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March 28, 2024, 11:56:58 PM

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'Memory' smells

Started by Garfield And Friends, March 21, 2005, 06:51:56 PM

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I've just passed by the toilets on our office floor as the cleaners set to work, and I've just gotten a whiff of a chemical that immediately set my mind back to a memory of an indoor ghost-train/arcade/dodge'em emporium that, as a kid, I used to be taken to as a special treat. I can recall the 'evil face' design on the fronts of the ghost-train carraiges. Not only that, but I could remember the distinctive background rock music that seems to accompany a lot of those dodge'em rinks (coupled with frightening murals on the walls of F1 cars crashing and bursting into flames). Wow.

(Side note: Apparently women have a better sense of smell than men. Or maybe men just stink more and women are picking up on that)

Back to topic!

Baxter

hmm yes whenever i smell jars of mint it reminds me of 20pences and vice versa because my nana allways used to give me loads of 20p peices each weekend in old mint jars, or it could have been some very clever synaesthesia experiment on her part.

Rats

When I smell butane gas, I always remember that I'm 18 foot tall and made of shrimp.

Labian Quest

We used to walk past this factory on the way to school called the 'Dyeing and Finishing Works' and the smell that came out of the place was horrendous. I remember wondering out loud what the hell they did in there and my older brother said 'That's where they take people that are dying and finish them off'

DuncanC

Worryingly, some kind of cleaning fluid or disinfectant always reminds me of these flat green lollipops I loved as a kid and haven't seen anywhere for years. A the time, I assumed they were apple flavoured.

The Burnhouse.  It has a theme tune as well.  "Kiss from a Rose".

The Burnhouse is nestled up a black hill near Lisburn, and it's always dark.  It's an abattoir but we used to watch the smoke billow out the windows, and the smell was so potent and strong, the smell of death and decay and silence.  I'm going all goth on you now but meat smells like the Burnhouse and that's why I can't have a good old steak, as I whizz past that place in the dark with "Kiss from a Rose" suddenly coming on the car radio.

Baxter

Pineapple drops allways make me feel a bit ill but purely in an intelectual way because I know to make the ester that flavours them (butyl butanoate) you need butanoic acid which smells like a mixture of 1. sick 2. poo and 3. smelly cheese, butanoic acid is also evolved when butter goes rancid.

Des Nilsen

There's a kind of scented candle that reminds me of Christmas when I was about 3 years old, but I haven't smelled that in a long time, so I don't know what it is exactly.
When I was 13 I caught a whiff in a shop and it brought it all back, but the exact odour is a mystery. I'll have to go sniffing around shops soon to find out.

Also, that rubbery smell you get from those little day-glow pencil tops. My aunt had hundreds of them when I was very young and she'd look after me (she was still in her late teens). I'd enjoy smelling them and called them 'smelly things'. Hehehe.

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dan dirty ape

The soft drink Black Grape, from the drinks company that also does Red Stripe lager and Karribean Kola whose name now escapes me, has a smell and taste that really, really reminds me of something from childhood but I'm fucked if I can remember what. And I grew up in Dartford, not the West Indies.

butnut

<Butnut's excuse-to-waffle-about-Proust-detector has been ringing for hours>

Somone famously said about Darwin that the reason he was a true genius was that he looked at the same world as someone else, but saw it in a different way (yeah, there was that other guy who came up with the same idea at the same time but y'know...). But my point is the same point applies to Proust. Everyone has there sudden, often inexplicable memories that come out of nowhere, but only he spent over 20 years writing about them. His main realizations about these 'memory smells' is that for a brief moment we are transported outside of time, and therefore, for a brief moment, we have escaped death.

Labian Quest

The reason we can develop such strong associations with smells is probably a lot more mundane; I think it has to do with remembering whether or not certain fruits, vegetables or other food sources are poisonous or not. It's probably just a primitive survival instinct.

You make me want to investigate Proust.  I think I shall.

Baxter

QuoteYou make me want to investigate Proust. I think I shall.
Another convert to the dark cause.

Ambient Sheep

I could go on all day about these.  So I won't.  For now, anyway.  Besides, I might end up in tears...

Leila

The smell of burning toast reminds me of my nan's old house. Not that she burnt food all the time or anything.

peet

The smell of a creosoted wooden fence:
my grandparents' house and small allotment, his cobweb-filled shed with old metal oxo tins full of nails, picking runner beans with her, short weekend visits.

The smell of freshly cut grass:
hyperactive lunchtime football on the school field (I was always best goalie), a heat-hazy neverending summer feeling of absolute content, excited sports day anticipation, slight whiff of dogshit.


I also remember one year the Comic Relief nose was scented with a pleasant boiled sweet/flowery perfume smell... and my mum buying me one on the very same day I was given The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings in flimsy paperback volumes.  I think I must've periodically taken a big whiff while I was reading The Hobbit, because many years later I found the nose at the bottom of a box and on sniffing had a massively potent boingggggg flashback memory of wizards and mountains.

Suttonpubcrawl

I get these sorts of experiences with smells a lot. I also get them with other things, like the weather will be a certain way and it'll remind me of some time of year in the past when the weather was like that a lot and I felt a certain way. The thing about the smell memory experiences I get is that they're almost always extremely vague. I'll have an extremely brief flash of a memory but it'll be extremely unclear, just a feeling or a vague image of a place. And when I try to pin it down it slips out of my hands like a bar of soap in a bath (haven't had a bath in years, only showers, soap still does that in baths, doesn't it?).

When I get a memory like that it'll sometimes have me thinking for ages trying to remember the full detail of where I recognise the smell from, what feelings it's reminding me of, what places, what times of year, what times of my life. I very rarely manage it though. It's amazing the things that come up though, the way using a certain soap can bring back memories of a time when you used that soap before, or seeing an object you haven't seen for a while will bring back memories of when you last used it.

The most clearly defined smell memory I can think of at the moment is the smell in Bow Road station when I pass through it on the train. It's a kind of computer parts smell and every time I pass through the station it reminds me very strongly of when I first built a computer. Sad eh?

NobodyGetsOutAlive

Does anyone get Weather Smells? When you go outside and the 'smell' of the air makes you reminisce?

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: "NobodyGetsOutAlive"Does anyone get Weather Smells? When you go outside and the 'smell' of the air makes you reminisce?
Yes, Suttonpubcrawl does.  ;-)

But yes, I do too.  And they're often the best.

NobodyGetsOutAlive

Well, that'll teach me never to read a long post again :)

Lady Beaner

Sometimes bonfire smells remind me of being in Mauritius.  A strange 'earthy' smell which catapaults me back to being aged 10 and clambering across the 'coloured earth'.  Damn you bastards, I could weep!