Walking down the street distracted by my thoughts and memories, I smelled a nearby bakery, which invaded my nose with a scent of smoldering biscuits and muffins, eggs, butter and sugar, which transported me to another time, somewhere else.
So, instead of being on a street in my village, I was in a mountain house when I was ten and playing with my brother in the garden while my mom cooked. It happens to all of us; a smell, a sound, a taste or an image transports us to a world of memories.
- Our senses can clearly evoke emotional memories of our past.
- Releasing positive emotions.
- Such as pleasure and happiness.
- Or negative ones.
- Such as fear and anger.
- A song can bring back a special moment with a person or a trip with friends.
- A landscape can bring back memories of adolescence and what we live in a specific place.
“I was writing for you, now I’m writing for the time I spent with you. “
-Victor de Hoz-
Of the five senses, smell is one of the most powerful to evoke memories, can a simple perfume trigger a cascade of sensations, the smell of coffee, the smell of wet grass, a perfume?They free our imagination and transport us somewhere else and again.
Smell is the closest sense to the hippocampus, a brain structure responsible for memory, which in turn is linked to the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. The other senses (sight, taste, touch, hearing) must travel a long way to reach the parts of the brain responsible for memories and emotions.
Therefore, the very structure of our body and brain is responsible for awakening our memories, they are living memories, capable of reproducing sensations that contain a mixture of tenderness and sadness that we call nostalgia.
“There are memories that I will not erase, people I will not forget, silences that I prefer to silence. “
-Fito Peez-
A study by psychologist Silvia Called, “Smells and Emotions,” showed that people remember 35% of what they feel and only 5% of what they see. This research involved 1000 people of both sexes, from 25 to 45 years old It was concluded that memory can perceive up to 10,000 different aromas, but can only recognize 200.
According to this study, when we smell a perfume, that smell is recorded in the brain with the emotion we feel at the time, then, when we remember the smell, we feel the emotion. Returning to the study, 83% of participants said they remember happy moments with certain smells and that feeling a family smell affects more than seeing an object that brings back memories.
“It was inevitable: the smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unshared love. “
-Gabriel García Márquez-
The image of an object, a room or a landscape, for example, can lead us to a moment in our life that can be very pleasant, you can also feel the feeling of having been there before or having lived a situation before, which is called “already seen”.
There are two theories about this feeling: one that holds that when recording an event in our memory, an area of the brain does so with some delay compared to other memories, and then what has already been seen happens; another theory, however, assumes that a Fact can activate in memory memories with which he has a real or imaginary relationship.
When we eat, the brain integrates all the sensations with the information stored in memory and looks for data on certain preparations that we relate to those same sensations, past situations or other foods with similar stimuli, so flavors can convert the sensations derived from food. in memories.
As for the sounds, did we all have one? Soundtrack?At some point in our lives, (this special song that is part of our good times). According to psychology professor Peter Janata of the University of California, Davis: “Our Diary Life Needs a Soundtrack Chosen by Ourselves, but many of our musical memories are mental films, which come to mind when we hear a family song, which ends up serving as a soundtrack.
Janata explained in his study, published in the journal Brain, how in a certain region of the brain related to the storage and recovery of memories, neurons function as a center of connection between familiar melodies, memory and emotion.
Therefore, all our senses can lead us to the past and evoke our memories of certain moments. In this way, we can relive happy and pleasant moments; it’s just a matter of letting him go.