The tantalising scent of rain or freshly baked bread: why can certain smells transport us back in time?
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Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Psychiatry, Smell, Infection, COVID-19, Neuron, VIP, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, Olfactory mucosa, Magic, Noise, Anosmia, Schizophrenia, DSM-IV codes, Tears, Ageing, LH, Brain, Emotion, Alcoholism, Research, MCI, Disorder, Dementia, Cerebral cortex, Thought, Wood, Thalamus, Walking, Swimming, Olfactory nerve, Patient, Risk, Memory, Chlorine, Limbic system, Happiness, Coffee, Amnesia, Mortality, Hand, Rain, Bread, Hippocampus, Olfactory bulb, Aroma compound, Electric battery, Computer data storage, Pharmaceutical industry
Simply by living among sawdust and woodchips, you learn to distinguish the different smells of wood.
Key Points:
- 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.