Scent: What the link between smell and memory teaches us about the link between love and logic.
Did you know that if we link a smell to a certain memory, at least three parts of the brain are active simultaneously? As opposed to sight and memory, where only two parts are triggered?
When a memory is triggered by a smell, we attach a stronger emotion to it. I must admit that the studies done by Dr Herz at Brown university lacked female participants, but it does seem to be conclusive. I read about a woman who was raped in America. She couldn’t remember too much of the incident, but the smell of a certain hotdog vendor on the beach one day had her hysterically remembering details about the attack. It turned out that the rapist had eaten a hot dog from that vendor several minutes before attacking the woman. She could then give the police a better idea of what he looked like and his height, eye colour etc. The smell of the hotdogs triggered a stronger emotional reaction to the traumatic experience and in turn gave a ‘better quality’ memory, with more details, than any other method of recall used.
It is important to remember that memory problems lie in ‘retrieval’ mostly. The memories are there and can be recalled for example during hypnosis or under the influence of mind-altering drugs. It’s the retrieval that we struggle with. Think of your brain as a hard drive, and simultaneously a cloud-saving website. Your hard drive has less space but is easier to access fast. Your everyday basic thoughts, the you that is awake right now, is in charge of a selection of memories most often used for example. Basically the you after a cup of coffee! Your cloud is controlled by the sub-conscious and instead of storing an important selection of memories, the cloud stores absolutely everything. Now the subconscious is ONLY emotion, no logic, no maths, no sense. Only feelings. And this entity oversees the logical and empirical evidence that is our memories. All our memories. Every single smell and sight and audio ever. It then makes sense that we sometimes struggle with remembering things! It is as if a love-sick teenager has been made bank manager. But the two go together and one is nothing without the other. Without the subconscious memories cannot be retrieved. Without memories, we would have no use for a subconscious. That is your brain. Two opposite ends of the spectrum, having to work in perfect harmony. We often think of our brains as either ruled by logic or ruled by emotion. Should we follow the heart or the brain? Well, considering that for us to retrieve a memory, we need both heart and brain, we can easily conclude that the two can and should work in harmony rather than fight.
Can using smells to trigger certain memories help Alzheimer patients? As far as I know, no studies have been done regarding this, but an increasingly poorer sense of smell can indicate the onset of Alzheimer’s. There seems to be a link, but most likely the results cannot be reversed by following the link in reverse, for example letting someone with early onset Alzheimer’s smell different smells and remembering childhood stories for say, an hour a day, will not combat the effects of the Alzheimer’s nor slow it down. I do think if other memory tests have proven invalid at this stage, then using scent may not be helpful either. Then again, it just takes the first psychiatrist to try something and you might have a small weapon against an awful condition.
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