The tantalising scent of rain or freshly baked bread: why can certain smells transport us back in time?
Simply by living among sawdust and woodchips, you learn to distinguish the different smells of wood.
- Simply by living among sawdust and woodchips, you learn to distinguish the different smells of wood.
- Years after my father retired, I was walking through the underbelly of a hospital when, completely by chance, I stumbled upon the maintenance room.
- Suddenly and unexpectedly, I was transported back to my native Toledo (in Spain), to my father’s carpentry workshop.
Smells that revive past emotions
- The scent of freshly baked cakes or bread, the chlorine of a swimming pool in summer, a salty sea breeze, coffee, and rain are smells that cause our minds to recover memories and emotions that we thought long forgotten.
- Memory is the brain’s ability to compile, store and recover information based on past experiences.
- Numerous scientific studies have tried to discover how we can recover memories and sensations from the past through a particular smell.
A direct line to emotional memory
- For this reason, a familiar smell activates the same areas of the brain as those related to emotional memory.
- In fact, scent induced memories tend to be connected to past experiences with a greater emotional significance than other senses.
The loss of smell, a sign of neurological illness
- Many of us experienced this first hand during the covid-19 pandemic, when millions of people lost their sense of smell.
- Intriguingly, many disorders linked to a loss of smell are neurodegenerative, where one of the associated symptoms is memory loss.
- LH, this reads as though all loss of smell ends up with Alzheimer’s, which i don’t think is what is meant, given the next paragraph.
Olfactory gymnastics to rehabilitate your memory?
- Consequently, in recent years there has been interest in determining the therapeutic potential of scents to stimulate and rehabilitate memory in patients with neurological disorders.
- Olfactory enrichment –smelling a range of different scents– can reverse loss of smell caused by an infection, craneal trauma, Parkinson’s and aging.
- Obviously, more research is needed to definitively conclude that regular olfactory stimulation helps to protect the brain and prevent cognitive decline or impairment.