Smell: The Skeleton Key to Memory (A Natural History of the Senses)

 Smell: The Skeleton Key to Memory (A Natural History of the Senses)

By Calliope Mills

As much as I would love to say that the most powerful sense to me is taste–due to my obsession with food and constant pursuit of my next culinary undertaking–or hearing–as I find comfort, creativity and great joy in dancing to music–I find that smell, is truly what keeps me on my toes in everyday life. 

    As Diane Ackerman says in her opening paragraph to her chapter on this sense, “Nothing is more memorable than a smell” (16), I find this to be quite true. It is almost always a scent that has me catapulted back, days, months, or decades into memory.

A whiff of one specific type of antique furniture, and I am transported back to my grandmother's living room. Like I am in that moment looking out her window, seeing a sunset over the ocean at the bottom of the hill, listening to my cousins run about, wreaking havoc throughout her old hallways, and I can feel a worn sheepskin rug under my fingertips, all faster than I can blink. 

Or I open the wrong spice jar, and I am in Morocco, on a walk to see sunset, and am paralyzed by a group of stray dogs, seconds away from ripping one of their own to pieces, its whines of fear and pain making my stomach churn–a horrible juxtaposition to the delicate first rays of light illuminating the little blue town of Chefchaouen. 

I think that I find the sense of smell to possess such strength due to its nature to tie in the other senses with it, as you cannot have a memory without stirring up pictures, sounds, feels, or even tastes alongside it (in my experience, at least). Although you could argue that all the senses are interconnected, it doesn’t really matter which you pick as they will find a way to ride in tandem. I find that smell has a further and stronger sensual reach as a starting point.  

Although songs can remind you of dark times, or an embarrassing moment at a party, or maybe the beginning of a friendship, and taste can bring you back to childhood with flavors of your family’s cooking, I find their effects to be a bit less forceful and immediate; the memories they stir up taking their time to grow into a flushed out picture or sequence, building slowly until you’re enveloped in that point of time. Smells on the other hand, I find I have a knee jerk reaction to, at times even whipping my head around to find where it is emanating from, or stopping in my tracks, instantly plunged into the past. Something like smelling the cologne of an ex will have my adrenaline spiking as I don’t know if I want them, or a stranger, to be the harborer of the scent, and like someone has just pressed “play” on a supercut of our relationship. 

I also find the impact of smell-triggered memories to be much longer lasting than of the other senses. Not only will I be hurled into reminiscing in the moment, but I will then be in and out of that wavelength for sometimes days at a time. I think it is in part as it is hard to satisfy a craving for a smell, the way the other senses can be realized upon–you can eat the food you remember, hug a loved one, listen to something on repeat or look at the object (or a picture of it), that you feel the need to revisit. Smells, although provokers of memory, often do not have a way to be satiated–in my own experience at least–and just lead to confusion or seeking out the memory they have resurfaced through a different sensual avenue. 

In her writing, Ackerman also states that “females score higher than males in sensitivity to odors, regardless of age group” (41). I wonder if that is part of the reason I find this sense so impactful–a biological predisposition to its importance. I also would be curious to know if other female born individuals consider it to be an significant factor in their perception of the world, and connection to the past–as Ackerman seems to experience as well: this whole chapter being filled with many stories of her lightening-speed transportation to a vivid memory and other realm off of a simple scent.