The Power of Smells

I awoke last night with this incredible smell of honey that came with a cool breeze and bloomed like a cloud in my bedroom .  I knew that this odor must be coming form the mass of tall trees across the avenue that are sugar dusted with little white flowers.  I started to think of how smells are so powerful in our lives and always seem to take us back to places, events and people of significance in our lives.  Marcel Proust wrote about the intense memories that flooded him around his aunt by dunking a madeleine in his camomile tea.  Therefore Proustian memory was coined as an association between the sensory and memory.

Our olfactory sense is said to be one of the oldest in the evolutionary order of mammalian development.  Of all the five senses, it is the only one that makes a direct and undiluted bee line to an area of our brain associated with feelings and memory.  This area of the brain is called the limbic system and is noted to be a storage of emotionally charged memories .The limbic system also modulates our libido and sexuality and colors our mood either positively or negatively.  Women are said to have a larger limbic area and therefore are more gifted olfactory wise.

Since smells go directly to this part of the brain associated with our sexuality, it is not surprising how certain human pheromones can ignite up with passion.  The body odor of males and females  can invoke an immediate response in us and probably has to do with what we call “chemistry”.  In the Elizabethan age, women would give their lovers unpeeled apples permeated with their sweat obtained from their armpit.  It is said that Napoleon requested his wife Josephine to not bathe for two weeks prior to return from the war front, in hopes of a powerful sexual stimulate. With that little anecdote, one can see that what may turn one on sexually, may repel someone else.  Therefore, our registration of smells is highly individualistic, in so far as being pleasant or not.  An old tee-shirt from a long ago lover kept through the years can transport us back , magically.

Our canine friends are more than 100,000 more superior than we are in distinguishing odors. They  are our partners on the warfront, at crime scenes, and at customs and are  doing incredible feats of medical detection being guide and therapy dogs, from warning of life endangering low blood sugar, to epilepsy.  My little male dachshund, Potiron, always traced the route back to our hotel at any given times in various cities that he had never traveled to before because of his superb scent tracking.  He also knew, probably through detecting testosterone levels, of any human males who came in who might have had sexual interests on his women, as he would either mark his territory or demonstrate his agressivity with a stuffed animal.

Pheromones given off by women who live together can cause menstrual synchrony . Smells can also trigger abreactions or replication of traumatic events in PTSD patients.  If smells are this powerful to gush over us with memories good or bad, or even change hormonal cycles in others, they are probably implicated in many other ways not discovered.   I suspect we only know the tip of this iceberg around this phenomena. It is really too bad our canine friends can not communicate all they know and decipher with just their nose!

Using various fragrances as a form of therapy is not new.  Apparently the Chinese, Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians all used fragrances  medicinally. We spend thousands plus on drenching ourselves with perfume to enhance and attract.   Romans were said to strew rose petals in baths and lining their banquet tables.  Fragrances are often part of rituals and to denote sacredness.  We all remember the story of the wise men bringing frankincense, and myrrh.  Saint Mary Magdalene is always pictured with her alabaster jar from which she anointed Christ with spikenard.  Original rosary beads were made from compressed rose petals.  Saint Hildegard of Germany circa 1140, was a mastermind of a herbalist who used fragrance as a healing medium.

I am always fascinated reading various treaties of aromatherapy, as I do not know a lot about how each scent has certain properties, I just know that they certainly do change our moods.   I love to smell the incense used in catholic churches.  For me, it is calming and soothing, yet evokes a feeling of renewal.  I buy it and burn in my apartment to feel expansive and hopeful; really transformative for me!  At times I have taken american indian smug sticks which I think are mostly sage, for cleansing my therapy room, if there had been a very angry patient so as to restore the energy to one of peace and love.                                If I have problems sleeping, I rub lavender oil on my hands and upper lip.  Invariably you will find me going to flower markets to sniff out any fragrance I can find when depressed.  Roses and pivoines(peonies) preferred!  A recent outing to a Roserie overflowing with the heady perfume of roses was like being lifted up into a cloud of happiness.    I long to return to the seacoast when I feel exhausted because the smell of the ocean is so powerfully reinvigorating to me.                                                                                                                                        I have a tendency to grow herbs and flowers that are perfumed because I favor fragrance over beauty.  I baby my angel trumpets for their sensual perfume only emitted at night and my solandra maxima that has huge golden flowers that smells of coconut!  Ah, the little jasmine  and lemon tree flowers are oh so sweet!  Magnolias always bring me back to my Louisiana roots with their powerful perfume, and I confess to stealing the blooms anywhere I find them here.  Leaving behind my beautiful plumaria plants was difficult  when I moved here as the fragrance offered wonderful memories of my first semester in Hawaii many moons ago..   Last but not least for me is the complex and tantalizing perfumes of wines.  Sometimes I find myself so enamored of perfume emanating from my glass of wine I almost hate to bring myself to drink, as if it would pull me away from such intense pleasure.  Certainly amongst wine lovers I am not alone!

Smells zoom us back to events and places in time, a sort of time travel machine.  Most of us like the scent of baby powder which I don’t think has changed that much over the years, perhaps from  our own forgotten babyhood or remembrance of our own children. Even unpleasant odors can have pleasant connotations to us.  An example, however strange,  is the slight burned rubber smell of metro line 4 which always reminds me of my first months of being a student here in Paris.  If the scent of peach cobbler and fried apricot pies brings immediate memories of my southern grandmother and the smell of Wheatena cooking, that of my northern grandmother, you too have a repertory of scents and smells that bring people , places and events from the past  to immediate awareness.

I would love to hear about your own personal experience and repertory of powerful scents that connect you to memories of the past.  Please share!