The moment she mentioned it, the strange sweet-cold smell of sugar beets that fell down from a lorry and burst into pieces filled my nose. I hadn't thought of it for ages.
Contrary to scientists I believe that one can remember smells - the dark-alluring smell of box in the sun, the mellow smell of warm mashed potatoes with milk and bran to feed sows, or foul water in rain barrels that weren't used permanently - but it is very difficult to describe them (Well, Patrick Süßkind must have succeeded in "Perfume" - but that I never read).
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." wrote H.L.Mencken
PS: Strange: the date announcing my post is wrong (it is Sunday) - but then: Time... does it matter? Dissolves like smells...
Do scientists really say we cannot remember smells? I'm sure we can. Otherwise how could we claim to recognize a smell that we have encountered before? And when I read your wonderful description of box in the summer sun, it took me right back there, outside my friend Ginny's house waiting for her on my bicycle.
ReplyDeleteFirst: I'm glad you are here!
DeleteOf course you are right: the hippocampus controls memory, and the piriformen cortex processes them. Long time neuroscientist believed that a scent stimulates a special memory (Marcel Proust!), now J. Gottfried from the University College London found out that also a photo or words can stimulate the recollection of a scent - if I understood it right (and that was what I wanted to say in the post) one is not able to imagine a scent without a memory of it.
I am not sure how I recollect scent, is it just a nebulous memory or real or could I be visualizing it, as with my memory I "see" everything? It is confusing to think about it for me. But I do recollect scent of because as Shawn says how would we know a scent that we have encountered before if not? And of course I remember the smell of the sugar beet (this being the plural as well as the singular). An interesting post. With regard to the time on your new blog perhaps you need to tweek into a different time zone.
ReplyDeleteAnswering from the universe :-), especially after the new film (which I did not see and do not intend to see) a good idea!
DeleteThey say that smell-recollection is one of the earliest childhood-memories - but then: scientists... - take two and you get three different results.
Thank you for the tip about "beet" - I'm always really grateful to get such corrections (I wondered also if one say: to eat "in the street" - as in 'dancing in the street' - or "on the street"?).
As you I "see" things (husband "hears" - worlds between us - really - another topic for a short post).
Oh I remember scents - I didn't know that I shouldn't!
ReplyDeleteThat wonderful burnt-sugar-coffee-vanilla scent of a Konditorei in winter; pine and candle wax at Christmas; the top of a just-bathed baby's head; hot tar on a newly-repaired road in summer.....
Yes, Pondside, that it is such a joy to be transported back in and on a whiff - to be suddenly very present in a bygone time, "À la recherche du temps perdu".
DeleteMmh - I want a cake (interesting that pure imagination can make our mouths watering!), and the smell of babies - I thought of that too: the first three months or so they smell absolutely divine, as long as the get mother's milk.
And the contrast: the biting stench of tar...
I'm not sure we remember smells until we smell them again - surely our noses don't have a memory.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy this discussion! I am absolutely sure that when I close my eyes and think "skyblue" - I see the colour. When I smell something, I can remember it (raspberries&currants - grandma's wonderful juice). If I see a picture of me playing on the raked sandpath between the box - I think that I can smell it (so I fall in Prof. Gottfried's category - or Rachel's). The hardest to remember for me is pain - of course I remember it was awful, but I cannot recall it, thank God.
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