Why can scents awaken memories?

A scent suddenly like a time portal immediately takes you from a busy street back to a quiet place you've been to many years ago. Science says fragrance can awaken long-forgotten memories.

But why is that? The short answer is that the brain areas that handle aroma, memory and emotions are closely linked . In fact, the brain has a very special way of controlling smell, different from controlling other senses.

A scent is the chemical particles that enter your body through the nose to reach the olfactory bulb of the brain. Here the sense of smell is processed so that the brain can understand, then the brain cells transfer this signal to a very small area in the brain called the amygdala to process emotions, followed by recovery. seahorses right next to where the process of learning and memory formation takes place.

Emotions, memories and smells are extremely connected.

John McGann, an associate professor at the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, says the scent goes straight to the brain's emotional and emotional centers, and all the factors that work. moving through the other senses goes through an area of ​​the brain called the hypothalamus, which functions as a 'switchboard', shutting down, dividing information about things we see, hear, feel to Other areas of the brain. The scent skips this 'switchboard' and goes straight to the olfactory bulb and then to the amygdala and hippocampus in just one or two synapses.

Therefore, emotions, memories and smells are extremely closely related. This is why scents can awaken memories and create emotions and create more associations than perceived by other senses. For example, a familiar but long-forgotten scent can also make people cry.

Rachel Herz, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA, says scents are truly special because they can evoke memories that other ways cannot. can do. The daily sight of people and familiar surroundings does not make you remember specific memories.

For example, going into the living room is a recurring hormone, an action you do over and over, so it won't recall a specific moment that happened in the room. there. On the contrary, if there is a scent related to something that happened in your past and you never stumbled across the scent again then you probably will never remember what happened. out there.

In general, when a person smells something related to an event that had a significance to them in the past, they will first have an emotional reaction and then recall the incident. But sometimes the memory does not really return clearly, the person may have a feeling of something that happened but did not remember what they were going through. This partly depends on the context.

Imagine a person walking down the street, smelling a scent that smelled for the first time decades ago and an emotion appears. If he first smells this smell into a completely different situation, like in a movie theater, then recalling that memory is quite difficult.

The brain uses context to name information and to retrieve that memory. A moment later, if he still smelled the scent it would escape the old memory and no longer be able to recall that memory. In addition, the memories recalled by scents also have the same weaknesses as other memories, which may also be inaccurate and recorded by all flashbacks.

However, due to the strong emotional bonds that memories bring, people who remember something brought about by scents often believe their memories are accurate.

The relationship between scent and memory is also linked to memory health problems . A decreased sense of smell may be a manifestation of age-related memory impairment, or it may be due to Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

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