My biological psychology professor recently asked us, “What’s your favorite sense?” I’ve entertained a similar question before: if you had to give up one sense, which would it be? Though I don’t have a ready answer to that question either, the one I often choose to place last in line is vision. Maybe this is because I am so affected by color. In fact, I’m often baffled by other people’s apparent lack of fine color discrimination (apart from the naming itself which is another topic entirely). My reluctance to give up vision might make it the obvious choice for favorite, but I’m going to skip the obvious and go for a much more subtle and, at least to me, complex sense: smell.
My fascination with smell has to do with the ways in which it rehydrates long dormant and seemingly forgotten ordinary experiences. Among the senses, it appears that olfaction has the most unique relationship to memory. While I might have strong visual and episodic memories of where I was and who I talked with on September 11, I do not remember a single thing about what I smelled though I might have if I’d noticed something in particular that day. Alternatively, events that are entirely mundane, unmemorable to the most imaginable degree, are summoned back in vivid detail by a smell. I had a most transcendent experience of this phenomenon when I opened an ancient blue-tinted mason jar full of buttons that I’d collected from my grandmother’s sewing room after she died. In that jar was a embodied experience of place.
What I find so intriguing about the power of smell is its ability to rekindle deep experiential memories — the feeling of being there. If you asked me to remember my grandparent’s house, the resulting tableau would certainly include smells I experienced over many years there – percolated coffee, german sausage, oil paint and lake water – but I could not have resurrected the experience of being there brought so vividly to life by smelling all those things, mixed together for years and years, and captured in a jar of buttons.
