A Nose that Knows...

It’s been uncharacteristically warm...nay I should say hot...( high thirties and even 40 degrees Celsius on Monday!!) for winter.....and the balmy evening breezes and warm hazy mornings have produced a sense of euphoria in most of us here in Yamba...my daughter said to me yesterday, ‘it’s so hard to go to school now, it just feels like summer and I keep thinking I should be free to go the beach!! It smells like holidays!” The latter few words really held my imagination, ‘it SMELLS like summer.’ It got me thinking about all the memories we associate with smell...how important this largely taken for granted sense is and how much it influences our state of mind.

I have read that not being able to smell, which is the unfortunate lot of a few, can actually lead to depression. I guess when you think about it, it is very understandable... Smell doesn’t just evoke memories it evokes emotions such as fear, contentment, anticipation and even sexuality. Strong smells can also affect us physically, giving us a headache or making us nauseous.

It is a fact that Smell is the only sense with direct access to the amygdala, the 'emotional centre' of the brain. An important quality of the olfactory system is that information travels both to the limbic system and cortex. The limbic system is the primitive part of the brain that includes areas that control emotions, memory and behavior. In comparison the cortex is the outer part of the brain that has to do with conscious thought. How apt then that Yogic teaching tells us that prana, or life force energy, is taken in through the nose with the breath. The nose is known as the gateway to consciousness.

Now the intriguing thing about the senses in general is that they all cannot be clinically understood except by careful separation of the physical and objective stimulus from the mental and subjective perception. We cannot be directly aware of the properties and qualities of external objects, though our language and thinking often identifies an object with its perception. An object cannot, of itself, be red or a solution of sugar sweet: these are essentially perceptions within us, not properties of matter. There is no straightforward, universal connection between the intensity of a stimulus and the strength of its perception. It all boils down to our ‘experiences’ with that sense…..and thus our associations.

Marcel Proust wrote, ‘"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered· the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls· bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory”.

I associate the smell of seaweed and fish with holidays, the beach and the sensation of being free to do as I wish, not to mention the concept of time being endless….

I associate the smell of apple pie with my childhood, winter, security and comfort and the sensation of being nurtured….not to mention the anticipatory tastes that go with the smell and the working of the salivary glands.

I associate the scent of jasmine flowers with my children’s baby hood and the rainforest where we lived, with comforting routine and lazy summer nights on the verandah drinking red wine and philosophizing….

Each smell memory is complex and intimate and immediately gives me a sense of being in a different time and place…it affects my present emotions in complex ways too…sometimes conjuring up anticipation, longing or dread…all of which can be totally out of context with the actual moment of time I am in!

It makes me realize just how potent aromatherapy could be…but how very particular to an individual it would need to be to replace other drugs in the healing process be it emotional healing, or otherwise. At present aromatherapy oils are the concentrated essence of the plant. They are extracted from such varied parts of the plant as the root, seed, trunk, leaf, fruit, and flower. Aromatherapy has the capacity to affect people on different levels: physical/medicinal, and emotional/psychological. Each level of action works in synergy with the others and can enhance the overall effect. It is remarkable in its effect and I can attest to its effectiveness. How much more remarkable would it be if each individual could bottle a summer’s day, newly mown grass, the scent of wet dog hair, their mothers baking, sheets just brought in from the clothes-line, or any other memory smell that they choose based on their own unique experiences!

I wonder just what smells my children carry with them from childhood…good and bad…and how much these memory smells will affect the choices they make, the things they like and dislike upon their journeys…