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National Geographic

How smelling roses could help you make stronger memories

If hearing an old song or getting a whiff of freshly sharpened pencils instantly carries you back to high school, you're familiar with the link between your senses and memory. When a sensory experience spontaneously evokes an autobiographical memory, it's often called the Proust Effect, named for French author Marcel Proust who described how the experience of eating a madeleine instantly transported him back to childhood in his novel In Search of Lost Time. 'The senses are critical for memory because they're at the intersection between our environment, our experiences, and our memory system,' says Susanne Jaeggi, a professor of psychology, applied psychology, and music and co-director of the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being at Northeastern University in Boston. But you don't have to wait for that random waft of pencil shavings to conjure your school days. By actively focusing on your senses during important moments, you may actually be able to improve your long-term memory. And even if you're not trying to remember a specific moment or experience, strengthening your senses will boost your memory overall. Here's how your primary senses influence memory—and what experts say you can do to hone them. The links between memory and the senses in your brain First, some background: On a basic physiological level, the parts of the brain that process smell, sight, sound, taste, touch, and memories are neurologically linked. When you're exposed to a particular sight, sound, or smell, your senses generate electrochemical activity—with brain cells firing, typically in the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for memory and learning, explains Andrew Budson, a professor of neurology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and coauthor of the book Why We Forget and How to Remember Better. These signals are transmitted to the hippocampus, which then 'takes separate sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, and feelings and binds them together into something coherent,' he explains. Meanwhile, the brain's amygdala adds emotion to the experience, and another part of the hippocampus tags this information so it can be retrieved for years to come. 'One of the ways a memory can be tagged as important is if it had a strong sensation such as a strong smell or beautiful image associated with it,' says Budson. 'That tells the brain to hold onto the information for a long time.' When information is experienced across multiple senses—for example, if you see and smell an apple pie as it comes out of your grandmother's oven—it has a higher chance of being remembered, Jaeggi says, because 'you have different pathways for accessing it later.' Indeed, research has found that multisensory learning improves memory by creating what's known as a 'memory engram'—a physical trace or imprint of a memory in the brain—across different sensory areas in the brain. 'There's a myth that some people learn best with visual stimuli and others with auditory stimuli,' says Budson, who's also chief of cognitive behavioral neurology at the VA Boston Healthcare System. 'The truth is, we all learn best when we have a multisensory experience because we're literally storing that memory in multiple areas of the brain that are associated with those senses.' Different areas of the brain play a role in sensory processing and memory formation. There are two hemispheres in the brain, each of which contains four main lobes: • The frontal lobes help control thinking and short-term memory, as well as voluntary movements and emotion regulation; • the parietal lobes process and integrate sensory information, including taste, texture, and temperature; • the temporal lobes are involved in auditory processing and spatial and visual perception; • and the occipital lobes process and interpret visual information from your eyes. Sight has might As human beings, 'we are very visually oriented,' says Jonathan Schooler, a cognitive psychologist and professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara. 'You can recognize a smell but it's hard to recall a smell. It's easy to conjure an image in your mind. While people often think vision happens in the eyes, what you see is actually processed in the occipital lobes, the parietal lobes, and the temporal lobes of the brain. 'Vision is the largest sense in terms of brain real estate,' Budson explains. Not surprisingly, research has found that visual long-term memory 'has a massive storage capacity' for details. Visual memory also can help you remember people and places—and it's flexible. In a study in a 2023 issue of Current Biology, researchers demonstrated that visual memories are the result of neural codes that evolve over time so that people can use that information to guide their behavior in the future. For example, if you make a list of groceries to buy but forget to bring it to the store, the process of having written it down and reviewed it will help you remember what you need. TIP: Zoom in on the details. If you train your eyes and mind to pay better attention to visual stimuli, studies have shown it can improve accuracy and efficiency in recalling visual information. If you're gazing at a scene in nature or a painting in a gallery, home in on the colors and textures to help you remember it better. (Learn what makes a photo memorable.) Hearing provides a soundtrack Although it's unclear why, scientists have found that auditory memory—the ability to remember information that's presented orally—tends to be less robust than visual memory. But there are exceptions: A study in a 2021 issue of the journal Psychological Research found that musicians have specific advantages when it comes to remembering sequences of sound patterns. These include the variations in pitch associated with speech (based on intonations or inflections) as well as changes in frequency of other sounds. This makes sense because remembering sound variations is important to musicians. A similar principle applies to important moments in real life for non-musicians: You might remember what song was playing when you met the love of your life or the lyrics to a song you played nonstop in high school because they mattered to you. 'A lot of what we remember has to do with the [subjective] importance of the information we're processing—the fact that it is important or interesting to us,' Jaeggi says. TIP: Break down the sound into separate parts. Auditory training—training your mind to listen actively to sounds and make distinctions between them—has been shown to improve working memory, attention, and communication among adults with mild hearing loss. So if you hear a great song that you want to remember to add to Spotify later, try to pick out certain instruments or rhythms in the piece. Smell conjures emotions If the smell of fresh-cut grass or campfires reminds you of your childhood, you're in good company. In 2021, a study conducted in Japan found that exposure to particular scents—such as tatami (Japanese straw mat), osmanthus flower, baby powder, citrus, and incense—elicited vivid, autobiographical memories, causing participants to feel as though they were 'being brought back in time.' 'No other sensory system is linked to the neural hub of emotion, learning, and memory, the way smell is,' says Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist and adjunct assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at the Brown University Medical School. The primary olfactory cortex resides where the amygdala and the hippocampus meet—"that's where the conscious perception of smell occurs,' Herz says, and it's the area that modulates learning and memory. A study in the journal Memory found that olfactory cues are more effective than visual cues at helping people recall memories from childhood. 'If you smell an odor, it's a great way to unlock a memory,' says Lila Davachi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Columbia University in New York City. TIP: Stop and smell the roses, the freesias—and the rest of your surroundings. A 2023 review of the medical literature found that olfactory training (a.k.a., smell retraining) is associated with improved cognition and memory. 'Good olfactory function is important for healthy brain aging,' says Herz, author of Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food. This is why Herz recommends engaging in smell training: Spend a few minutes every day smelling different things in your home such as spices, personal care products, perfumes, candles, or foods: 'Focus on what you're smelling and think about what it reminds you of,' she suggests. Taste the moment Believe it or not, there's something called gustatory working memory—the ability to remember a particular taste even after you're exposed to other tastes. With gustatory memory, taste information detected by your taste buds travels to the gustatory cortex, located within the cerebral cortex in the brain. There, it's processed and interpreted; then, the taste signals are transmitted to other brain regions, including the amygdala which plays a vital role in emotional responses and memory formation. Taste memory allows you to anticipate the taste of particular foods simply by looking at them, which helps you choose the foods you like and avoid those you don't. Keep in mind that your sense of taste doesn't work alone: 'When we talk about flavor, it comes from what's in our mouth but also [from] the volatile chemicals from what we're eating or drinking migrating up to the nose,' says Pamela Dalton, an olfactory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. While it's widely claimed that between 75 and 95 percent of what we perceive to be taste actually comes from the sense of smell, a precise percentage has been hard to prove; even so, many researchers agree 'that olfaction plays a 'dominant' role in the tasting of food.' TIP: Eat a wide variety of foods—and describe them to lock in the experience. A study in a 2022 issue of Nature found that healthy adults who engaged in taste recall training became better at recognizing and recalling sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes they'd previously been exposed to. To improve your gustatory memory, treat yourself to a range of these different taste sensations. Focus on the flavors and the way the foods feel in your mouth—then describe them in words. While drinking wine, Budson recommends focusing on the various flavors and sensations on your tongue. Get a feel for things Most people don't think of memories related to the sense of touch—often called tactile memory—but research shows that people are remarkably adept at storing and recalling memories of how objects feel. 'Touch sensations are processed in the parietal lobes, close to the frontal lobes and next to the movement processing area,' Budson says. This allows you to integrate the experiences of touch and movement in ways that help orient you and navigate your surroundings—which is why you can hold a cup of coffee without looking at it or spilling it. TIP: Channel your inner preschooler and make time for sensory play. Research has found that engaging in tactile memory training can improve sustained attention and working memory. You can do this at home by running your fingers through bowls of water, rice, and dried beans and noting the differences in how they feel. You could also try making shapes with clay while focusing on the way it feels in your hands. If you pay attention to sensations that feel good or uncomfortable, it can help you make wise choices in the future. For example, if you take note of the discomfort you feel in a roughly textured shirt, it'll help you remember not to buy clothes in the same fabric in the future. Your tactile memory can also help you decide if a tote bag you've loaded up is going to hurt your hand or shoulder, based on previous experience. Ultimately, strengthening your senses and your memory is all about paying attention to the world around you, Schooler says. He recommends engaging in breath-focused meditation, using your breath to anchor your attention, then shifting your focus to whatever sights, smells, or sounds are arising. Herz agrees: 'The more attention you pay to anything—and attention is multisensory—the more it will reinforce whatever information you're encoding in your brain.' This article is part of Your Memory, Rewired, a National Geographic exploration into the fuzzy, fascinating frontiers of memory science—including advice on how to make your own memory more powerful. Learn more.