Scent and Memory

“I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.” Michael Chabon

Until recently, the most accessible and practical means of cataloguing memories was through photography. Pictures became the medium through which we told stories about our past and thus became our most cherished possessions.

The irony is that the amateur, point-and-click photographer in all of us is not very good at taking pictures. Our natural impulse is archival rather than expressive. Our subjects are often posed and detached from the experience, as if they are taking break from the moment to stand and smile. Only a rare photographer can capture the depth of emotion that happens in a given moment and tell a story that exists outside of the frame.

Thus, pictures are a starting point for memories, a prompt for thinking about our past. Our strongest memories are actually associated with our “chemical” senses, taste and smell. Our sense of smell is overlooked, but the human olfactory sense is controlled by the limbic system, the part of the brain also responsible for emotion, memory, pleasure, and motivation.

This is the Scenter, a project of the Kawamura-Ganjavian architecture and design studio. It stores smells in tiny cartridges and releases them when the bellows are squeezed.

We tend not to notice our sense of smell except in cases when an odor is surprisingly strong, pleasantly or unpleasantly so. But there are also moments when a scent is so familiar, so close, that you feel as if you are experiencing something again.

The Scenter is a remarkable achievement then: a sensory device that can capture a tremendous part of our daily experience where technology of the pixilated sort cannot.