Memory for a lifetime

   1 - Introduction
   2 - Sight
   3 - Hearing
   4 - Taste
    5 - Smell
   6 - Touch

  1 - Sight
  2 - Hearing
  3 - Taste
  4 - Smell
  5 - Touch

Choice of questions
…and the answer

   1 – One or several memories
   2 – Memory and attention
   3 – Biology of memory
   4 – The memory function
   5 – Memory and its environment
   6 – Our senses and their memory

Chapter 6 : Our senses and their memory

Presentation

- - - - - - Smell

Unexpected, fugitive, a perfume conjures up memories. Odours awaken our senses. Our forebears used their sense of smell much more than we do, and let it guide them. At birth a baby is capable of recognising its mother’s smell. If unused, this sense fades, even though we can recognise an average of 10 000 different smells.

Sherlock Holmes is famous for his keen nose. In “The Hound of the Baskervilles” he identifies a woman by the perfume on her writing paper.

Odours emanate from our surroundings and our bodies, but we often lack words to describe them. How can you describe an odour to someone who has never smelt it ?

How do we smell ?

The sense of smell is associated with breathing. We smell by inhaling. The perfume molecules pass through the nasal fossae, behind the ridge of the nose. Here, they are absorbed by the mucous receptor, which has microscopic hairs called cilia.

Five million cells send signals to the olfactory bulb. Unlike the neurones of the eyes or ears, these neurones in the nose are spontaneously restored after about thirty days.

The sense of smell is closely associated with emotion. A fragrance can set off feelings of nostalgia, images, strong sensations, even before we are conscious of it. “To play on the heart strings, odours are more reliable than what we see or hear.” (Kipling)

There are several categories of smells :

* mint

*floral

*ethereal

*musky

*resinous

*fetid

*sour

Many authors have written about these odours : Proust and Colette recalling the gardens of their childhood, Joyce, the memories of baby urine, Dostoievski the smell of St Petersburg… Baudelaire immersed in the realm of odours until his soul floated away on the wings of a perfume, the way the souls of other men float on the wings of music.

We can also quote Patrick Suskind and his novel “Perfume”, where the hero, living in 18 th century Paris, has a prodigious sense of smell, but has no human smell himself.
Loss of the sense of smell is called ANOSMIA. A malady difficult to live with. Possibly due to an allergy, an infection, a brain tumor, exposure to toxic chemicals…

The habit of imposing salt-free diets was a terrible experience, literally spoiling a life by depriving a person of one of our few daily pleasures, that of savouring food.
Some people have a highly-developed sense of smell, required in some professions, like that of creating perfumes.

The memory and the sense of smell:

Like taste, odours always have an emotional dimension: we like them or we dislike them. This sensitivity is individual: people can like, detest or be totally indifferent to certain smells. This sensitivity probably has its origin in certain moments of the person’s life story.

A waning of interest in smells often means a lessening of interest in daily life. It can be a sign of depression, more or less recognized. It indicates a withdrawal that has the effect of diminished memory.

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