A Smell Can Take You Back to Being Seven

Crayons, for some people. Wet wool, a certain soap, bread in an oven for others. Most people have at least one.

One breath of it, with no warning at all, and the present goes quiet. Someone in the next aisle opens a box of crayons, and for a moment the store is gone. There's a wooden floor, a coloring book, a window full of afternoon.

A photograph doesn't work that way. You look at an old snapshot and you remember. A smell doesn't just remind you of the place. For a moment, it actually puts you back in it.

Part of the reason is wiring. Sight and sound make a couple of stops before they reach the part of the brain that handles feeling. Smell goes almost straight there.

And it reaches further back than anything else. Ask older adults to call up memories from a word, a picture or a smell, and the words and pictures mostly land in the teenage years. The smells land earlier, before age ten. The memories that come back through smell also tend to be the ones people have thought about least.

That matters more than it sounds. The stories we tell again and again get polished, and each telling smooths them a little more. A smell can bring back a memory nobody has handled in all those years — rough edges and all. It reaches feelings no amount of trying to remember would find.

And what comes back with it is more than a memory.

It's the sense that the child on that floor and the person reading this are the same person.

The word for that is nostalgia, and for some it has a reputation it doesn't deserve. Some people dismiss it by calling it living in the past. Yet it really seems to work the other way around. When a scent stirs it up, people come away feeling more connected to others, more hopeful about what's ahead, and surer that their lives mean something. Scents stir up memories and feelings even more readily than music does.

Which is why the scent that matters most in your home probably isn't the one sold with that promise on the label.

It's yours. The scent of pine. Cold cream. Lilac twining on a fence. Tomato leaves rubbed on your fingers. Starch on a pressed shirt. Nobody else's list will work, because nobody else was there.