Isn’t it strange how one of your senses can bring back a memory of someone or some time or place?
The smell of something or hearing a sound or tasting something that takes you to another time in your life.
There are two smells that I associate with my grandmother Cooke. Smelling a gardenia makes me think of her Jungle Gardenia perfume. The original one from 1939 made by Tuvache’, not the nasty one made later by Coty. And Dove soap. When I first started buying my own toiletries in college the smell of Dove reminded me of her.
My friend Denise Starnes and I had a conversation about this topic a while back. She and I both think of her mother when either of us gets just a whiff of cigarette smoke. Just a slight whiff, not days old smoky beer joint smoke. There were a few ladies in mom’s bridge club who smoked and Loray Miller was one of them. I guess I’ve associated that smell with her from my very early days when it was mom’s turn to host.
Discover magazine had a story about this that I found interesting, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have powerful smell potential. A 2014 study showed that we can distinguish at least 1 trillion different odors — up from previous estimates of a mere 10,000.
Awareness of our innate smelling abilities, however, is complicated because the human language doesn’t have words for a trillion smells, and much of smelling happens under the radar of our consciousness. Unlike our other senses, the olfactory nerves do not proceed directly to the brain’s thalamus, the gateway to consciousness. Instead, information feeds from the nose to cortical areas to arouse emotions and memories without our awareness. When it comes to smells, people can be influenced and not realize it.”
And that’s why movie theaters make sure you smell popcorn when you enter, and why if you’re in a mall the Cinnabon smell is wafting all around. They both make you hungry. And coffee shops smelling of roasted beans.
There’s a whole scent-related business these days. People who decide what your store should smell like to make people buy more of your product. An interesting field of work to make sure your emotions are getting involved.
There’s one place that I think gets this very wrong. Have you ever been into a Kirklands? I can barely spend any time in that store because I think the smell is overwhelming. I went into the one in Clear Lake several times but I never bought anything because I just wanted to get out as quickly as possible.
There are even grocery stores that have “fried chicken smell” which is completely made of chemicals, not fried chicken. When you smell something you love to eat your digestive system starts gearing up for it and suddenly you’re hungry.
And when we’re deprived of our sense of smell, like when we have a cold, food doesn’t taste as good because taste and smell go hand in hand.
There are even “aroma patches” you can wear that supposedly make you eat less. And I should probably do some research on that with all this extra COVID weight I’ve put on. But I have serious doubts about it working on me.
I even read somewhere that after you shake hands with someone if you smell your hand within 30 seconds of the handshake you are better able to remember their name since we all have a different smell just like fingerprints. Although I don’t recommend doing that during a pandemic. Actually it sounds kind of nasty in general so I wouldn’t recommend it at all.
Whoever thought our sense of smell could have so much to do with our emotions – good, bad or otherwise – that people can trick you into doing something without you even noticing?
Everything olfactory you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask.
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