Monday, 23 January 2012

Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?








Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.


  1. Yes, but the phenomenologically interesting thing about olfactory memory is the way it can transport you back over many years - as in Proust's and your own example. Testing people after one week just doesn't cut it, although I suppose it does provide a good baseline for the follow-up study. I look forward to seeing the real results in five or ten years' time!
    (Another interesting thing to test would be tactile memory: a few months ago I revisited the street where I grew up, for the first time in many years. I was surprised - and a little frustrated - by how visually unfamiliar it seemed. Yet when I ran my hand along the stone wall of the church at the bottom of the street, a wall that I had touched many times as a child, it felt exactly the same and it was as though I was standing there as a child once again.)

  2. Hi Gordon - you're absolutely right. The timescale is a major weakness of the study and in fairness the authors do acknowledge that problem in their discussion. Also really interesting to hear about that tactile memory experience you had. I wonder if the point about Proustian memories isn't to do with one sensory modality more than another, but something to do with the uniqueness of the original sensory experience. If you've never felt a wall like that since your childhood, perhaps it makes sense that feeling it again transported you back in time?

  3. A casual whiff of fresh white glue always takes me back to the summer of 1975. I imagine a play list of songs, the dim lights of the lower level of our home and the complicated balsa and tissue-paper bi-plane that I built that summer and flew in the park across the street from our home. The music doesn't do it, the lighting doesn't do it. Looking at pictures of the house and the park don't immediately bring to mind the same memories, but the smell of Elmer's glue always does.

  4. I think it would have been interesting if they did a seperate study using male participants. I understand their write off of using both genders mixed in one experiment, but it would be interesting to see if males had a similar preference or different vs other males.

  5. Anonymous4:38 pm

    From a personal POV music can definitely transport me back, particularly if it's a song I haven't listened to for a number of years but listened to a lot over a certain period of my life.

    The example with the wall is also interesting. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that.

  6. I think that uniqueness of the sensory experience is key - you can choose to listen to a song again, and gradually rid it of its associations, but it's hard to access the exact same smell. Also, the memories that people are talking about when they talk about smell are much richer, more personal, and longer-lasting, than what happened in a film. Smell seems to take one back to an era, rather than to one specific event.

