I Don’t Feel It, I Smell It.
We were talking with Rob, and he asked me, “Is a pebbly beach really a beach?” I thought a bit, then answered him, “Yes, it is the real beach for me.” After that moment, some smells from my past popped into my mind.
When I was a child, we lived in a city without a seaside. During these summers, we went to my mother’s village. This city has a beautiful sea, but there are no sandy beaches. Just the pebbly beaches made me “a child” at the time. It was not happiness. It was like the first bite of your chocolate mousse in a dessert crisis. It was like experiencing a zero-gravity environment. Whatever, those times and feelings have a smell for me: salty, mossy water. After years, I smelled the same salty, mossy water when Rob asked me that question. I was a child again.
In Marcel Proust’s book “ À la recherche du temps perdu” (Paradise Lost), the main character comes home very tired one day and puts a piece of madeleine cake into his tea. He then describes his experiences as follows: “ This taste was the taste of a piece of madeleine that my aunt Léonie would dip in her tea or linden tea and give me when I went to her room to say ‘good morning’ on Sunday mornings in Combray. As soon as I recognized the taste of a piece of madeleine that my aunt would dip in linden tea and give me (although I don’t yet know why this memory makes me so happy, and I will postpone discovering it until much later), the old grey house overlooking the street where my aunt’s room was located, was added to the tiny house overlooking the garden in the back, built for my mother, like a theatre set; along with the house, the city in all seasons, from morning to evening, the Square where they sent me for lunch, the streets where I did my shopping and the paths we walked when the weather was nice, took their place in the image. And just like in the games played by the Japanese, where the faint pieces of paper they throw into a porcelain bowl full of water dissolve, take shape, become colored, and become apparent as soon as they enter the water, leaving no room for concrete doubt as a flower, a house or a person, all the flowers in our garden and M. Swann’s garden, the water lilies of the Vivonne River, the kind-hearted inhabitants of the village, their little houses, the church, all of Combray and its surroundings took shape and gained volume. The whole city with its gardens jumped out of my teacup.”
That’s why the French call it “La Madeleine de Proust”, describing the smells and tastes that transport you to a moment or memory in the past.
Today, when I received some good news that I had been waiting for a long time, the first thing that stirred was not my heart but my nostrils. Yes, I was smelling something. The smell of paper came from the pages of a notebook that my father took me on a September evening to buy. The stationery shopping we did for the beginning of a new educational year, in which I would take notes that would not embarrass my father. The only time where I felt “successful”, or “enough”. Now, having received this news, I feel “enough” again, so this smell of paper did not surprise me.
So what is the reason for the ability of smell and taste to affect us much faster and more deeply and take us back to the past, despite auditory and visual stimuli? Hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the part of our brain that is responsible for sending the information coming from the sensory organs to the cerebral cortex of our brain. During this process, hypothalamus filters the information it receives from the sensory organs to a significant extent, except for one of our senses: smell. Smell is the only unfiltered sense that reaches the emotion and memory center (limbic brain) and, from there, to the cerebral cortex. This explains why scents can powerfully affect our memory, emotions, and even behavior.
