I could be blindfolded and recognize where my parents grew up just by the scent alone. I know that the sense of smell triggers a lot of memories in humans, but I was curious if it does the same for you.
What brings this up is that my daughter is strangely comforted when she goes over to my parents house for Easter, Christmas, or any other occasion. She is just more mellow for lack of a better word.
Our family bickers all of the time, so tranquility isn’t it. Any anecdotes or opinions would be great.
Hey, I just did a project on this for my bio class! (The Effects of Hydrophobic Plant Compounds on the Naked Ape…or…Aromatherapy 101)
Yes, you’re right, scent triggers memory, especially emotional memory more quickly and perhaps more completely than any other sensory input. The reason for this is that the scent triggers the olfactory nerve (right behind the eyeball), which is hotwired right into your amygdala. The amygdala is part of the limbic system in the medial brain. Deep, deep in there, and it controls emotion, mood and remembered trauma, as well as some kinds of learning.
For *Firefly *fans, the amygdala is what was fiddled with in River’s brain, so that her brain had no ability to suppress the impulses from the amygdala - all emotions and trauma were front and center in her awareness, with no way to turn it off. While that was science fiction, it was a pretty interesting and not entirely fanciful picture of the amygdala’s function. In a much less intense way, that same thing happens with us when we smell something unique - if it’s got an emotional connection in our brains, our amygdala pulls out that file in microseconds for us to review.
I’ve got two in particular: a certain fruited pipe tobacco which brings my grandfather back to life, and a complex mix of stewed celery and other unidentified odors that is my grandmother’s house.
I’m very scent oriented. I can be taken back in time by scent alone. To me, every home has a distinct odor, some good, some not so good.
Last year, a lady at work was wearing my Grandmother’s perfume, and I just stopped in my tracks & cried. Very intense.
Everybody’s home has a particular smell. And the people who live there don’t recognize it unless they’re away from it for awhile, IME.
I can only guess what makes up the particular smell of the home…cooking, detergents, cleaning products, candles, deodorants, perfumes, the inhabitants’ inherent chemical makeup…but when I moved away to college and came back for Christmas, the smell of my parents’ house was like a time-travel ticket back into childhood. I didn’t get along with my parents at that time so I found it rather profoundly depressing. (If I had missed them I would imagine it would have been as profoundly comforting.)
My parents have since moved out of that house and out of that city, but their house still has an instantly recognizable smell. It isn’t as much of a memory-trigger (because I have few memories of that house) but it is quite a distinct smell. Same thing for my friends’ homes.
Scents in general are absurdly provocative memory-triggers. Glade used to make a candle called Hawaiian Something-or-Other that I bought all the time when I lived with my ex-boyfriend. They don’t make it anymore AFAIK but I ran across one when I was moving a few months ago and the smell brought me back to that relationship more vividly than our old photo albums.
[slight hijack]
Am I the only one who runs across a scent occasionally that brings on quite vivid feelings without any knowledge of why? Like, “This is such a FAMILIAR smell that it has emotions attached to it…but I can’t place it…”
I hate that. And I hate the fact that the more you smell it, the less you can smell it (like anything) and you realize you may never remember why that smell means something to you.
Or maybe I’m just crazy!
Some of my earliest memories are completely scent-based. There’s something about white glue, for example, that immediately brings back doing Christmas crafts in kindergarten.
My grandmother’s house had a very specific smell as well… I can’t describe it, except to say that it must have been a combination of musty furniture/carpets, old books and an ever-so-faint whiff of pipe smoke (my grandfather was a regular pipe smoker until he passed away in the 70s, as were my uncles and father once they were old enough to be allowed to smoke at home… the smell lingered because nothing in the house changed from the mid-60s onward). I can still remember it perfectly well, though I haven’t experienced it since my grandmother’s passing away a few years ago.
I’m very sensitive to smell as well. My mom’s house always smells a certain way and always has, just like my grandmother’s used to and my dad’s. The house my husband and I live in has its own smell, both while we’re in it and if we’ve been away for a while. The same is true for people - everyone seems to have their own smell.
I often have strong gut reactions to people based on their smells. It sounds really stupid, but it’s almost like people ooze some sort of scent and when it smells off to me, I just don’t feel comfortable around them. It makes me feel like a dog sometimes.
My husband smells just right while a male acquaintance of mine smells really off (he has this weird smell that’s like a combination of used hockey socks and face grease - yuck). My son also has his own somewhat sweet-salty smell and it changes when he’s sick. I don’t know if it’s his breath or his body, but he seems to ooze an off smell when he’s about to get a serious illness. And it’s really consistent - every time he’s smelled like that, he gets sick enough that we wind up having to give him breathing treatments or something.
Yes! When my husband and I started dating, Yankee Candle’s Hearts and Flowers was in the potpourri pot all the time. All I have to do to bring those early years back is burn some Hearts and Flowers.
Also yes, to your question about not being able to associate a scent with a memory. It drives me nuts.
The smell of oranges takes me back to riding the bus to school. The orange scent is even stronger than the diesel fuel smell.
There’s a special smell to schools and libraries and banks, but I don’t know what causes it. Books and paper?
My sense of smell is not particularly good, but I had this triggered once. I was making coq au vin, using a recipe where you dredge the chicken in flour and brown it before making the sauce. Something about the smell of the chicken just took me back to my grandmother’s house when she would make fried chicken. I’ve made other dishes where I dredged chicken in flour and browned it since then, but never had that reaction again.
Here’s an earlier thread on the subject: My second thread ever.
I’m not sure I like your implication there. 
Heh. I brought up this subject because I almost had a “flashback” moment yesterday when I got a faint smell smell of jasmine and weed that the memories of one of my girlfriends came back so intense that I felt I was a teenager again. It was a strange sensation.
I recall opening up a storage container in which my late grandmother’s effects had been stored - I lifted out a load of towels and burst into tears at the scent of her soap. I’ve looked around for it (surruptitiously sniffing soaps in stores), but I’ve never been able to find it since.
We recenty rented my grandparents’ (on the other side) house while we were buying our home, and over a year we slowly transformed the scent from theirs to ours. 6 months later, it’s back to smelling of a thousand roast lamb dinners. I’ve wondered how that works.
And not my story, but a terribly sad story about scent I heard was a man calling into a science radio show, asking about how to preserve his dead wife’s hair which was cut off as she went through chemo - I think he was wanting to save it so he and their children could keep the memory of her scent alive as they weren’t old enough to remember her. Such a powerful story. 
Yes, i’ve experienced this many times…going back to my grandfather’s house-the smells brought me back to my childhood!
After all this talk of smell-induced memories, I decided to make my mother’s split pea soup last night for dinner after a crappy day at work. There was a total time-warp moment as soon as everything started bubbling away in the pot… I jokingly refer to it as Quebec’s answer to aromatherapy.
I’m glad I brought some for lunch today - it’s boding to be a repeat of yesterday, and I can definitely use its calming influence.
I know exactly what you are talking about as far as smells taking you back emotionally.
I had a boyfriend from my high school and college days who always used Flex Shampoo and Conditioner. I always enjoyed snuggling into him right after he had showered. It had to of been 10 years later or so and I was at a friend’s house and used their shampoo and it threw me for an emotional loop. It was like the old boyfriend was right there!!
On another note…
Honeysuckle smell reminds me of my grandparent’s farm.