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.

Status, grievance and resentment: C.S. Lewis on the surprisingly modern business model of hell

60 years after its author’s death, The Screwtape Letters image of hell as an unscrupulous business is still relevant. Simon Horobin tells how C.S. Lewis came to author the influential bestseller.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

A comic book style cartoon of a small squat devil looking quizzed in hell.

A scene from Marvel Comic's version of The Screwtape Letters.

November 22nd is the sixtieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, an event that was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK on the same day. Although he is best known today as the author of the Narnia stories, the obituary that appeared in The Times newspaper a few days later noted that it was in fact The Screwtape Letters which sparked his success as a writer.

Initially published as a series of letters in the church newspaper The Guardian, The Screwtape Letters appeared in book form in 1942. The idea came to Lewis during an uninspiring sermon at Lewis’s local parish church in the Oxford suburb of Headington, in July 1940. Provisionally titled ‘As one Devil to Another’, the book would form a series of letters addressed to a novice devil, called Wormwood, beginning work on tempting his first patient, by an older, retired devil, called Screwtape. In finding Screwtape’s voice, Lewis was influenced by a speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Reichstag and broadcast by the BBC. What struck Lewis about the oration was how easy it was, while listening to the Führer speaking, to find oneself wavering just a little.

Lewis dedicated the volume to his friend and fellow Oxford academic, J.R.R. Tolkien. After Lewis’s death, having read an obituary in the Daily Telegraph claiming that Lewis was never fond of the book, Tolkien noted drily:

‘He dedicated it to me. I wondered why. Now I know.’

Despite Tolkien’s misgivings, the public devoured the work and it quickly became a bestseller. Although, as Lewis pointed out, numbers of sales can be misleading. A probationer nurse who had read the book told Lewis that she had chosen it from a list of set texts of which she had been told to read one in order to mention it at an interview. ‘And you chose Screwtape?’, said Lewis with some pride. ‘Well, of course’, she replied, ‘it was the shortest’.

Not all readers approved of its sentiments. A country clergyman wrote to the editor of The Guardian withdrawing his subscription on the grounds that much of the advice the letters offered seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical. The confusion no doubt arose from the lack of any explanation surrounding their circumstances; in a later preface Lewis gave more context, though refused to explain how this devilish correspondence had come into his hands.

Its publication by Macmillan in 1943 brought Lewis to the attention of readers in the United States; when Time magazine featured an interview with him in September 1947, it carried the title ‘Don v. Devil’. A picture of Lewis featured on the magazine’s cover, with a comic image of Satan, complete with horns, elongated nose and chin, and clutching a pitchfork, standing on his shoulder.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored.

The Screwtape Letters are the product of the war years, during which Lewis wrote many of his most popular works. It was in 1941 that he delivered the first of his broadcasts for the BBC Home Service, which launched his career as a public apologist for the Christian faith. In 1942 Lewis published Perelandra, the sequel to his first space travel novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), in which his hero, Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist – another nod to Tolkien – is summoned to Venus to prevent a second fall. Although it was published in 1950, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with four children being evacuated to the countryside to escape the London blitz. In setting his stories in outer-space or the fantastical world of Narnia, Lewis could be accused of writing escapist fiction that avoided the realities of a world in conflict. Lewis, however, believed that the war had not created a new crisis, but rather brought into clearer focus an ever-present struggle between good and evil.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored. As he remarked in the second of his Broadcast Talks:

‘Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage’.

The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’.

Lewis’s message to a country living in fear of occupation by German troops was that the invasion had already happened. They had been summoned not to their country’s defence, but to its liberation. When the Pevensie children stumble into a snow-covered Narnia under the control of the tyrannical White Witch, they are told in hushed whispers of the rumours of Aslan’s return: ‘“They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.”’ It is a reminder that Aslan enters Narnia as a rebel, intent on overthrowing the Witch and installing the rightful kings and queens on the thrones of Cair Paravel.

The Screwtape Letters do not ignore the war during which they were written; Wormwood’s patient is killed in the London bombing. But, for Screwtape, a war is of no value unless it results in winning souls for his Father Below. His advice to his nephew is concerned with diverting the patient from engaging with universal questions by distracting him with everyday preoccupations and sense experiences. While these might involve the immediate conflict, they could also be the excitement of a new romance, a falling out with a friend, the prospect of promotion, or an obsession with food. If the patient should begin to speculate about spiritual matters, Screwtape advises Wormwood to deflect him with academic theories and philosophies that avoid confronting the question of whether the Christian faith might actually be true. The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’. It is ironic, Screwtape observes, that, while mortals typically picture devils putting ideas into their minds, their best work is done by keeping things out.

Despite numerous requests for sequels, Lewis was reluctant to twist his mind back into the ‘diabolical attitude’ and revisit the spiritual cramp it produced. Numerous spin-offs have appeared to fill the void, with Screwtape emails, audio and stage performances and even a Marvel comic book adaptation. Despite this, readers continue to turn to the original work. After all, Lewis’s depiction of hell as an unscrupulous business concern, whose employees are perpetually concerned about their own status, nursing grievances and resentment, speaks to our modern age just as much as it did to Lewis’s own.