfactory hallucinations of smelling the air in the subway station.
There is a certain rather tart perfume fragrance that I can’t currently describe but that I would surely recognize if I smelled it. Some teacher or someone had it on in my school when I was in Grade 4 and smelling it would immediately call to mind the Spring of that year (1989).
There is also a different, sweet and very smooth fragrance that could come from some hand lotion, sunscreen, or similar produt, that I recall sensing on a school day in Grade 7; over the years I have encountered that specific fragrance and it has called to mind the Spring of that year (1992).
There is one instance where a fragrance made a strong impression on me and I managed to recognize it later and get it identified. It would have been early 1993, a nice winter day at Centerpoint Mall at the edge of Toronto. At the time, there was a Woolco department store (where the massive supermarket is now). In the little atrium just outside it were some stalls selling something like Bonsai or aloes growing out of seashells or something like that. Suddenly I sensed a very strong, tart perfume with a kind of tangerine-y smell. It made me imagine a landscape in Medieval China or Japan. Many years later, in my 20s, I was in an office and recognized the same scent. An elderly lady who worked there was wearing it. I asked what it was and she identified it as Amarige by Givenchy. I have recognized the fragrance again since then.
There would certainly be other examples. These would be my top ones.
I know that smell. On the California coast it means a patchy squall and to look out for rainbows.
Fascinating. This lines up with my memory of my older brother’s distinctive fart smell. I’ll bet there’s some medical researcher somewhere who could educate us quite extensively on this topic.
Inevitably, but I am not sure I want to know!
Not quite the same thing: I stopped smoking over 50 years ago, so rarely have need for matches.
A while ago, I was driving in traffic, and someone on the pavement (sidewalk) struck a match. I instantly had the sulphorous smell in my nose, even though the windows were closed and the match was too far away anyway.
When I was a kid, Dad would pick me up every other Friday for his every-other-weekend non-custodial-parent visits. Since that coincided with his payday, we’d always stop at the tobacco store. He’d buy a single cigar and smoke it on the way to his house. To this day the smell of cigars, and of pipe tobacco, remind me of my dad.
There’s also bromine, which is used in the water in certain theme park attractions, it’s somehow better than chlorine in this specific context (though I couldn’t begin to explain the science). In whatever concentrations they’re using it at Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando, the smell is fucking INTOXICATING. I could just stand by the water and breathe in the scent all day and it would be worth the price of my admission ticket. I call it “Theme Park Water.” Rarely do I smell it outside of theme parks*, but when I do, I’m instantly back to Frontierland or wherever.
*I’m to understand that bromine is dangerous if not in the proper concentrations, and so it’s mainly limited to theme park use because of the specific set of circumstances that requires its use there. If I knew the concentrations I’d buy a bottle, mix up a safe batch, and just snort that shit every day.
This smell actually has a name: Petrichor.
The reflex for smells to evoke emotions is why a lot of residential real estate agents used to recommend that home sellers either bake cookies or bread just before holding an open house. They believed the smells would link the house to the sense of home in potential buyers. I haven’t been in any open houses in a long time, so I don’t know if this is something that is common or if the practice has faded.
Also WRT smells, my HS GF had a smell about her that was intoxicating. I don’t know if it was her shampoo or soap or perfume or laundry detergent or just a mix of one of those with her body chemistry, but to 16-year old me it was absolutely heavenly. I’ve only smelled anything like it 2 or 3 times since then, but each time I pitched a tent.
Right there with you, my man. I dated girs in high school whose smell would just send me into convulsions. And, wood. So much wood.
I had the opposite experience recently. I didn’t date in high school but I was fondly remembering the look of some girls’ hair back in the day, but then I remember that sometimes their hair smelled like soapy shampoo, which actually unpleasantified the memory.
So I had an interesting sensory memory experience a while back. I was watching the Wes Anderson Fantastic Mr Fox movie. I had no memory of the story at all, the plot, the characters, etc. But when I reached the scene where the animals are eating all the purloined food, I realized someone had read the Ronald Dahl book to me as young (maybe 4-5 year old?) child. I had no memory of the rest of the book but I think I must have been hungry when I had been read that bit. So the memory of how delicious that food tasted in my imagination stuck with me and came flooding back when I watched the film many decades later.
I remember the smell of scrambled eggs and sausage cooking at my maternal grandparents’ house. Eggs from hens who ate bugs and worms tasted/smelled better. Our chicken house smelled like a mix of manure and chicken feed (not a pleasant smell memory). Same with a barn full of cured tobacco. Our Little League baseball field had a concession stand between the two dugouts, so we could always smell hot dogs. Mom used All detergent and Downey on the clothes, and that smell stays with me. Same with the smell of the iron.
Thanks to the many oil spills of my youth, the smell of tar takes me back to the beaches I played on as a child.