Article

Culture

Psychology

Weirdness

23 October 2023

5 min read

Why smell jumps the queue when it comes to memories

Smells hardwire deep into the brain, writes Henna Cundill, as she explores why they jump-start such vivid memories.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

An autumnal scene of a church yard and church framed by leafless trees.

'The smell of dust and damp stone will always cry “safety!”'

Jakub Pabis on Unsplash.

When I was a 22-year-old undergraduate my mother died quite suddenly. I can't remember the name of the undertakers we used, nor the chaplain who took her funeral. I can no longer visualise what any of their faces looked like. I know I visited the chaplain’s house to plan the funeral, but I can't remember exactly where that house was. What sticks is that the day of the funeral was a sultry summer's day, and both the chaplain and the undertakers smelt of perspiration. To this day there are moments where I catch that same whiff of man-sweat in some other location, and for a fleeting second, I am a bewildered 22-year-old once more.

Here is another memory. I attended a tiny, rural Church of England primary school in the middle of England. At the end of each school year, all of us donned our little Wellington boots, which smelt faintly of slurry (since this was dairy-farming country) and sweaty feet. Then we lined up in a crocodile and trudged through the bluebell-wood (damp leaves) and skirted the edge of fields (silage, which stings the nose) covering the mile or so between our school building and the village church.

We would enter the church grounds through the back field, hurrying through an eerily muffled graveyard with tombstones towering far above our heads and the grass disturbingly lumpy beneath our little feet. To the chidings of “Quickly!” and “Quietly!” we children scurried down a gravel path, away from this unsettling place of death, to reach the cool sanctuary of a little church, and the comforting smells (for me, at least) of damp stone and dusty hymnbooks.

Others may not have the same associations, but for me the smell of dust and damp stone will always cry “safety!” and the reassurance that “there are no ghosts in here!” in contrast to that troubling graveyard. From death to life. Yet, at the same time, getting stuck with my nose close to some man’s whiffy armpit on the Tube will forever insinuate that I am just a child pretending to be a grown-up, out of my depth, overwhelmed with one thousand decisions to make (“What flowers do you want for her coffin?”) and no-one to advise. In the midst of life, death again.

On reflection I will know that my emotions are being manipulated by my nose, in ways which are more or less than helpful depending on the circumstances.

Of course, I am not 22 years old and lost anymore, no matter what that man’s armpit tries to tell me. My rational mind knows better, but my rational mind doesn’t get a say – or doesn’t get the first say anyway. This is because smell is the only one of our senses that bypasses the thalamus (the brain’s ‘filtering gate’ that decides which part of the brain needs to respond to sensory input) and goes straight to the limbic system, where emotional memory is stored.

Sometimes it is very obvious that this is taking place, such as in the examples given above. On reflection I will know that my emotions are being manipulated by my nose, in ways which are more or less than helpful depending on the circumstances. But it can happen in more subtle ways too. Supermarkets infamously pump out smells to influence our buying choices, and we’re trying to sell our house right now, so we’ve been brewing a whole lot more coffee than we ever usually would.

Intriguingly, scientists don’t really know why the human sense of smell jumps the queue when it comes to cognitive processing. There are biological theories, such as that the smell of predator could wake up our ancestors while they were sleeping and/or could allow them to follow a scent trail quickly when fleeing danger or seeking food. There are social theories too, such as that we don’t have a lot of good words to describe smells, so the brain just doesn’t bother trying to analyse them. Whatever the truth of the matter, the reality is that (whether we like it or not) our noses are an emotional trip-hazard.

When I walk through those great oak doors there is a moment, a glitch in the matrix, when the unmistakable smell of church hits my nose. Dust, damp… a little hint of mouse.

I can’t help wondering what this tells me about my religious practice. Do I go to church because I have made a cognitive decision to worship God each Sunday? Or do I go to church because I am following my nose, getting away from a world full of armpits and responsibilities to a place where I am a seven-year-old girl, all gingham dress and wellies, feeling safe. If so, does it matter?

Truth is, my mind can give me a dozen reasons not to go to church every single week. In fact, two dozen reasons. More. It has always been a busy week; I’m always behind on work. The house always needs a sort out and the car is never washed. But because certain congregation members are normally counting on me for certain things, and because I’m still pretending to be a grown up, I typically drag myself out the door, and off to church I go.

And week on week, without fail, when I walk through those great oak doors there is a moment, a glitch in the matrix, when the unmistakable smell of church hits my nose. Dust, damp… a little hint of mouse. My body registers this before my mind; my shoulders drop a little of their tension. Even if it’s just for a fleeting moment, I start to feel that I know for sure what is absolutely real in my life and what is just pretend.

Is this knowledge irrational – since it doesn’t come from the cognitive part of my mind? Or is there a God who knows that the cognitive part of my mind sometimes tells me all sorts of untrue and unhelpful things. Is there a God who is choosing to reach out to me in more subtle, more ancient ways?

I can only wonder if I have been following my nose all this time, without even noticing. Drawn along by an ancient scent trail that leads me time and time again…this way…and that way…until I reach a place where there is safety, and bread.

Article

Belief

Culture

Time

12 March 2024

5 min read

Ted Giola is right: we’re all addicts now

Addiction to distraction prevents deep thought about our place in time.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A clock repair peers at a clock he is repairing, amid a see of alarm and wall clocks on display

There’s a joke told by David Foster Wallace in a speech called “This is Water”. Two young fish are swimming and come across an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish says “Morning boys! How’s the water?” The two fish swim on until one of them turns and asks, “What the hell is water?” Unlike fish, however, for humans time is the water in which we swim. There can be no understanding or meaning in life without time.

Take the ending of the old BBC sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth. It’s set in World War One, as a group of soldiers try to escape the near-certain death of going over-the-top. In the last episode, they are stood at the foot of their trench, waiting to attack the enemy. Suddenly, the artillery stops. One soldier takes this as good news: “It’s over!” he shouts, “The Great War: 1914 to 1917!”

This joke only makes sense with time. I can only find this funny from the perspective of someone in a different time from those in the narrative. This only makes sense to someone who knows the war instead finished in 1918. Time makes the joke.

Robert Jenson, the late American theologian, was wrong about a lot. But he was often wrong in the right way. Jenson wasn’t afraid to follow through on the implications of some of Christianity’s most fundamental claims, even if led him down paths others would be wary of treading. If Jenson ends up entering the pantheon of the Church’s great teachers, it will be for his flaws as much as his successes.

We are, Giola argues, entering a ‘post-entertainment culture’. We’re no longer seeking entertainment. We’re seeking distraction.

One of the most helpful aspects of Jenson’s theology is on time. We often think of time as some sort of process, a way of moving through life and getting from A to B. However, Jenson stressed that time is a creature: a thing given existence by God, not just some neutral aspect of the universe to be taken for granted. God is without time and may have created us to be creatures without time, too. But God did create time and created us to live within time. This suggests we might learn something about human nature by reflecting on what it means to be creatures that inhabit time.

But time is so ubiquitous that we can’t think about time except as creatures within time. It is, in other words, like trying to bite your own teeth.

Okay, great. Time is important. Big deal. Why should you care? Isn’t this just the sort of nonsense philosophers come up with to look busy? Well, this matters because our ability to think with and in time is under serious threat. And with it, our ability to flourish as creatures.

For the last two years, the famed music critic Ted Giola has offered his thoughts on the state of culture. This year’s is a rather bleak read.

Giola argues that we’ve misunderstood the relationship between art and entertainment. We often think of art as something done for the artist, while entertainment is something done for the audience. Creatives must choose whom they create for: themselves, or their audience.

Instead, Giola suggests it’s better to think of a food chain. Entertainment is parasitic upon art and uses the artistic to fuel its inexorable growth. Recall Martin Scorsese’s infamous comments about the Marvel cinematic universe: they’re not cinema, they’re rollercoster rides; they’re not art, they’re entertainment.

But there’s always a bigger fish. We are, Giola argues, entering a ‘post-entertainment culture’. We’re no longer seeking entertainment. We’re seeking distraction.

But the short-term, instant response culture that social media habituates us to cannot come at the expense of the long-term work of genuinely deep thought.

Films become TV shows become TikToks. Books become blog posts become tweets. The ways in which we engage in reflection upon the world around us are increasingly reduced to shorter and shorter soundbites and the expense of substantive, thoughtful analysis.

Distraction involves short, repetitive interaction with stimuli to produce dopamine hits. Because this leads to pleasure, we repeat the process until we become habituated to it. We become addicted to it.

Crucially, this addiction to distraction itself is the very thing being sold. We don’t become addicted to the content of what we watch; we become addicted to the form of it. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said, and so it is here too. We are becoming habituated to addiction itself. Distraction is merely the way in. We are, as Giola shows, all addicts now.

There are, of course, numerous worrying issues this raises. Giola himself does a fantastic job at covering some of them. However, in addition to all the psychological harm this addiction does, our addiction to distraction is curtailing our ability to inhabit our nature as creatures in time.

As we saw earlier, time brings perspective, and perspective brings understanding. We depend on time itself to help us make sense of events in the world and in our lives. The creature that is time is, in this respect, a gift from God and a reminder of our own limitations as co-creatures with it.

But, the more we become addicted to short-term distraction, the less able we are to inhabit understandings of the world that emerge as a result of long-term reflection and deep thought. We are becoming creatures in time who are gradually losing sight of our dependency on time itself to understand what is most in service of the common good.

Look, social media and everything that accompanies it can be great. The ability to respond to news in real time has its benefits. Public narratives have become increasingly democratised and that is only a good thing. But the short-term, instant response culture that social media habituates us to cannot come at the expense of the long-term work of genuinely deep thought.

If we are to move away from the near-universal sense that everything is on the verge of collapsing into chaos, perhaps the first step we might take is to begin again to work with, not against time. If the short-termism underwritten by addiction to distraction is one of the myriad factors that contributes to our pervasive sense of unease, perhaps we might commit to thinking more slowly?

Robert Jenson was right; time is a creature. We forget this at our peril. Some things can only be healed with patience and the slow passage of time. Until we retrieve an understanding of time as gift, not burden, our capacity to grapple meaningfully with the real substantive issues we face will remain beyond our reach.