you're walking through a hardware store
one day when all of a sudden you catch a
whiff something you haven't smelled in
years
somehow the scent of glue immediately
takes you back to your kindergarten
classroom and you spend the next couple
of minutes wondering what happened to
that kid who used to eat all that paste
you just experience what's known as odor
vocht autobiographical memory but it
simply a smell made you remember
something from your past and it happened
because of the way smells and memories
are hardwired into your brain
lots of different cues like sights or
sounds or even someone describing
something or telling a story unrelated
to your story they can trigger memories
the memories linked to smells are often
stronger and more vivid and studies have
shown that they also tend to be memories
of your early life often before you were
10 years old which is weird because
adults usually experience what's known
as a reminiscence bump when they don't
remember much from before their
adolescence but smells are really good
at bringing those memories back
these memories tend to be more
perceptual rather than conceptual so you
remember a particular sensation rather
than a bunch of facts about something
that happened and researchers have come
up with some theories why memories
triggered by smells are so odd there's a
big difference between the way your body
handles sight sound taste and touch and
the way it processes smells those other
senses are all routed through the
thalamus the part of your brain that
sends them off into the appropriate
processing centers but smells bypass all
that once they're detected by receptors
in your nose the signal heads straight
to your olfactory bulb
the smell analyzing region in your brain
and that area happens to be connected to
the amygdala and the hippocampus which
are parts of the brain that help handle
memory and emotion so it's possible that
when you smelled that glue in
kindergarten the signal got tangled up
with memories of building blocks and
apple juice and when you smelled it
again later you remembered not just the
glue but also some of the associated
memories like that weird kid who ate the
paste in 2013 a group of European
psychologists tested this whole
phenomenon using functional magnetic
resonance imaging first they presented
subjects with 20 different strong
specific odors like garlic whiskey and
leather then for each person they
identified the two that elicited the
oldest positive memories then it was
time to scan their brains each subject
was
presented with their two experimental
smells plus two generic control smells
flowers and citrus they were also shown
some verbal cues which were just the
names of the smells projected onto a
screen the researchers found that both
types of triggers tended to activate the
regions of the brain associated with
memory but while the verbal cues lit up
parts of the brain that were responsible
for processing smells the smells
themselves were more strongly connected
to emotional processing centers some of
the participants associated the smells
with memories from before they were 10
while others remembered things from when
they were between 10 and 20 and
depending on which time frame the
memories fell into their brains tended
to use different regions to recall them
the earlier memory is lit up the
orbitofrontal cortex which is connected
to perception later ones on the other
hand tended to activate the left
inferior frontal gyrus which handles
more conceptual memories so can you use
your noses superpowers to help you
remember things for your next big exam
probably not smells tend to evoke early
perceptive memories of events not
concepts so the scent of glue might make
you remember playing with construction
paper in kindergarten but your smell
memory will not help you memorize
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