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...the voice of pensioners

Smelling bits of history

13 May 2019

Dear LPG

 

 I would like to ask your readers a question?  

 

Have you ever had that experience where you are busy minding your own business and then you suddenly smell a smell that takes you back.  Sometimes you can’t even put your finger on where it takes you back to, and when it happens to me, I often spend ages trying to search through my memories to see if I can find the association.  It happened to me recently and I wondered if I was unique in this. 

 

I am asking you the question now, but LPG was not the first place that it occurred to me to look for an answer.   These days, when faced with such a conundrum, I tend to get the tablet out and ask Google, and there was a lot of enlightening information there.

 

The first thing I learned is that I am not unique at all.  Our noses, like everything else inside us, are attached to our brains; in particular the olfactory bulb which is strongly associated with our sense of memory.  I also read that research has determined that the memories associated with our sense of smell are at their most heightened when we are between the ages of 15 and 30, and not surprisingly, when we are really little.   

 

Having found all this stuff I thought it might be a good idea to pass it on.  I am sure that LPG will print the links below now I have asked them to.

 

There is only one other thing that I have to say and that is, according to most of the information I read and the videos I saw you are supposed to remember where you smelled the smells that cause the reminders; I do the associating but, have to really work hard to ever put my finger on why a smell is so significant to me.  Perhaps my olfactory bulb has a screw or two loose.

 

UT, Hither Green

 

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