Making scents of our lives

One of my grandmas used to smell us instead of kiss us when she saw us during our visits. My siblings and I, together with our cousins, used to wonder if this were a peculiar behavior of our own grandma or if all grandmas naturally cultivated this specific way of greeting. It was as if the essence of her grandkids were rising like steam from the pores of their beings and she was there to breathe them all in to her own.

I used to have a small red pillow that was my comfort object until I was maybe six or seven. I do not remember why it gave me comfort but when I now remember my pillow, I have an image of it and I remember how it smelled. My mother would always tell me to have it washed since she said it smelled awful but I remember feeling that every time it was returned to me after washing, I feel like I have lost part of its essence. If it did not smell the same, it did not feel like it were the same red pillow that knew me so well.

Science has been on the trail of discovering the power of scents for many years now. We have known for a while now that the olfactory paths — the tunnels through which aromatic messages from the nose pass — lead directly to the hippocampus (brain part linked to emotions), unlike the paths of vision and sound that have "pit stops" before they reach it. This is how we can explain why a whiff of something can immediately trigger not just a memory but the feelings layered upon those memories. Lately, science has been conspicuously nosing around for the role of aromas in our lives.

Last Feb. 13, the Journal of Neuroscience had this study: "Smelling a Single Component of Male Sweat Alters Levels of Cortisol in Women." "Cortisol" is a hormone that indicates stress level and it can be found in saliva. It does not take a stretch of imagination to see how smelling man’s sweat could stress a woman out but I was surprised to see that the women in the subject study also reported having positive changes in their sexual arousal level. These changes did not significantly register when the women were asked to smell a similar-smelling compound based on yeast. This could mean that androstadienone, a compound in men’s sweat is a pheromone, and if it really is one, it is the first one to reveal its identity to science. This could also mean that we could have men in locker rooms thinking and smiling at the power they could possibly wield with only their sweat. Now, now, ladies, let them be. We women know that we need them to think about so much more but multi-tasking has never been such a strong feature of these Ys.

In another study in the journal Science last March 9, researchers from two German institutions, the University of Lübeck and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf found that scents could help us perform better even in tests, but only after a good night sleep. In their experiment, they released a whiff of rose scent while they were being asked to remember something on the screen. Then the subjects were asked to sleep while their brain waves were being monitored. They released another whiff of the same scent in different times for different groups: one before sleep time, one during deep sleep (around 20 minutes after you hit the pillow, extending to maybe an hour more and then at different fragmented times throughout sleep) and then during dreamtime or REM (Rapid Eye Movement). Only when the scents were redelivered during deep sleep did the subjects register a significant improvement in remembering what they learned after sleeping.

This study on scent, sleep and memory could shed light on why sleep is a good time to learn or relearn things. The researchers found that in deep sleep, when the brainwaves are slow, the "thinking and planning" parts of the brain talk to the hippocampus, where the day’s memories seem to be also recorded. Upon the sensing of the scent that was recorded during the waking hours, the occurrence of the same scent, even in sleep, seems to cement the memory, enough to last when one awakes. However, there have also been studies where dreams played a role in completing the picture of what one is trying to learn. One popular account of a dream among scientists is that of chemistry professor Friedrich A. von Kekule of Belgium who dreamt of a snake whirling, trying to get hold of its tail. This dream occurred when Kekule was preoccupied in his waking hours with the structure of the benzene molecule. The dream helped him construct a closed-ring model of the benzene molecule, which apparently revolutionized organic chemistry. So maybe there are certain kinds of learning where each stage of sleep would be given to helping.

The Guardian science news also reported a study done by Bruce Hood of the University of Bristol and Paul Bloom of Yale University in the US, to find out how kids could be so attached to their "comfort" objects — whether a blanket, pillow or toy. Aged three to six, kids in the experiment were told that a certain contraption they saw in the same room could "copy" their favorite object. Of the 22 kids, four flatly refused to have their beloved toys copied, 18 did but only five of those opted to have the "copy" afterwards. The children seemed to know that their toys were not alive but they believed that they had something else that cannot be copied. They do have a working sense of something irreplaceable that was not physical. They have a sense that the identity of something rests not only on its appearance or material — that there is something else about a red pillow that is beyond being "red" and being a "pillow." I think that is the essence of the child within each of us that we precariously lose now and then when our spirits grow old.

Science has been making sense of a lot of scents that float around the pathways of our lives. If we could only mark each book we have read with a scent, every lover we have kissed, every discovery we come upon, every new friend we encounter, or every ground we walk on, maybe our memories would be better connected. Imagine if we could just inhale silently instead of polluting the moment with helpless words or with a barrage of unnecessary images, then we could readily summon the lessons of the memories we have made. Imagine the silences it could afford, the instances of profound encounters with the simple and plain against which we could savor the richness of our very own lives.

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