That is sometimes called a Proustian memory. And yes, sometimes wonderful.
My dad ran an auto body repair shop. The mix of smells, paint thinner, grinders, Bondo, welding, is fairly unique. I’ve been in a variety of mechanics shops as an adult and while they’re always familiar, it’s not the same.
That one trip to the auto body shop when my car needed the bumper done, though, absolutely transported me back to my childhood.
When I was a kid, my parents (along with my uncle and aunt) owned and operated a True Value hardware store, which included a small-engine repair shop in the back (mostly lawnmowers and snowblowers). The scents of that shop – kerosene, oil, and the exhaust from two-cycle engines – instantly take me back there.
One thing I’ve found is that while there are hundreds or even thousands of words to describe sights, our vocabulary where aromas are concerned is comparatively impoverished. There are lots of smells I encounter all the time that I simply don’t have words for, but sure enough, there’s that instantaneous memory flash back to some distant time and place when encountering those certain smells.
There’s that sort of combination old leather-bound books and coffee smell I love encountering in connection with used bookstores.
There’s a sort of mélange of smells I call “the fall smell” that’s a combination of the faint smell of burning leaves and crisp air and something else I can’t identify.
Good and bad ones.
My mother would hang the wet laundry on the clothesline, and I loved walking “through” the hanging bedsheets and smelling the detergent.
Every now and then I will get a whiff of cigarette smoke. Smelled it all the time as a youth, hated it, and it reminds me of that time.
I think really anything musical can lodge itself in your brain, obviously with jingles and earworms but with any bit of music. I know that people like to say that there is no such thing as a photographic memory, and that our memories are mostly constructed over time from our memories of our memories, and that we of necessity shortcut our memories such that we don’t remember everything like it was a recording.
Except that isn’t true regarding me and certain music. Because more than once, I had miscomprehended lyrics to songs, or just flat out didn’t know what the lyrics were and didn’t want to take a guess. If I’ve heard them more than a couple dozen times or so, sometimes I can replay them in my head and figure out the lyrics based on the sound of the word rather than what I remember the word being. For instance, for a long time I thought that there was a line in the Be Our Guest parody from The Simpsons that said “but a greyhound for tuxedo would be best”, except that I thought the singer just slurred the word “for” a little bit or used an accent in which it was “fer”. It turns out that the line is actually “a greyhound fur tuxedo would be best” and I figured it out by replaying it in my head including the weird way he pronounced what I thought was “for”.
So I think that we can almost phonographically replay music in our head if we’ve heard it enough.
That’s funny I let my GF borrow my hoodie once. I wore it the next day to work. I could smell her all day.
I went to Taco Bell for lunch that day. That’s her favorite fast food joint to go to. It was like a weird psychological effect. I had to have Taco Bell that day. Because of that smell. Lol
I have a not so nice one.
When I was in high school we studied a quite confronting book about Hiroshima. The teacher often sat near me wearing a certain perfume as she read horrible passages about burning flesh.
Obviously the perfume smelled nothing at all like burning flesh. Regardless, while it’s not a common perfume I still come across women wearing it and the association remains powerful and is highly disturbing.
Patchouli oil.
I grew up in Berkeley, 60s. I’ve noticed it coming back a little bit lately. It’s still a love-it-or-hate-it fragrance, but it sure is evocative. My brain projects a very pleasant macrame halter top onto my consciousness. And granny glasses.
Oh yes-- patchouli, “it’s yesterday once more…”
Personally, I didn’t like the scent in 1970 and I don’t like it today, but it is overwhelmingly evocative.
You know what they say, “If you can remember the '70s, you weren’t there.”
The problem with patchouli oil, at least it it’s current renaissance, is that too many users think it’s an adequate substitute for taking a shower. It is not.
(I was around in the '60s, but too young to form an impression about it.)
Patchouli is an interesting scent. My daughter used to use it regularly and it smelled divine on her. I tried wearing it and just couldn’t stand the odour. Guessing it reacted differently to our bodily chemicals or something/end hijack.