Smells Of Childhood: Doors To Our Emotional Past

Colored pencils, chocolate cake, the lawn freshly cut in summer, the grandparents’ room where we could not enter and the perfume of our mother when she hugged us. The scents of childhood inhabit our brain like ajar doors,  as powerful anchors to an emotional past that we access to remember those happy days.

Psychologists call it “Fragrant Flashbacks” and they come to show us the intimate relationship that exists between memory, smell and our childhood. Until the age of 5, the way in which a child integrates his memory is closely related to smell, but as we grow older, the sense of sight and hearing begins to have more weight.

The subject of smells and their relationship with children’s memory is an exciting area that has not been explored too deeply. However, scientists like Dr. Maria Larsson reveal that in reality, the nose is the “physical entrance” to our emotional world. In it, wonderful and unknown processes enter which we want to talk to you on this occasion …

Smells of childhood, a direct link to our emotions

Helen Fields, writer and medical expert for the Smithsonian, explains to us thanks to her book “Fragrant Flashbacks” that during our early childhood, smell, along with taste, are our most important “chemical channels” for understanding the world. After 5 years, we no longer have the need to put things in our mouths, and our nose is also no longer so receptive.

We could say that and that in turn, it is capable of activating very specific emotions and memories. We explain this interesting process to you.

Olfactory memory as therapy

We have all experienced those childhood smells that come unexpectedly, when we least expect it: when we open an old book and feel a strange “déjà vu”, or when we associate the fragrance of cinnamon with that cake our grandmother made …

Thinking that there may come a time when we lose “this magical path” that connects smell with emotion, is something we should all regret. However, an early symptom of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s is precisely the gradual loss of smell.

• There are very interesting therapies that seek to stop this loss of olfactory memory, those childhood smells, through stimulation, and in turn, as a mechanism to stop, as far as possible , the loss of memory itself.

• It is a known fact that in the case of Alzheimer’s, the emotional aspect is still very alive, very active, hence using smell as a mechanism to activate memory through emotion is undoubtedly an interesting aspect to take into account.

Exercises such as taking them for a walk after a rainy day, letting them smell the kitchen fragrances, or the perfume of freshly washed clothes, would be daily exercises with which to curb the disease a bit and, above all, offer well-being the patient allowing him to evoke significant moments from his past.

His childhood smells, for example …