Authors: Molly Birnbaum
Trygg Engen, a professor of psychology at Brown University who passed away in 2009, was one of the first to theorize on odor memory and learning. It begins in childhood, he said, upon emerging from the womb. (Or even earlier. Studies have suggested babies are born with preferences for flavors similar to those ingested by their mothers while pregnant—even choosing chew toys scented with the aroma of alcohol over those with vanilla.) But babies, who have a fully developed sense of smell after only twelve weeks of gestation, are born without any preexisting knowledge of or opinions on scent, Engen believed. Emerging from the womb a blank slate, nothing is positive or negative until they learn it to be that way. The scent of a dirty diaper bears as much pleasure as a rose. Engen found that newborns responded the same way to the scents of foul onions and licorice, and that four-year-olds reacted similarly to the scents of rancid cheese and bananas. We learn smells through experience, often programmed into our brains while young, when we encounter most for the first time, when everything in the world seems large and intense. It’s these memories that stick.
This slate is soon filled, however. It’s filled with a love for anchovies like mine, a love that I learned while mimicking my father, who learned in turn from his father, who ate the strong salted fish piled on slices of pizza with cheese. It’s filled with a hatred for ripe bananas like my mother’s, which is so virulent she cannot stand in the same room as a peel that is soft and fragrant and dotted in brown. I once met a chef in New York City who fell in love with her partner after learning that she, too, was fond of the taste of durian, the famously stinking fruit from Southeast Asia. “She just had to learn to appreciate its smell,” she told me with a smile.
This is in part a mechanism of biology: if you eat something and become sick, the brain is programmed to remember the warning signals. I will never forget the slice of New York–style cheesecake, which I ate while on vacation with my family, only to spend the entire night helplessly huddled on the cold tile floor of the hotel bathroom, leaning over the toilet. It took years for me to bring myself to taste cheesecake again. Its creamy aroma, no matter how far away, nauseated me.
But how long do these scent memories last? Could Proust’s protagonist really remember that specific cookie from that specific visit to his aunt’s house in Combray all those years before? Engen was one of the first scientists to study long-term odor memory. In 1973, he asked a group of people to memorize a certain number of novel odors in his lab. Over the following days and weeks, he tested them periodically and found that their retrieval rate didn’t lessen over a period of many months. They could remember far fewer of the smells than they could a list of novel words in the same time span, true. But, nonetheless, Engen believed that scent memory was long lasting. “The Proustian insight is validated!” he wrote.
Though it has since been found that if
another
new scent is smelled soon after the one to be remembered, the memory of the first is significantly dimmed, Engen’s findings have been furthered by many more. Two decades later, William Goldman and John Seamon asked a group of students at Wesleyan University to recognize and recall a group of odors that they hadn’t smelled since childhood. Among them they smelled bubbles, fingerpaint, crayons, and Play-Doh—important odors of young, impressionable years, ones first encountered far from the sterile laboratory environment. Later, the experimenters found that their participants could recall these childhood scents statistically higher than average.
And it goes further: we remember smells from our past, but smells also help us resuscitate memories. In 1999, John P. Aggleton and Louise Waskett, two scientists at the Cardiff University, tested the memories of a group of people who had made a visit to a specific museum at least once, but as many as three times, six years before. Not just any museum, however. They chose one that dealt in a niche underworld: Vikings.
The Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England, dives into its subject matter on more than one sensory level. Scents of burnt wood, apples, rubbish, beef, fish market, rope/tar, and earth are piped into different areas of the museum, depending on the exhibit, to aid in education. Aggleton and Waskett, trying to resuscitate the specific, detailed memories from trips taken years before, split their participants into three groups and had them all fill out questionnaires. One group filled out the questionnaire first while smelling these seven specific scents, and then again while smelling a set of “control odors,” or seven completely different aromas—common non-Viking ones like coffee, peppermint, rose, antibacterial cleaner, coconut, maple, and rum. The second group did this in the opposite order, and the third filled out their questionnaires without any odor at all. And the results? Those who answered questions about that distant day while first smelling the common odors, and then again with the Viking odors, showed a steep increase in accuracy. The scent of burnt wood and apples resurrected a moment of the past. Proust would have liked that.
Others, however, disagree with this emphasis on Proust as seen through the lens of science. Avery Gilbert, a smell scientist and author of
What the Nose Knows,
says that Engen was wrong: odor memory is the same as all others, being faulty and decaying. Gilbert calls the scientists who put so much emphasis on his emotional connection to the past “Proust-boosters.” “How can a work of fiction, no matter how well written, become the truth standard for scientific research?” he writes.
Perhaps it is ridiculous to put so much emphasis on the twentieth-century French novelist. He did, after all, deal in dream worlds and alter egos, concentrating on the cadence of language and not the accuracy of scientific possibility. But what’s important is that these ideas, these theories and explanations swirling about the subject of scent memory have captivated many. Scientists have studied it—the length, the emotion, the accuracy of odor memory—for decades. They’ve written about it, spoken about it, and fought over it. And still we keep coming. We still read Proust. We still cite Proust. What is it about the memories excavated by an odor that keeps us so rapt?
I WALKED AROUND
my house sniffing for days after rosemary shocked me with its wooded potency. I sniffed over every single item in the refrigerator, one at a time. Mustard, mayonnaise, milk, Niçoise olives pitted in a jar. I sniffed over every bottle of shampoo in the shower. I smelled the blanket on my bed, the washing machine in the basement, the screen to the television overlooking the couch. I breathed in and out, carefully and conscientiously, waiting for the next scent to return. I continued to cook and to bake, leaning over the pots and the pans, my body taut with expectation. But as the inhales remained blank and the days passed numbly, I grew frustrated. Where the hell were they?
What came next I didn’t expect.
I sat at the kitchen table reading a book and sipping a bitter cup of coffee one dark winter afternoon. When this scent arrived, it came slowly. Unlike rosemary, which assaulted me, sending me flying with its sudden strength, this smell melted into my consciousness. When it finally registered, I couldn’t be sure it had ever been gone. But I paused, and looked around. What was it? Hovering and delicate, it wasn’t the coffee steaming by my hand. It wasn’t the book, or the table, or the lamp. Nothing burbled away on the stove. I closed my eyes. The more I concentrated, the stronger it grew. It was a toothsome, earthy scent. It was a strange scent. I wondered if I was going mad.
When I left the kitchen, it followed me to the living room. And then to my bedroom. It followed me to the shower, and then to the car parked in the driveway. I smelled it under my covers as I fell asleep that night. I smelled it over the oven as I baked a loaf of lemon pound cake to eat with tea the following day. I smelled it in the garden and on the front steps, in the basement and the linen closet upstairs. It lasted for weeks.
What was it? I could come up with only one answer.
“I can smell my brain,” I told my mother.
I sat in my bed with a bottle of water and a stack of books to my side.
“What?” She laughed. And then she stopped. “Your brain?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can smell my brain.” She looked doubtful. I shrugged. I knew she wouldn’t believe me. “Yes,” I repeated patiently. “My brain. I can smell my brain.”
“And what does your brain smell like?”
“It smells like the forest. Like the woods.”
She looked at me like I was crazy.
Perhaps I am,
I thought. But that didn’t take away the scent. And there
was
a scent. It came wobbly but present on each breath. It reminded me of the grass, of a garden after the rain. It felt organic and real and fluctuated in strength throughout the day. This smell didn’t come from anything around me. That much was obvious. Therefore, I told my mother, it must come from within.
“It has to be my brain,” I said. “What else could it be?”
I waved off her disbelief. I didn’t mind the scent. I liked it, in fact. The constant aroma was reminiscent of the rambles I once took in the forest near my aunt’s summer home in Pennsylvania, all leaf-burning horizon and black earth underfoot.
I liked the companionship, too. My little pet sensation, constantly nipping at my heels. The world no longer fell so flat with the blooming aroma of my insides. I kind of hoped it would stay.
I described it to my father when he stopped to see me one afternoon.
“I don’t know that it’s possible to smell your brain.” He tried to explain. Miswiring. Misfiring. Phantoms.
“Whatever,” I said with a flip of my hand. I didn’t want his science, his doctorly lore.
My brother, Ben, at home for a weekend away from college, was more receptive.
“That’s awesome,” he said. “My sister can smell her
brain
.”
After three weeks, however, the smell began to fade. It trickled away one breath at a time. Until one day, it was gone.
I ASKED FOR A JOB
at the bakery because pastry dough had nothing to do with smell. I didn’t need to taste the intricacies of flour, butter, or baking soda, I told myself again and again. Baking is about measurement. It is the science of precision and the art of decoration. “I can do that,” I said to Bill, owner and head baker at a little pastry shop in Concord, Massachusetts. I hadn’t worked since my time at the Craigie Street Bistrot, and now that I could walk, I needed a job.
Bill hired me as a favor. I had worked for him before. The summer before I went away to college I sweated out the early mornings unloading loaves of bread and refilling the cookies piled behind the glass case under his watchful eye. In those months I had stirred cauldrons of his special tuna salad, which smelled strongly—unappealingly, I thought—of curry and sour mayonnaise, and helped assemble towering sandwiches of apples and brie. I escaped the melting heat of summer in his walk-in freezer, which hung with the disembodied scent of winter, hectically piling bags of pecans in my arms. I had approached him in the first weeks I walked with my cane because I would soon move unhindered and I wanted a job. I wanted to be out of the house and in a kitchen again. He needed help for the holidays and this time he would let me bake. He would teach me how. But honestly? I wanted to see if it would hurt. And I didn’t mean in my knee.
I began one morning in late November. There was snow on the ground, and it took me a long time to walk from the parking lot to the bakery. I moved slowly, a slight limp favoring my right leg. I was still afraid of ice and, despite the six-pound metal knee brace that I wore twenty-four hours a day, I just knew that if I fell I would injure myself all over again.
I opened the creaking wood door of the bakery, which was on the corner of a historic block in the center of town. I felt dizzy and was worried my hands would begin to visibly shake. When I stepped inside, though, I was struck by the warmth. A handful of people milled about the small room, peering into the cases filled with breads and pastries. Coffee cups steamed. The brunette behind the cash register laughed loudly and greeted a man in a red sweater, clinking change and rustling paper bags. I stepped past the counter, through the arched doorway to the back. I glanced around, taking in the stacks of ovens, racks of colorful molded cookies, shelves of brown bread, and a cascade of metal mixers.
I shook hands with Bill when he emerged from the storage room downstairs, a well-worn Red Sox cap snug on his head. His shoulders were slightly hunched, his eyes creased in smile lines, and a pristine white apron hid his slight paunch. I began to work immediately.
I peeled and chopped apples for the Thanksgiving pies, refusing to think of those in my past, losing myself in the repetitive physical task. I rolled out dough for batches of Danish and turnovers, throwing about cinnamon and more apples with speed. I baked pumpkin bread and coconut macaroons. I couldn’t smell a thing.
I arrived home that night tired and sore. I threw my clothes in the laundry immediately. They must have smelled of butter and grease, I was sure. I woke up the next morning and started again.
As the weeks progressed, I felt strange and uncertain in the bakery. It was a warm shop, filled with light and shelves of crusty bread. Pans of muffins and sheet trays of cookies were constantly emerging from the ovens. Coffee brewed in massive machines against the wall and Bill could always be found frosting a batch of cupcakes or piping a design onto a birthday cake. But I didn’t know how to move, and my knee brace was always in the way. I couldn’t carry the heavy bags of flour upstairs from the basement or tell when loaves of lemon poppy seed bread were done, unable to detect their nutty scent. I had no idea if the milk in the refrigerator was sour or if the caramel on the stove was scalding without looking inside the pot.
“How did the cake turn out?” Bill would ask me every morning, a congenial smile on his face, after I had baked the day’s orders to his exact instructions.
“I don’t know,” I would say, always hesitant and stumbling. “Will you look?” The cakes were beautiful. I could follow directions. But I felt like I was always missing something.