Hilltowns Senior News for Friday, August 5, 2016

What did your grandmother’s parlor smell like? Got it? You are instantly back in that room, and you can even see what color the upholstery is on the settee. (It was blue, right?) Mine always smelled like those little round pastel mints that came in spearmint and wintergreen.

Odors can bring back emotional images, feelings, and experiences. A number of behavioral studies have demonstrated that smells trigger more vivid memories, and are better than pictures at inducing that feeling of “being brought back in time.”

Odor memories have been described as stronger than memories evoked by words. Most odor-cued memories are tied to the first 10 years of life, whereas memories associated with verbal and visual cues peak in the teenage years. The sense of smell is functional at birth.

The power of odors to trigger the memory of experiences has been called the “Proust phenomenon,”  because the writer Marcel Proust described the flavor of a madeleine cake dipped into a cup of tea that caused him to recall an old upsetting memory.

We may choose not to look at something, but unless we hold our breath we will still be affected by the scent associated with events. Olfactory, or odor, memories can be unpleasant as well as pleasurable. They can forcefully bring back traumatic events like a car crash, or battle smells for a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder.  This type of learning helped our early ancestors avoid those threatening situations in the future.

There is also some evidence that suggests that what you think you’re smelling affects your response to an odor.  An identical odor may seem more pleasant when it is given a positive association or label (like Parmesan cheese) rather than a negative label (stomach flu).

Biologically, the olfactory bulb receives the sensory information from our nose and mouth.  It is part of the brain's limbic system, an area so closely associated with memory and feeling it’s sometimes called the “emotional brain.”  The olfactory bulb has access to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning.

Despite the tight wiring, however, smells would not trigger memories if it weren't for conditioned responses. When you first smell a new scent, you link it to an event, a person, a thing, or even a moment. Your brain creates a link between the smell and the memory. When you encounter the smell again, the link is already there to evoke the same reaction.

Scent marketing is one of the newer advertising tricks. These scents are subtle, and almost imperceptible to the unwitting sniffer.

In 2006, the California Milk Processor Board tried a scent advertising campaign to go along with its “Got Milk?” slogan. The city of San Francisco received so many complaints that it called for an immediate removal of the cookie-scented add-ons.

Real-estate agents set out fresh bread or cookies to make a house seem welcoming. The scent industry now produces sprays and other artificial scent-producers to create the same impressions. Hotels, stores and car dealers are turning to customized scents to help set a mood and create an impression.

You can even try your hand at sharing some of your own scent memories. California artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter has initiated the Olfactory Memoirs participatory art project.

In cooperation with San Diego Writers Ink, creative writing workshops are held in which participants think of a scent from childhood and then write a memory piece to describe it.  Brian says he began it because he has always been interested in other people’s passions, their stories, and the things they collect.

He is quoted by Emily Grosvenor in Perfume Week as saying, “Scent is wondrous. It represents, but not in the way an image or a sound represents. The volatile molecules of an odor change over time, which give it a temporal dimension. And, of course, the fact that it is the only sense that directly interfaces with our central system means that it’s the only sense in which emotion precedes cognition.”

Olfactory recollections are much less linear than written narratives, and can bypass the sort of editing we do when recounting stories about ourselves in a logical order. Sense memory is more like a collage.

Brian’s project will eventually result in a presentation by some of the writers, where their stories will be accompanied by an ingeniously engineered release of scents. Brian has been working with artist and engineer Dave Ghilarducci to design a scent keyboard to disperse scents over an audience using a computer. If you’d like to contribute an olfactory memoir to the project, go to www.olfactorymemoirs.com

Coming up

Moving right along, August is American Artists Appreciation Month, National Catfish Month, National Goat Cheese Month, and Shop Online For Groceries Month. The week of Aug. 7 to 13 is Assistance Dog Week, National Farmers' Market Week, National Fraud Awareness Week, and Elvis Week.

Aug. 7 is Lighthouse Day and National Doll Day; the eighth is International Cat Day, and  Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Night. Paul Bunyan Day is the 10th. The 12th is Kool-Aid Day, Vinyl Record Day, and World Elephant Day. The week ends with National Garage Sale Day on Aug. 13.

Don’t forget the Hilltown Seniors meeting on Saturday, Aug. 13, at the Berne senior and community center. The meeting begins at 10:30 a.m., and lunch is served at noon.
 

Menu

To create some of your own new olfactory memories, join the hungry guests at the Helderberg senior lunch program. Enjoy a hot lunch, good friends, great discussions, and dominoes and other games afterwards.

— Monday, Aug. 8, spaghetti with meat sauce, Romaine salad, wheat roll, fruit salad, and milk;

— Tuesday, Aug. 9, chicken cacciatore, rice, broccoli, wheat bread, Mandarin oranges, and milk; and

— Friday, Aug. 12, turkey tetrazzini with peas and spaghetti, Brussels sprouts, melon, wheat bread, vanilla pudding, and milk.

Please call Linda Hodges 24 hours in advance to 872-0940 to reserve lunch, or email her at: , or sign up when you come in. Tell us how many are coming, your name, and your telephone number. If you’d just like to come and help out, give Mary Moller a call at 861-6253, or email her at , and put “volunteer” in the subject line.

Lunches are provided by Helderberg Senior Services, the Albany County Department of Aging, and Senior Services of Albany. The town of Berne senior and community center is located at 1360 Helderberg Trail (Route 443) in Berne.