Smelling Makes Us Remember

Smelling Makes Us Remember
Sometimes I’ll be walking down the street on an ordinary day, just minding my own business, when suddenly I’ll catch a whiff of something that brings forth a flood of memories so powerful that it nearly knocks me over. And I’m not talkingwow accountabout exotic scents like the tuberose lei I wore at my wedding; these are run-of-the-mill aromas that can be found in most drugstores and shopping malls. For example, when I washed my hair with Pantene Pro-V at a friend’s house recently, I was instantly transported back to summer camp in 1988, where I took showers in a communal log cabin, snuck out at night, and “fell in love” for the first time.
Another day, when I met a very glamorous woman at an art show in Los Angeles, I was so distracted by the smell of her perfume that I couldn’t even focus on what she was saying, so caught up was I in my recollections of being in mynike shoesbest friend’s room freshman year of college as she got ready to go out for the night—and filled the air with that very same fragrance as she spritzed it on her wrists. I could picture everything about that moment—the shape of the perfume bottle, the clothes my friend was wearing, and even the music that was playing—all because a stranger in an art gallery was wearing the identical scent fifteen years later.
At first I thought I had some kind of supersniffer that conjured up these vivid mental images for me alone, but I’m not the only one after all. On the contrary, of the five human senses, the sense of smell (also known as olfaction) is the strongest trigger of memory for most mammals.
Approximately one thousandwow accountsensors exist in the human nose, and they’re capable of picking up as many as ten thousand different odors. The shape of the molecules that each odor is composed of is unique to that particular aroma. When we inhale, we absorb these molecules into our nasal passages, whereupon they bind to complementary chemoreceptors in the olfactory epithelium, a one-centimeter-square patch of tissue above and behind our nostrils that’s specificallynike shoesresponsible for identifying particular smells. These chemoreceptors then send information about the specific scent to the brain’s limbic system, which reads the signals by comparing them to past experiences the person has had with the same smell or similar smells.