On a summerlike day in November, I walked through a commercial garden where employees had just unloaded newly arrived Christmas trees. The unmistakable fragrance from so many hunter green fir trees surrounding me halted my immediate pursuit for ideal gifts and overpowered me in a maelstrom of memories. I fought the very temptation to sit on the ground and replay the swirling memories of Christmas past. In that moment, I saw fast forwarding images of Christmas trees lined up at my dad’s grocery store and a doll clad in a blue wool dress matching one of my favorites.
“May I help you,” a salesperson interrupted my interlude.
The moment passed, but that old familiar scent of Christmas lingered with me as surely as if I had broken off a tree branch and carried it in my pocket the rest of the day. I did not damage someone else’s tree, but I could not shake the distinctive smell, stronger than any perfume, nor the memories.
Although modern research into the sense of smell did not begin in earnest until the last half century, scientists and laypeople alike have long known that odors trigger memories. According to Dr. Tim Jacob, professor of Biosciences at Cardiff University in Wales, Marcel Proust lent his name to this phenomenon of memory recall in response to a specific smell - the Proust Effect. “Whole memories, complete with all associated emotions, can be prompted by smell. This is entirely unconscious and cannot necessarily be prompted voluntarily although countless studies have shown that recall can be enhanced if learning was done in the presence of an odour and that same odour is present at the time of recall.”
Wow! My shopping experience has a name - the Proust Effect. And, I wish I had known long ago about using fragrances to enhance my studies.
Likewise, educators have long known that we acquire all information through our five senses - seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. Tasting and smelling are different in that they trigger chemical reactions. Highly connected, 75 percent of taste is actually smell.
Ironically, as we learn more about this sense of smell, we have a very limited vocabulary to discuss aromas. In fact, we use the name of the actual substance that we smell - Christmas tree, coffee, cinnamon, apple pie, popcorn - to describe the smell. Of course, we also remember foul odors as well, but those we attempt to avoid rather than recapture.
William Ecenbarger, author of “The Forgotten Sense” in an old Atlanta Weekly Magazine that I’ve saved for years, cites the fascination of ancient man with fragrances. Museums are filled with unguent jars, vials, incense burners and philters. Greeks actually studied the sense of smell about 2,400 years ago. According to the Old Testament, God instructed Moses to create a perfume called myrrh. Perfume making is one of the oldest industries, still dominated by the French. Then, man totally ignored the scientific aspects of this sense until the 1950s.
However, according to Jacob, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year went to two American scientists, Dr. Linda Buck, Seattle, and Dr. Richard Axel, New York. In 1991, the two researchers jointly published their findings on “odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.” Since then, working separately, they have discovered the gene family which allows us to recall over 10,000 specific odors. Long ignored, the sense of smell, however, is the first sensory system to be deciphered using molecular techniques.
So what does the sense of smell really have to do with the Christmas season?
Everything. At no other time of the year, are all of our senses, especially that of smell, so bombarded. Perfume remains a favorite present to give. Knowing that Moses created a myrrh reminds us that one of the gifts the Wise Men brought to the Christ Child was myrrh, which according to legend, Mary saved until it was used during the burial rites of Jesus.
Helen Keller, who in losing both sight and hearing intensified her other senses, once wrote, “Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my Southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.”
One of the real hazards of modern society is that our intense focus on outcome, results, completion of the job, often makes us ignore the actual pleasure we can encounter both in the processes of our work and in the very acts of preparation for Christmas. With all the senses, savor each good moment of Advent. Then at the most unexpected times, often triggered by a familiar faint aroma, the moment, joy and all, will make a return visit as a tiny gift to ourselves.
2004
Beautiful words , I love reading them