Scents Familiar From Childhood Evoke Memories

If you remember your last trip, a series of visual images and various events will come to mind. But what happens when you think about your childhood? Do you remember vague but powerful sensations or perhaps certain scents? Each of us has sometimes experienced that the scent hovering nearby suddenly takes us back to the past. In that moment, we vividly remember a particular situation, place, or person as if we had traveled back in time. Smelling takes place in the same parts of the brain as dealing with emotions and memories, which is why the scents familiar from childhood evoke memories. Much of a person’s emotions are due to smells, even though we don’t know and notice it.

Memories, emotions and scents of childhood

There are two very interesting things about memories. The first is that although man is a particularly visual being, during the first years of life our memories become established mainly through our sense of smell. The baby uses his sense of smell right from birth to find his mother. Until about the age of ten, smells and scents play a big role in building memories.

Memories evoked by different smells also contain emotional components. When you remember in your mind a visual scene from a discussion of the past, you will remember different information as well as things that happened. Such a memory is accurate and objective. Instead, as someone walks past your nose, a familiar perfume hovers, completely absorbed into an emotional state and the power of emotions. In that case, you won’t remember so well what happened at a particular point in time, but you’ll better remember the personal observations you made with the scent.

Emotional brain

Our brains create strong associations between smells and our internal spaces. So when we perceive the same olfactory stimulus, we feel the same emotions that we originally felt when we sensed this same scent.

But what makes such memories then so unique? How can different smells take us back to our childhood? This is because the sense of smell is strongly related to the emotional brain.

Before the stimulus reaches the cortex, the stimulus detected by the sense of smell passes through two areas of the brain. These areas are the almond nucleus as well as the hippocampus. Both of these brain regions are strongly associated with emotions and memory. For this reason, smells appear to us as emotional memories at that very moment.

This is especially true when we are children. This is because the sense of smell is the most important sense that a child uses to connect with the world in early childhood. Therefore, smells allow access to childhood memories that we would not otherwise have access to in other ways, and because childhood memories are quite limited.

The scents familiar from childhood evoke memories

From the very first years, the child remembers memories that are strongly associated with emotional states. In the future, certain smells and smells will take a person back to childhood. For example, the perfume used by the mother is reminiscent of warmth and a comforting feeling of mother’s embrace. The smell of freshly baked biscuits, on the other hand, is reminiscent of memories of an innocent and carefree time when a child stopped playing just while eating.

In the same way, the scent of rain and moist soil is reminiscent of summer days spent in the countryside. The scent of modeling wax, on the other hand, is reminiscent of time spent with siblings and friends. All of these memories take over our minds when we least expect it – memories overwhelm our minds suddenly and without asking. At the same time, however, they act as powerful anchors for childhood, allowing us to relive those emotions when we need them most.

When a child needs to feel loved, safe, protected, and happy in the future, he or she just needs to find familiar scents: light a scented candle, make familiar home cooking, or introduce familiar hand soap. The sweet memories of childhood are treasures that always go with us and are always close to us.