Return to Compass Features for June 17, 1997
Smells have long been known to evoke some of our most vivid and detailed memories, even memories that may be inaccessible to our conscious recollections.
Rachel S. Herz, a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, questioned whether odor really is the best cue to stimulate or revive those intense memories and compared how music and visual images and textures compare to smell in evoking memories.
She reported her findings to a crowd of about 50 May 13 in the Monell seminar room.
Herz referred early in her talk to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, recalling his discussion of "privileged moments" of memory that take us back and connect us to experiences of our past, the memory brought on by something as inconspicuous as the smell of a cup of tea.
Herz wondered whether music would be a better stimulus than odor to affect memory. (We all have a certain song that takes us back to some special place and time.) There was no known research that dealt specifically with this issue, so Herz conducted her own experiments.
Subjects were shown an unfamiliar painting while either listening to an unfamiliar piece of music, sniffing an unfamiliar odor, feeling some texture or viewing a second image. They were not told that the experiment had anything to do with memory. Two days later they were asked, while being exposed to the same memory cue (music, odor, etc.), to recall the content of the painting they saw.
Although accuracy was unaffected by memory cue, Herz noticed that subjects who used smell to stimulate their senses included noticeably more emotional descriptors in the written recollections they turned in. Subjects in the odor-cued group used adjectives like "beautiful," "scary" or "happy" more frequently, and, with further questioning, those subjects, more than the other groups, also reported their memories felt intense, she said.
Possible explanations for these results ranged from the physiological fact that the nerves involved in smelling are linked directly to the limbic system in the brain, where emotions are handled, to the more cognitive theory that odors have less of a linguistic basis and therefore appeal more to our emotions, Herz said.
She also explained that people often confuse the emotional vividness and intensity of odor-cued memories with accuracy of those memories. The emotional vividness may make it seem that some memory cues lead to better recall than others, even though that is not the case.
Herz's presentation included not only slides, but samples of the music and odors--contained in moistened cotton at the bottom of small jars, which she passed around the room--from her experiments. With a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Toronto, Herz now studies the association between memory and emotional states, and often uses smell as an emotional stimulant in her research.
Return to Compass Features for June 17, 1997