Authors: Molly Birnbaum
I BEGAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
in the fall of 2007. I would earn a master’s in journalism over the course of one year. Autumn arrived alongside stacks of reporter’s notebooks and mechanical pencils, new faces and new friends and a constantly replenished stack of library books to read on the long subway commute between Brooklyn and school. I felt suddenly overrun and exhausted. I felt challenged and inspired.
And, I was surprised to find, my nose went haywire.
I could smell the clove-tinted perfume of a woman in heels who clicked past me on the street. I could smell the chlorine emanating from the pool at the gym from down the hall, thick like carpet and cloudy with memories of summer camp. I took a stick of butter out of the fridge one morning as I prepared a breakfast of toast and held it in my hand for a moment, unable to believe that it could so reek of sweet cream and salt.
My nose was suddenly registering so much, so quickly that at times I found it hard to concentrate. I sat near the water off Hunts Point in the south Bronx on a reporting trip for class and found myself breathing through my mouth because the air smelled so brackish that I felt sick. I couldn’t think beyond the malodorous stench of the can of cat food my roommate opened in our kitchen each night. Whatever I learned from a lecture on the ethics of journalism was blotted out by the shower-fresh deodorant of the man sitting next to me in the auditorium.
More scent had returned in two months than in the previous two years combined. These scents weren’t entirely new. Not like the bursts of that first fall and winter before. But these scents were stronger. More intense. They assaulted me with aggressive entrance. It was the opposite experience from that of the months after David left. “It’s because I’m happy,” I told my mother on the phone.
I was happy when I inhaled the scent of cleaning fluid—sharp and painful, like lemon juice on a scrape—as I tidied the bathroom one Sunday morning in September. I was happy on the bright afternoon that I sat on a bench in Union Square trying to read, but couldn’t process a single word alongside the spicy scent of
pasta alla puttanesca
eaten by a nearby woman in large forkfuls from a cardboard container. And I was happy when I met Matt.
Matt and I were introduced at the end of the second week of graduate school. On that Friday afternoon, like many Friday afternoons that year, a large crowd of our classmates flocked to the bar. We would mingle over happy hour beers.
I saw him standing amid a group of fellow students on the sidewalk outside the pub on 108th Street, chatting in the dim evening light. He had short brown-blond hair, cropped close. He wore a beige button-down shirt and jeans. He hung back a little, handsome and austere.
I joined them, and we passed introductions around like a hot stone. When Matt met my gaze, I smiled.
Soon we trickled into the bar to be swallowed by the mass of patrons, the taste of hops, the smell of smoke. I lost track of Matt in the flurry of sound.
Later, though, a new friend pointed at him from across the room. He leaned against the bar, talking to a swarm of faces I didn’t know.
“He used to be a soldier,” she whispered to me loudly.
“Really?”
I watched him for a moment. I was intrigued. Our country had been at war for years. I read about it in the paper every day. But I had never known anyone in the military.
“Someone said that he’s been to Iraq,” she added.
I had a hard time imagining that.
A few weeks later, at another party that we both attended, I asked him about it. We were perched on picnic tables outside at a beer garden in Queens, drinking pitchers of Brooklyn Lager, chatting among classmates and friends. Matt and I fell into easy conversation. We covered journalism and New York, past travels and future plans. We talked about smell and cooking. He had eaten chocolate ice cream for breakfast, he told me with a guilty grin. “I would also want chocolate to be among the first things I recognized when my sense came to,” he said. We talked about his family in New Orleans, and his decision to join the army when he was eighteen. And we talked about the war in Iraq, an event that had defined Matt’s life and never touched mine. He told me about the desert heat, shimmering off the sand during his two yearlong tours of duty. He told me about the hours of hurrying, the days waiting, the tanks and the uniforms and the care packages from home. I leaned in close as he spoke. I could smell the alcohol on his exhale, a sudsy note of soap.
Later, he kissed me on the subway platform at Times Square as we waited for the trains to take us to our respective homes. I could smell his skin, which was warm with aftershave and a hint of sweat. I could smell his breath, which now held the spicy cinnamon of chewing gum. I could taste the heat of his mouth, the candy of my lip gloss. Our noses touched gently as we paused for air, his palm soft against the back of my head.
I FELT SURE
that my sense of smell was tied deeply to the state of my emotions. When sad, I noticed my perception of scent dim, like stereo volume on low. When happy, new, intense smells arrived constantly in my nose, making me feel jumpy and quick, the world suddenly coming in exaggerated hues. But why? I had no idea. The smell experts at the lecture with Sacks hadn’t explained it. I wasn’t sure anyone would. All I knew was that my internal landscape fascinated me, moved me, drove me to wonder.
The tie between smell and emotion has long been known, potent since before the days of laureled Greek philosophers. It began, writes Patricia Davis in her book,
Aromatherapy: An A–Z,
with smoke. “When the twigs of certain bushes or trees were thrown on the fires as fuel, the smoke and aromas they gave off may have made people drowsy, or happy, or excited, or maybe even given rise to ‘mystical’ experiences. . . .” she says. “The ‘smoking’ of patients was one of the earliest forms of medicine, and as religion and medicine were closely bound up with each other, the use of special smokes also formed part of primitive religions.” In ancient Egypt, oils infused with scents like cedarwood were used to embalm the dead and help transport them to the afterlife—smell was equated with spirituality and the gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans used ample perfume; floral scents, specifically, were associated with a state of grace. In Greek mythology, the invention of perfumes was ascribed to the immortals. Today, scent as a mood modulator can be found almost everywhere: from massage parlors to department stores and in the advertised promise of perfume. In 2006, for example, the Westin Hotel chain began pumping the scent of white tea into its lobbies in hopes of inspiring a feeling of calm.
I’ve experienced a feeling of relaxation during a professional massage scented with chamomile and almond. When I was sixteen, I traveled to Nepal and felt an alert but deep calm while sitting in temples where incense burned lazy curls of smoke above my head. I cannot deny that the scent of a cake baking in the oven makes me feel happy no matter where I am, the safe pleasure of home. But could these scents really infiltrate my mind and manhandle my emotions without my conscious knowledge? How did it work? A long chain of scientists and amateurs have wondered just this.
The scientific validity of aromatherapy remains shaky at best. While there have been studies showing that the application of essential oil to the skin can cause a physiological reaction to take place in the body, there is little science to show that inhaling the scent of orange will cause the body to energize or that rose will relieve stress. But that doesn’t mean that smell and emotion aren’t linked.
Like the tie between scent and memory, this tie to emotion is rooted in the structure of the brain. The olfactory system is only a small step away from the amygdala, which processes memory and emotion, and the hypothalamus, which deals, among many things, in autonomic reflexes. When looking at the results from studies using fMRI, the neuroimaging technique that maps brain activity by the careful recording of changes in blood flow, scent psychologist Rachel Herz has found that the amygdala, “the wellspring of emotion in our brain,” is more highly activated when a person is recalling memory triggered by scent than by any other sense. It is also more active when recalling a scent related to a personally significant event, rather than a smell without personal meaning.
On the surface, the explanation is pretty simple, actually, one that goes hand in hand with the connection between smell and memory: learning. “Aromas work their therapeutic magic by evoking a learned association in the smeller,” wrote Herz in
The Scent of Desire
. Similar to the connection between smell and memory, “this learned association can have real emotional and physical consequences, which in turn will influence moods, thoughts, behaviors, and general well-being. The scent of lavender encourages relaxation, and sniffing peppermint is revitalizing because of the meanings these aromas have acquired and the emotional associations they induce. We have ‘learned’ that the emotional association to lavender is relaxation in the same way that we have learned that rose smells
good
and skunk smells
bad
.”
Herz has conducted many studies on smell and emotion. In one, published in 2004, she explored the difference between memories evoked by scent and those by sight, sound, touch, or simply a word. At the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., she asked seventy people who ranged in age from seven to seventy-nine to recall a personal memory after hearing the name of each of three items: popcorn, fresh-cut grass, and campfire. They were asked to rate their memories based on emotionality, vividness, evocativeness, and specificity. Then, each item was presented again, this time by different sensory means. Visual, auditory, olfactory. Popcorn, for example, came first as an animated scene of an overflowing bowl of fluffy white kernels, then the sound of popping, and finally the scent—fresh and buttery. Each participant recalled the same memory after each example and again rated them on the same scale. Herz found that compared with sight and sound, the memories triggered by smell were rated significantly stronger both emotionally and evocatively. These scented recollections brought a great deal more to life.
But the association between smell and emotion can be much more concrete. Scent can change mood. Scientists William Redd and Sharon Manne projected heliotropin, a sweet vanilla-like scent, into the room where patients received magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) as part of a diagnostic workup for cancer in 1993. These patients, lying in the claustrophobic chambers, alone with the possibility of their disease, reported reduced levels of anxiety compared with another group of patients who only breathed in the blankness of regularly humidified air. Vanilla, after all, is most commonly associated with the experience of baking, of dessert, of home. It produced a calming effect.
It goes both ways. In 1997, Robert Baron, a professor of management and psychology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, found that patrons of a mall in upstate New York were more likely to pick up a dropped pen or give change for a dollar if in proximity to the “pleasant” ambient scents of Mrs. Fields Cookies, Cinnabon, and The Coffee Beanery. In 2009, Rice University psychologists Denise Chen and Wen Zhou published a study saying that those who are better at smelling have a higher level of emotional competency. In this case, a group of female university students who could identify the T-shirt of a roommate opposed to that of a stranger by scent alone tended to score higher on emotional awareness and facial-emotion identification tests. Does better smelling equate with a more developed sense of sympathy?
But our emotional reaction to a smell is malleable. It can change because of placement, because of timing and mood. Studies have been done on how odor perception changes when labeled or given a suggested meaning. In 1990, Susan Knasko and her colleagues at the Monell Chemical Senses Center told a group of participants that there was an ambient odor—positive, negative, or neutral—present in a room. In truth, there was no odor at all, but they found that the participants self-rated their emotional state and physical well-being depending on what kind of ambient scent they believed to be present. With a feigned positive odor, participants reported a happier mood. With the false negative odor, participants reported a greater number of physical symptoms. It’s as simple as context. “The instantaneous response to smell is an emotional response even when the scent is unknown,” Herz would explain to me. “It doesn’t have to be all good or all bad. It can be curiosity or suspicion in response to an unknown smell, so that you are aroused on some emotional level. It’s the hedonic evaluation—
do I like it or not
—that comes with prior experience, and from interpretation and context.”
As fascinated as I was by the link between scent and emotion, I wanted to know more. I smelled more when I was happy, less when sad. Why?
I sat in Tealuxe, a small café in Providence, Rhode Island, on a muggy August morning years after I first noticed the connection. I was waiting for Herz, who had been a professor at Brown University since 2000, to arrive. I had taken one of her classes, when I was in the midst of a brief but hopeful period in which I wanted to become a psychotherapist like my mother. I remember the uncomfortable hard-backed chairs in the lecture hall, which smelled musty, a mixture of stale coffee and feet. I remember the way my spring allergies peaked right before our final exam, clogging my nose and fogging my head. I remember the day that Herz lectured about scent and its relationship to child development. I had never thought too much about the nose and found it strange that this is the subject about which my young professor was so passionate.
“I love the smell of skunk,” she had told us as she explained the importance of learning. “I would wear it as perfume if I could.”
I ordered a cup of tea as I waited for her in the café. I chose Crème de la Earl Grey, a sweet brew that held blended blue flowers and a twist of cream. I used to drink it all the time when I was there as a student. The smell—burnt sugar, caramel—had once been viscerally tied to anxious hours of studying, hunched over unread textbooks and the hard black countertop. I inhaled over my mug. It smelled nice, sweet and cakey, like a liquid dessert.