Last update: May 12, 2016
Colored pencils, chocolate cake, freshly cut grass in the summer, the grandparents' room where you could not enter, the scent of our mother when she hugged us ... The smells of childhood live in our mind taking on the appearance of a half-open door, the powerful link to an emotional past that we use to bring back those happy moments.
Psychologists define it “Fragrant Flashbacks”, a term with which they try to demonstrate the intimate relationship between memory, smell and our childhood. Up to the age of five, children integrate their memories through the sense of smell; however, as they grow older, sight and hearing become more and more important.
Childhood has its own way of feeling and understanding the world. We cannot replace it with that of adults: children have to fill their “experience baggage” with positive stimuli, affection and wonderful discoveries.
The theme of smells and their relationship with childhood memory is an exciting area that has not yet been studied in depth. However, scholars such as Dr. Maria Larsson reveal how in reality the nose is a real "physical access" to our emotional world. In it are hidden wonderful and unknown processes that we would like to talk to you about today.
Smells of childhood: a direct link with our emotions
Helen Fields, a medical writer for the Smithsonian Research Institute, explains in her book Fragrant Flashbacks that during early childhood, smell and taste are the most important "chemical channels" for our understanding of the world. After 5 years, we no longer feel the need to put objects in our mouth, and the nose itself ceases to be so receptive.
The sense of smell, that sense that until recently referred almost exclusively to sommeliers and perfume creators, is actually the most significant link with our brain, and is in turn capable of activating very concrete emotions and memories. Let's explore this concept together.
“There is only one smell that can compete with the fragrance of the storm: the scent of the wood of the pencils”.
– Ramón Gómez de la Serna –
But here's an even more surprising finding: according to a study carried out in the 90s at the Monell Chemical Sciences Center in Philadelphia, newborns react to odors when they are still in the womb. Through an amniocentesis, it was discovered that through the amniotic fluid the maternal diet is also perceptible in terms of odors and that the fetus therefore begins to store and learn information at a very early stage. Certainly a fascinating fact.
Just as we have seen, there are concrete reasons to believe that the sense of smell goes hand in hand with emotions. A pleasant smell does not just generate a sense of well-being or evoke positive memories, it can also push us to "consume more". For this reason, many companies have begun to use the neuromarketing technique to take advantage of the power of smell on our emotions.
Olfactory memory as a therapy
We have all been caught at least once by those smells of childhood that come suddenly, when we least expect it: we opened an old book trying a strange déjà vu or we associated the scent of cinnamon with that cake that our grandmother always made us.
We should worry about the day when we may lose that "magical path" that connects smells to our emotions. A curious fact is that one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's is the loss of smell.
- There are particularly interesting therapies aimed at stopping the loss of olfactory memory through the administration of stimuli. Such mechanisms also intend to stop, as far as possible, the loss of memory itself.
- It is well known that in the cases of Alzheimer's the emotional element continues to persist alive and active; because of this, use the sense of smell to reactivate memory through emotions, it is an interesting aspect that must certainly be taken into account.
Exercises that involve patients going for a walk when it has just rained, smelling the fragrances in the kitchen or the scent of freshly washed laundry are daily slackening with which we try to slow down the progression of the disease as much as possible; their main purpose, however, is to give the patient moments of well-being in which to evoke significant moments from his past.
The smells of his childhood, for example.
