Smells can trigger emotional memories, study finds

Smells can trigger emotional memories, study finds

"Smells can transport us back to powerful and emotional memories from the past more effectively than sounds, a study shows, supporting a theory by Marcel Proust. Those who were given the smell remembered more details about the film and found their memories more unpleasant and than those who had the background music as a memory trigger."

What I want to know is why smells never seem to evoke clear, joyful memories. Why is the sense of smell connected only to the saddest, most indistinct parts of memory? To hear what has passed; to gaze on its likeness, to taste of the past ... is to savor its brightness. The aftertaste can be as bittersweet as a favored confection made incomplete, but, oh, the first impression! The sounds and sights and tastes of the past cheer me.

But the scents ... the scents are different. The Summer night's bouquets are cruel. They send me toward a Fall that I can never reach. I'm left standing at a wall that I can never breach. Missing a time that may never have been. Longing for a face that I may never have seen. Begging forgiveness for words that I didn't ever mean.

I can deal with feeling a sense of loss, for I've lived long, and coping with loss is what we old farts are trained to do. I just wish I knew exactly what I was missing. If I knew, I could seek it again, but its identity is always so elusive. The aromas pass and fan the flames of memory, but the blaze falls ever short, and there is only grief in the residue, heartache in the ashes.

Oh, yeah, Summer's evening breeze makes the cottonwood trees whisper of a sun-soaked tomorrow to end the gloom, but those are lies. The cursed, mysterious scents of memory waft in those same winds. Winds redolent of sorrow.