That stinks.

[mrissa]

Sometimes when I quit reading things, I have little pithy snarky posts about it. This time I wanted to highlight a factual error so that none of you will repeat it, because I've read this wrong, wrong thing more than one place:

It is, in fact, possible to remember and/or imagine a smell.

No, really. It is. I checked with timprov, who doesn't have

Comments

[swan_tower]

. . . I'd never even heard of somebody claiming that. Can't remember or imagine smells? What crack are they smoking? It took me YEARS to forget the smell of the dolphin necropsy I once observed!

[mrissa]

William Ian Miller claims that you can't, you can only remember how grossed out you were.

William Ian Miller is, on this matter, full of shit, though I recall enjoying him on early Icelandic law.

[swan_tower]

Which would be more plausible if I had been grossed out. I wasn't; but the smell was intense.

though I recall enjoying him on early Icelandic law

That is a sufficiently divergent field that I will not hold his statements on smell against him in that matter. :-)

[mrissa]

Well, it was interesting to me that he had written books on such divergent subjects. Now that I have made a go at The Anatomy of Disgust, I begin to think it was not the good kind of interesting.

[dancinghorse]

What? Huh? My understanding is that smell is the first of the senses, the one that calls back the strongest and possibly the oldest memories. Even after sight and hearing fade, smell can still call up a memory.

Link: http://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-the-sense-of-smell-work.htm

And a link: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web2/Ito.html

And so on and on and on.

Somebody is promoting personal opinion as fact. That's my opinion.

Personal experience? Agrees with the links. I can remember the smell of lilacs in my grandmother's garden when I was a toddler. And her old-fashioned roses. And even the bridal-wreath tree (light, fresh, barely there). All I need to do is think of it and it comes.

[adb_jaeger]

My understanding is that smell is the first of the senses, the one that calls back the strongest and possibly the oldest memories

While I agree with you, and the links, "smell triggering memories" is not the same as "remembering a smell".

[dancinghorse]

Hey, I made an assumption! I read it as "going both ways."

Obviously the same fallacy this person committed. Because I can remember smells as well as identify from triggers.

Interesting reflection on how we process sensory data--not just the actual input but information about the input.

[mrissa]

In fact, this author was claiming that scent triggers so strongly called up memory because we couldn't remember smells without the external trigger.

Which is, y'know, very wrong.

[txanne]

You can remember smells? That's SO COOL. I never questioned the received wisdom because I'm one of those with a crippled memory. But if I had to choose between remembering smells and having a vast library of MP3s in my head, I'd still choose the music.

[mrissa]

Oh yes, he was talking about the other direction as though it not only worked exclusively in that direction, but as though it only worked that well because it worked exclusively in that direction--as though Proust wouldn't have had his madeleine moment if he'd been able to imagine the smell of them.

[tiger_spot]

I frequently have a difficult time remembering or imagining smells for the same reason I have a difficult time remembering a particular song while a different song is playing. The world is quiet rather more often than it is odorless.

I'll just file "smells cannot be remembered" with "dreams are in black and white" and "thoughts are in language" under weird things that are apparently true for some people.

(Though if he's also got the the-thoughts-that-I'm-consciously-aware-of-are-mostly-words thing going, maybe that's part of the problem? There's practically no useful descriptive language for smells, so if he's trying to remember a description rather than the odor itself, that's probably hard.)

[mrissa]

That seems to be exactly what he's doing, yes: he talked at some length about the dearth of smell vocabulary. Which makes me wonder whether he thinks he also recalls music as "okay, dominant, minor third up, dominant again, major fifth down...."

[rushthatspeaks]

My response to this is that the man has spent no time whatsoever around anyone associated with professional perfuming.

There is a technical vocabulary to the level of conversation-does-not-read-as-English.

[mrissa]

Yes.

Even my mom and I have shorthands that don't parse for other people, because people who want to talk about smells a lot need them.

[voidmonster]

I... It... WHAT!?

Edited to add:

A google search turns up lots of people beginning from the assumption that you cannot remember smell. Almost all of the hits I looked at refuted the notion.

I'd never heard it before. It isn't like I've got Mris-level olfactilicious senses, but it's really very easy for me to call up lots of smells. The sorts of smells I can't remember are things like "what did the air smell like on Day X", where that is simply one of many details my mental compression routine has thrown out the metaphorical window. I can certainly imagine smells though.

[mrissa]

This is the problem with what we don't know we don't know: if you know that something works a certain way, why would you Google it? You know how it works, after all, and you can't Google everything.

[voidmonster]

Oh hell. That explains why it's been so hard for me to finish stories lately... Googling everything makes it real slow. :(

Seriously though, I'm fascinated by where this concept comes from, since in the little bit of googling I did I turned up the delightfully urban-legendish "I heard a smell-expert on the radio saying most people cannot remember smells."

I'd really like to hear that smell-expert's argument.

It's going to be difficult to convince me -- I strongly suspect this comes out of some Chomksy version of language -- but I'd like to hear the argument.