The Memory in Smelling

Here’s one question that may interest you: Have you ever smelled something that reminded you of an object from your childhood that you had completely forgotten about for a long time? When I first read this online, I was immediately intrigued by the possibility that a connection between our sense of smell and memories does exist. As bizarre as this might sound, I was recently at a mattress store, and the smell of one of the displayed blankets suddenly reminded me of a pillow that I was obsessed with in elementary school. The concept of the sense of smell somehow awakening long-gone memories piqued my interest; I decided to do some research about it, and I discovered that there actually is an incredible area in neuroscience dedicated to understanding the science behind such a connection.

One of the first articles that I found related to this was from BBC, and it stated that humans have a particularly hard time clearly communicating the smells that we can differentiate. In the case of the other four senses, it’s easy to describe how something, for example, sounds or looks like, but our smells aren’t so easy to delineate. As a result, we end up labeling our smells according to what we associate them with, often offering vague comparisons such as “It smells like potatoes.” From a non-scientific perspective, I tried to understand why this was. Does the English language have fewer adjectives dedicated to smelling than to seeing or hearing? Do people who speak different languages have a much easier time explaining what they smell to others? In addition, I wondered whether it’s possible that what we smell calls back long-forgotten memories because we often describe them with metaphors and similes and other associations that are dependent on our personal experiences. Could such an association act as an intermediary between a smell that I’m describing and a completely unrelated memory?

Despite the confusion and complexity that usually define neuroscience, there does seem to be an explanation for why the sense of smell is so different from other senses and why a connection between our memories and smells possibly exists. According to this piece published by Macalester University, all of our senses other than that of smell start at the sense organs and move to a neural organ called a thalamus before moving on throughout the rest of the brain. However, instead of going to the thalamus, our smell information travels directly to the olfactory bulb. Furthermore, another scientific fact that may explain the oddity is that the odors that we smell are molecular while the sounds and light that we hear and see, respectively, are waves. The most compelling information that provides evidence of a connection between memories and smell is that the olfactory bulb forms a direct link with the amygdala and hippocampus, which are colloquially known as the organs that form and store our memories.

Sure, these scientific discoveries do explain why our smells and memories sometimes get entangled, but they raise a whole new array of questions, including, “How come the connection occurs sporadically, meaning that I get reminded of a memory from a smell very rarely?” Personally, I'm not satisfied with the easy answer that I received from researching about this seemingly complex smell-memory relationship, despite its incredible implications for developing smell-based treatments for patients suffering from depression and dementia, according to this article from the New York Times. But since neuroscience and topics related to memory are still so nebulous and hard to explain on a fundamental level, I might need to wait much longer for a clear answer that's not just scientific. As for now, I guess I'll make a note to myself that whenever I feel a bit nostalgic, I just have to sniff a little harder.  

To learn more about the neuroscience behind the smell-memory relationship, you can read this piece.

Source: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/04/science/05angier02_600.jpg

Reflections on Blogging

Because I haven’t been a particularly active blogger this past semester, I believe that I still have not completely developed a unique personality for myself on my blog, “What’s Memory?” While the website’s character draws from my lens, memory, I feel that my writing doesn’t yet have a voice that any reader would immediately attribute to me. When I first started blogging for my sophomore English class, my writing was very quasi-academic because the rules for posting and interacting with the audience were very lax. As a result, I was surprised to learn this semester that becoming a proficient blogger actually had many prerequisites not limited to having thought clarity and very good writing skills, such as doing outside research. For example, while my blog does have posts that are cohesive in themselves, “What’s Memory” seems disjointed overall, despite my supposedly connecting theme of “memory.” One post would discuss the concept of memory in photojournalism while the next would illustrate how my past perceptions of Africa were debunked in class.

Besides those personal concerns, I’ve had an incredible experience writing my blog so far because it has made my learning especially in the Academy much more dynamic. While a majority of my posts were based off of ideas in English that piqued my interest, I also had to analyze such concepts via a lens of memory, which always made blogging challenging but rewarding. As a result of my efforts, I came up with and elaborated on some of my best ideas in several posts, most notably “Dealing with Brainwashing.”

In this post, I analyzed the eerie similarity between the Tiananmen Square and the Rabaa al-Adawiya Massacres as well as each respective government’s response to each event. At first, the only main connection I could find was that both the Chinese and Egyptian governments were using brainwashing and censorship tactics to blind their populations from learning about the massacres. However, I started to think in terms of solutions and wondered whether the social-media methods that Chinese activists are using to educate the Chinese population about Tiananmen Square can also be used in Egypt in order to make sure that the memory of Rabaa al-Adawiya does not disappear. Furthermore, I realized that since issues of brainwashing and censorship are so prevalent today, especially in Iran and North Korea, I wrote “how the Egyptians will work to successfully preserve the memory of Rabaa al-Adawiya may provide some clues about how people should combat, in this day and age, imposed efforts to intentionally revise history.”

After I looked back at my posts, I realized that most of the ideas that I developed in them were not actually pre-planned. I noticed that a majority of them arose only after I wrote a particular paragraph or sentence. Although I wish that my ideas and concepts weren’t spontaneous, I realized that especially in blogging, I’ve found it challenging to develop a comprehensive outline describing how I would structure and write a post. Perhaps this can be attributed to my misconception that the posts on professional blogs are all just rough drafts. Indeed, for the first couple of posts, I wrote directly in the word spaces rather than completing rough drafts as well as multiple revisions in separate word documents. Now, I do write and rewrite my posts in word documents, but I still come up with my best ideas spontaneously. Maybe this is just the way my brain naturally works in writing, but I hope to work on controlling my ideas before I start blogging.

            While I should reflect only on what I’ve learned from blogging, I think this piece would be incomplete without acknowledging my experience reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. On numerous occasions, I looked at my classmates’ blogs for some inspiration in composing my own posts. The insights that many elaborated from combining their unique lenses and topics discussed in Academy classes were often so incredible that I had to comment. For example, Matthew Bondy wrote an interesting post on how aid-giving can be paradoxically self-serving rather than entirely altruistic. This resulted in a comment session about providing aid vertically or horizontally and whether intentions behind providing aid really matter.

            Despite my hardships adapting to the numerous rules of blogging this semester, my experiences writing online have been very rewarding, challenging me to juxtapose ideas discussed in class and concepts in memory. With the intellectual exercises that came with writing online, blogging has definitely been a very integral part of English. 

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