Breathing in the Past

Aromatic memory prompts for writers

Photo by Tatiana Tochilova on Unsplash

I spent most of my adult life believing I had a terrible long-term memory. My short-term memory was just fine. I didn’t need a diary to remember appointments or present-day commitments. Faces, people, places, all good. 

But I could recall very little of my childhood or of my teenage years. Even my early adulthood was fuzzy. When my peers told tales of first concerts, first crushes, holidays past, I dredged my data bank of personal memories and came up with zilch. I honestly thought my brain was broken.

It bothered me. Our memories are cultural and generational touchstones. They age us, they unite us. They define us as belonging to one generation, to one tribe or another. We connect to one another through story. How could I call myself a writer if I didn’t have access to my own stories?

Only by deliberately seeking out tools to prompt my memory, by challenging the story I told myself of my “poor memory” did I realise that the memories were there. They just maybe weren’t the same as my peers’. Throughout my early life, I had been taught not to trust or to value my own experience. I had shut out the the good memories for fear of unlocking the bad.

This is the first of a a series of pieces here on Substack that will focus on unearthing memories and memory prompts for writers. If you’d like to receive future memory prompts, please subscribe.

My mother bought the house where she lived until last year, a concrete 1960s ex-council house that is nothing like the Victorian architecture she adores, because it had a walk in pantry. Like the one in her childhood home. Like the one her mother had in her own post-retirement home. 

On her first viewing of the house, she stepped into the pantry, closed her eyes, inhaled deeply and demanded:

“Smell it!"

So I did.

The smell is distinctive but also hard to describe, except as the universal scent of pantry. A soft and musty mix of old spices, once-fresh but long-since eaten bread and the sweetness of currants. (And probably of mouse droppings too, but we don’t talk about that.)

I can’t now say whether I was transported back to my grandmother’s house at that moment. But the smell is now indelibly linked to both my mother and my grandmother. When I opened my mother’s pantry and smelled the mouse droppings, I saw my grandmother’s house.

Whether because the scent was already in my memory, or because my mother told me about her own smell memory is now irrelevant. The connection is there. That smell is embedded in my own memory in both houses. 

So maybe we can inherit smells?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Scent-imental journeys

Smell is a powerful memory prompt for many people. It creeps up on you when you think you’re paying attention to something else. You can let the memory pass as quickly as it came. Or, you can choose to stop—to inhale—to allow yourself a moment to savour the smell and pull at the tendrils of the memory to see where it takes you. 

For me, the scent of mock orange flowers on a hot suburban street transports me in an instant from the grime and dust of city life to a balmy garden somewhere from childhood. The smell is sweet, heady, intoxicating. But the tail end of that half memory disappears behind me even as I turn to catch it, leaving only an unexpected and gentle joy. I can’t locate that memory in a single time or space. Perhaps it’s not one moment. Not one place. Perhaps it’s several, tangled into one mess of memory. 

A much clearer memory trigger for me is the smell of a fresh laundry. That always takes me back to my late teens and early twenties, cycling to college along domestic South London streets and past the Sunlight Laundry. I welcomed this moment every day and would open my nose wide, inhale deeply, stand up on my bike pedals and float on down the hill, high on a wave of fresh soap.

Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash

Nose knows best

Only recently, neurologists identified the mechanism by which smells can “trigger the brain to recreate vivivd sensory experiences from memory” [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180723155726.htm], confirming what has been known anecdotally as the “Proust effect” for many years. “We've discovered how you are able to remember the smell of your grandma's apple pie when walking into her kitchen”. 

The famously verbose Marcel Proust, whose memories were triggered by the smell of madeleines dipped in tea, spanned several hundred pages wandering through his childhood memories in the novel “À la recherché du temps perdu”  (In Search of Lost Time). All before he even got out of bed.

It’s not surprising that loss of sense of smell is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease—a symptom that can appear up to a decade before more obvious memory loss begins.

Memory and smell have a close evolutionary history. This same region of your brain that’s important for the sense of smell has a direct pathway to the hippocampus, critical for memory, which shrinks in Alzheimer's patients. 

You can’t capture and refer to smells in the way you easily capture visual moments with a camera. But you can learn to notice when a smell catches you and pay attention to where that trigger takes you. 

Memory Prompts: an olfactory odyssey

1. Pay attention to your nose

When a scent catches you, don’t rush on. Take a moment to take it in. What does it remind you of? Where does it take you?

2. Give yourself some quiet thinking time

Consider key places and times from your life. Try to conjure up the smells associated with those places and moments. Trying to evoke the smell of a particular place and time can trigger related memories.

3. Take a smell walk

You can do this around where you live now, around an old neighbourhood, in nature, or somewhere completely unfamiliar. What scents catch you? What pulls you to another time and place? Do this at different times of year to capture different scents and different memories.

4. Explore the smell in your own home

Rummage through your kitchen and bathroom cabinets. Open every jar, box and bottle, every potion and lotion and inhale. (Don’t do this with anything toxic, obviously.) What moments come to mind?

Spices by Miranda on Instagram

If you’re struggling

When I was not long out of college, I ruined my sense of smell working in a design studio and model-making workshop using all manner of toxic chemicals and spray paints and without a functioning spray booth. When we had to spray anything noxious, we’d take it out to the car park at the back of the building, in an attempt to protect our colleagues. That protection only worked so far. The dock doors that lead to the car park couldn’t be closed or we’d be locked out and spray would drift back into the studio while in winter, when we struggled to heat the place, no one wanted to leave the doors open. Or to struggle in and out of winter clothing for every tiny puff of spray mount.

I spent three years on and off in that environment. It was only when I left, and went to work in the nature conservation sector, that I realised my sense of smell was severely damaged. Things I’d taken for granted for many years, things I’d lost my connection to while working in the design world, I found hard to reconnect with. The smells I’d loved when I was a student — the smell of bluebell woods in full flower, of fresh cut grass, or wet mud and grazing cattle — I knew they were there in front of me. I just couldn’t actually smell them.

In time, my sense of smell recovered. But I’ve never forgotten that experience of anosmia. 

And I know that, even when the smell is unreachable because I have a cold, or because the seasons are wrong or I’m just in the wrong place, I can revisit the sense of those smells in my own mind. 

Revisiting smells in your mind is a skill that can be developed with practice. Here are a few techniques that you can try:

Use visualisation

Close your eyes and try to visualise the scent that you want to recreate. Imagine the smell in as much detail as possible, from its intensity to its underlying notes. What colours do you associate with the smell you want to reach? Try to create a mental picture of the scent, as if you are seeing it with your mind's eye. 

For example, if I were trying to capture and recreate the smell of orange blossom, the white of its petals and its deep orange interior connect me to the gentle warmth of its scent. Fresh but with hint of something more dense at its centre.

Use association

Think of other scents or smells that are similar to the one you want to recreate. For example, if you want to recreate the smell of fresh-cut grass, you might think of other outdoor smells like flowers, earth, and trees. This can help trigger memories and associations that can bring the desired scent to mind.

Use other memories

Try to recall a time when you smelled the scent you want to recreate. Recall as many details as possible, such as where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing. This can help you recreate the scent in your mind's (nose’s?) eye.

Use your other senses

Engage your other senses to help recreate the scent. For example, if you are trying to remember the scent of fresh-baked bread, you might imagine the texture of the warm bread, the sound and feel of the crust crunching in your mouth, and the taste of the melting butter. This can help to create a more vivid and realistic mental image of the scent.

Remember, recreating smells in your mind takes practice and patience. Don't get discouraged if you don't get it right the first time. With time and practice, you can develop the ability to recreate scents in your mind more easily and vividly.

REFERENCES

Olfactory Memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory 

Recent research https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322579.php 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/brain-babble/201501/smells-ring-bells-how-smell-triggers-memories-and-emotions 

The Psychological Impact of Smell Losshttp://www.fifthsense.org.uk/psychology-and-smell/ 

Olfactory memories are closely linked to space and time. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322579.php

What are you most abiding olfactory memories? What people and places do they bring to mind? Use the sensory prompts above and let me know in the comments what small stories emerged.

This is the first of a new series of posts on memory prompts for writers. Let me know in the comments if there are particular types of memory you’d like help to access and I’ll try to include it in future posts.