Entering an old building, the smell of floor polish may suddenly bring back a school corridor from decades ago, together with its light and a trace of nervousness. The memory was not “stored in the nose”. The odour acts as a highly distinctive retrieval cue. When the original experience formed, smell, place, people and emotion were encoded together. Encountering a similar odour can reactivate that network.
Olfactory processing is closely connected with brain systems involved in emotion and memory, providing a biological basis for the emotional quality of odour-evoked recall. Experimental work has also found that, compared with pictures or sounds of the same objects, odour cues can produce autobiographical memories that feel more emotional and more like being transported back. Some studies find that they are drawn from earlier periods of life.
Yet “smell always makes memory more vivid” is not a general law. A 2019 methodological review found that odour-evoked memories were not more vivid in every comparison. Familiarity, ability to identify the smell, cue presentation and research design all affect the result. More importantly, vividness is not accuracy. A memory can feel emotionally intense while its date, people or details are reconstructed incorrectly.
What is distinctive about smell, then, is not that it reopens an untouched recording. It can bypass a deliberate search for the past and use an infrequent but specific cue to reinstate an old context. The feeling of “being there again” is psychologically real. If the memory matters to a factual judgement, however, it still needs to be checked against photographs, records and other people's accounts.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15047596/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-018-1545-3
Discover more from Geoffrey Chen
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.