Remembrance of Scents Past

Summary

But Marks argues that smell is one of the most potent ways to give museum visitors a visceral sense of the past, and to help them remember what they read or saw in an exhibit. Among the scents she designed for the docks exhibition was one inspired by a woman’s memory, in the oral histories, of her dockworker father’s damp woollen coat drying on an electric fire in the nineteen-sixties. Marks thought that the coat might have smelled like her own grandfather’s wool flat cap. He’d been a London cabdriver, and she’d loved it when he would pick her up from school in his black taxi and bring her along to hang out with his fellow-drivers. She’d kept his cap after he died. When Marks shared the odor she’d devised with some local families who’d lived near the docks, one woman found it so familiar and nostalgic that she cried and started excitedly describing the wallpaper in the house she’d grown up in. Marks told me, “If you get a smell and it sparks off a memory like that, you know you’ve got it right.”There are physiological reasons why smell can trigger memories more effectively than other senses. The olfactory cortex is closely connected to the amygdala, a part of the brain that processes emotions, and to the hippocampus, a key region for memory. Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University who studies smell, told me that it is the only sensory system in which a sensation is produced and consciously experienced in the same regions of the brain where emotions and memories are made. “This uniquely direct neuroanatomical link,” Herz has written, helps explain why “odor-evoked memories” can be so emotionally potent. The flood of memories unleashed by Proust’s madeleine was as much a function of smell as of taste. Marks noted to me that, when we recall things we’ve seen or heard, we are always remembering the most recent time we remembered it, as well, and so the initial impression “dilutes over time—whereas with smell and taste it’s the same primal stimulus again.” Snif...