THE SCENT OF RECOLLECTION
Scents trigger recollections. They’ve transported many of us back to our childhoods, to our lovers’ arms, to the seaside or the woods.
“The scent of memories laid away, and yet never quite completely forgotten, is quite distinct. Set aside one dim distant day, so carefully, reverently even, perhaps for a reason now overlain by an infinite multitude of events that compose the procession of time, making its meandering way over a broken & barren landscape of submerged dreams, waylaid by ill-suited desires,” writes Robert Ketchell, renowned garden designer.
Now, we are getting a better handle on how and why scent is your memory’s best friend. The olfactory nerve, the one that transmits scent data from our nose to our brains’ limbic system, terminating very close to the amygdala, our brain center of emotion, and very close to the hippocampus, our main brain center of memory. Our ability to smell is actually tied to our ability to remember. You can’t identify a scent if you can’t remember the circumstances -- when you smelled it, or what your surroundings looked like.
Photo: Courtesy of Slices and Scribbles
Dr. Alan Hirsch, a US neurologist who heads up the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation, is investigating olfactory-evoked recall. In a recent survey of 1,000 people on the streets of Chicago, baked goods, like breads and cakes, were the most memorable source of childhood scent memory, followed by bacon (of course). Even more interesting is their findings that people born before 1930 tend to recall nature-based scents more and better than younger people do. The theory is that the mass move to urbanization made a difference to our memories.
The scent-memory connection is proving to be a valuable path towards helping people to remember. According to researchers at the University of Northumbria, scents from the essential oil of rosemary were particularly helpful. In their study, 66 people were given a battery of tests to assess their memory functions. Building on their previous research that indicated rosemary scents improved long-term memory and mental arithmetic, head researcher, Dr Mark Moss explained that this study focused on rosemary and its effects on prospective memory, which involves the ability to remember events that will occur in the future and to remember to complete tasks at particular times. “This is critical for everyday functioning,” he explained, “for example, when someone needs to remember to post a birthday card or to take medication at a particular time."
The results, presented at the British Psychological Society's annual conference, showed that participants in the rosemary-scented room performed better on the prospective memory tasks than those in the room with no smell.
Since scent is a powerful memory trigger, it is now being leveraged to help people with compromised memory, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. JWT Singapore and global fragrance house Givaudan have created customized “Smell a Memory” kits, which can help these patients to reconstruct memories that have drifted away.
The kits are custom-formulated for individual patients based on each patient’s family history, ethnicity, age, and personal stories, with scents like “Bedtime Stories,” “Mom’s Cooking,” “Prayer,” and “School Days,” to trigger memories and reignite engagement. “We wanted the smells in the kits to have a narrative quality. The idea was to evoke emotional memories, not just factual ones. Scents that could open the floodgates to a story or a certain time in their lives, and all the feelings associated with that memory,” says Juhi Kalia, of JWT Singapore.
In their studies at select nursing homes in Asia, a significant number of the patients, whose memory loss has left them listless, withdrawn, and uncommunicative, became excited after smelling the kits, engaging in animated conversations with family members and therapists.
Blushie, an innovative fragrance company based in San Francisco, has discovered a way to capture the subtle yet undeniable scents of weather. You can now buy Snowfall, Rainfall, Dust After Rain, and Oncoming Storm in bottles to keep on your dressing table, to dab on your pulse points at whim.
Petrichor, which is the scent of oncoming rain after a period of drought, is made up of "fresh ozone notes, clear blue water, rich earth, with a hint of cedarwood, and grass blades bending beneath the droplets."
If smelling like the weather isn’t part of your favorite trip down memory lane, try their more delicious scents, such as Sugared Walnuts, Oatmeal & Honey, and Caramel Latte.
Made of fractionated coconut oil and hand-blended natural fragrances, Blushie oils are a delight to wear.
Blushie also carries their scent-memory artistry into a line of handmade soaps. We love the Seaberry soap, shown above, for it’s heady fresh ocean breezes and faint wild berry. Made of sustainable palm oil, coconut oil, olive oil, safflower oil, distilled water, sodium hydroxide, castor oil, fragrance, mica, titanium dioxide, and charcoal powder, it offers a natural way to clean.
Designer, Amy Radcliffe, developed a new kind of camera that records smells versus images. Named the "Madeleine," after Marcel Proust's story of involuntary memory, which was prompted by biting into tea-soaked madeleine cake. Radcliffe wanted to close the technology gap between our abilities to memorize olfactory and visual senosry data. She believe recording scent is important. "It is the sense we react to most instinctively, and the furthest away from being stored or replicated digitally," she explains.
Using "headspace capture" techniques, pioneered in the 1970s by Swiss fragrance chemist Roman Kaiser, Radcliffe's "scentography" camera uses a funnel to capture the scent of an object and a pump to draw it through an odor trap made of Tenax, a polymer resin, which absorbs the object’s specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs). It is processed to produce the molecular information of the smell.
HOW TO SUCCEED WITH YOUR MADELEINE from AMY RADCLIFFE on Vimeo.
"It's like a huge electric nose," she says. "It processes the particles and produces a graph-like formula that makes up the smell.” You can then recreate the smell, using the formula. Imagine taking your odor trap to a local lab and having them reproduce a fragrance for you just as a film lab produced prints from a negative.
The design has been shortlisted for the CSM Nova award.
Celebrity chefs on the Food Network often lament, “If only we had ‘smell-o-vision!” when they swoon over their own visually gorgeous preparations. Of course, we’d like ‘taste-o-vision’ too.
Now, Japanese researchers from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have developed a smelling screen that brings your nose closer to your TV. While there have been experiments with "Smell-O-Vision" in the past, with movie theaters filling their air with smells associated with their films, the new smelling screen takes it further -- and brings it into your living room. The scents can be located on specific parts of the screen. Try sniffing up at the top for the heroine’s Chanel No. 5 and the bottom of the screen for her plate of bacon.
The screen was recently demonstrated at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference.
One last beautiful fact about scent and recollections to leave you with: this memory pathway tends to sugarcoat your memories a bit, filtering out some of the bad notes and amplifying the good.
Read about recollections all this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Mind/Body, Place/Time, Nature/Science, and Soul Impact. And enter our photo competition this week. The theme: Recollections (Deadline, July 7th, 2013).
