To Smell And Back

The most undervalued of senses is also the one most intimately connected to pleasure, emotion and memory…

“It’s Too Darn Hot” was how Cole Porter immortalised the brutal Baltimore heatwave of 1948 when temperatures topped 100° Fahrenheit 3 days in a row, a record that wouldn’t be broken for 75 years.

Over here in Blighty, it has taken a mere fifty years for this summer to exceed many of the meteorological milestones of 1976 when we had 14 days above 30.°

Fifty years on and I am once again participating in our national sport, the fifty metre watering can sprint, only now it is my own garden, not my parents, their irrigational activity now being  strictly Cloud-based, but I have another celestial compass for steering between those half century of summers….

The smell of sun cream

I only need to open a bottle of Nivea to be carried to the impossibly blue waters of the Aegean or the surging surf of Andalusia, the earthy petrichor of a  Sumatra Squall hitting Singapore or the dry heat rising off the rocks in the Grand Canyon.

But smells are a two-way street…

Several years ago I attended a networking event at Google where we were given a sneak preview of ‘the next big thing’ to emerge from the Page-Brin garage, a programme that allowed smells to be generated, at a key-stroke, from any laptop in the land. On the glossy promotional video, the software’s lead developer waxed lyrical about how he wanted to recreate the smell of his puppy-dog, in order to trigger warm fluffy feelings… and then they shared the release date, April The First.  I joined the resounding moan that followed.  What I should have told the tricksters was: “But I’ve already got one! ”

Because just as the smell of sun cream might carry me back to the deck of a kaiki as the breeze bears down oregano, rosemary and thyme from the monastery capped mountains… I only need to picture bacon sizzling on the skillet to summon up that delicious aroma of salty-sweet pigginess.  At least that’s how it feels to me, but there’s a lot more happening under the bonnet, as some interesting 2012 research points out.*

“Odours are suggested to be represented in two separate interactive systems in the brain: one perceptual and one semantic, of which the latter is also related to verbalization. Neuroimaging studies support this idea, although some behavioural data point to colocation of the two systems.  The semantic representation of odours is considered to depend not only on verbalization but also the context the odour occurred in.  Thus odours are believed to be organised in an associative verbal network in terms of the episodes that they relate to in an individual’s past.”

So in the above example, by imagining the word "bacon" I activate the concept of bacon in my semantic memory. But instead of retrieving the memory of the smell directly, my little grey cells may reconstruct a familiar episode, such as school lunchtimes at Mick’s café on Wormwood Scrubs, in which the bacon is just one part of the retrieved experience… bread rolls, brown sauce, Nine Card Brag and B & H.

It's a bit like sticking a pin in a map -using a memory to locate a smell, or using a smell to locate a memory- but sometimes those pins go missing.  And sometimes tragically. The same article points out that:

‘In the clinic, OI (Odour Identification) tests have been shown to have high sensitivity and specificity for predicting Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage.’

But why is my bottle of Nivea so much more powerful in evoking memories than say the taste of a salt-baked dorada or the photo of a Roman Amphitheatre at dawn?

An influential 2016 paper** gives the following explanation:

‘Odor-evoked memories are exceptionally viscerally involving because the neuroanatomy of olfaction has a privileged and unique connection to the neural substrates of emption and associative learning. The primary olfactory cortex includes the amygdala, which processes emotional experience and emotional memory, as well as the hippocampus, which is involved in associative learning. Thus, the mere act of smelling activates the amygdala-hippocampal complex. Moreover, during the process of recollecting an odour-evoked autobiographical memory, the amygdala is more activated than when similar odors that do not evoke a memory are smelled. Additionally, the secondary olfactory cortex (the orbitofrontal cortex) is the cortical area responsible for assigning affective value to stimuli and for determining the reinforcement value of stimuli in general. Finally, unlike other sensory systems where neural processing is directly integrated in the thalamus prior to processing in the cortex, olfactory information is indirectly processed through the medio-dorsal nucleus of the thalamus which appears to play a role in modulating attention to odors, and the primary processing of odors occurs instead in the amygdala-hippocampal complex of the limbic system.  None of our other senses have this level of targeted connection with the area of the brain that process emotion, associative learning, and memory.’

I have searched high and low for some popular song lyrics that directly express this vital association between smell and memory, but the closest I can get to it is:

“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?                                                                                        Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme                                                                                        Remember me to one who lives there                                                                                             She once was a true love of mine”

And even the West Midlands Chapter of The Business of Pleasure could only come up with:

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” (Hamlet Act IV, Scene 5)

So maybe there’s an Ivor or Grammy awaiting the first brave soul to tie the two together?

Me, I’m going to stop now and smell the roses

...and maybe even water them

DT                                                                                                                                                          30 30 July 2026

 *The human brain representation of odour identification Grete Kjelvik, Hallvard R. Evensmoen, Veronika Brezova and Asta K. Håberg Journal of Neurophysiology Volume 108.

 **The role of Odor-Evoked Memory in Psychological and Physiological Health Rachel S. Hertz Brain Science, July 2016.