Do you ever get a sense of ‘aroma déjà vu?’
Have you ever had that experience where, out of the blue, a certain smell shoots you into your past, sometimes so remotely that you can’t pinpoint quite why you remember it or from what period in your life? Often it’s a food association, but it could also take you back to a moment in time – like how the smell of baby oil never fails to remind me of my self-absorbed teenage years when I thought lathering myself with it would brown me up quite nicely during that full day on the beach.
Our sense of smell is important enough to us to evoke its own form of déjà vu, a French term which, literally translated, means ‘already seen’. Memories associated with smells can be powerful and immediate. Without going into too much scientific detail about how our brain works (not my strong suit that’s for sure), the olfactory system has pathways connected to those parts of the brain closely associated with memory and emotion.
Interestingly, odours which may have been connected to unpleasant experiences in childhood may be idealised in later life to transform a bad memory into a good one. The ‘rose-coloured glasses’ filter causes us to reshape those recollections into memories from the ‘good ole days’ when life was free of adult responsibilities and anxieties.
I can easily bring up some examples of this from my own childhood. The unpleasant smell of cow dung evokes memories of my mother taking me, as a recalcitrant 10-year-old, traipsing around the paddocks to collect the foul stuff as fertiliser for her garden. It was far from a fun activity but one I now view wistfully.
In a July 2020 episode of Conversations on ABC Radio Sydney, Richard Fidler explored the idea of holistic attachment parenting with his guest Justine Flynn, who co-parents five children adopted from Korea. Flynn’s approach when transitioning each child into the home, family and a different culture has been to integrate everything from the soap they were used to being washed with to the food they were accustomed to eating – on the basis that ‘smell is a really important thing for children’. A certain fragrance can remind you of a parent or a moment in time and ‘automatically conjures up a feeling or a mood and a sense of attachment’. Flynn and her husband often have rice cooking with sesame oil because it is a very distinct Korean smell. Then the associative odours are either incorporated long-term or transitioned out of their lives as the children adjust.
When I’m prompting memories for a personal life story, it’s fascinating how often recollections evoke particular smells and vice versa. It might be the smell of fish and chips and its association with the annual family beach holiday or the weekend pocket-money job summoning the smell of freshly mown grass. Or, in my case, the whiff of black licorice – which takes me back to an episode with ouzo in my younger days… which I’d rather forget…
Next time an odour jolts you back to your past, think about writing that memory down as the beginning of a series of personal recollections. Contact us at Record My Past for help bringing these memories to life for future generations.