Lmemory is not an orderly library where you can go to check book by book; rather it is a wild territory where odors act as guardians of secret passages. While the view and ear process the information through rational filters, the smell draws a direct path to the heart of the experience: the limbic system, the place of emotions and autobiographical memory. The smell, more than any other sense, functions as a chemical mediator between the outside world and the intimate map of our past, is able to resurrect whole moments with overwhelming emotional fidelity.
The "La Magdalena de Proust" phenomenon named after novelist Marcel Proust (In search of lost time)) describes how the taste and aroma of a muffin wet in tea immerse the narrator in a stream of memories of his childhood in Combray, has contemporary scientific validation. Neuroscience research, such as the Sandeep Datta laboratory at Harvard, shows that the olfactory system "evolved essentially to connect information directly to these memory and emotion centers." Neuroimage studies show that odour-evoked memories activate amygdala (emotion) and hippocampus (episodic memory) with greater intensity than those activated by visual or verbal stimuli, and these tend to go back to earlier periods of life.
The neuroscience of the "Proust effect" has not gone unnoticed in the commercial field. In recent decades, the marketing and branding industry has transformed this mnemonic power into a precise sensory engineering tool: the olfactory logo or branding aroma. Unlike ritual aromas, these odors are designed in laboratories such as Firmenich or International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) with the explicit objective of encoding the memory of a brand in the consumer's brain.
Authors like Aradhna Krishna, in his seminal book Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior, and studies like those of Morrin & Ratheshwar in the Journal of Consumer Research, show that a distinctive and pleasant environmental aroma (the "smell" of an Apple store, the vanilla aroma and fresh mass in a Cinnaon, or the unique fragrance of a luxury hotel) significantly increases the memory of the brand, the time of stay at the place and the intention to purchase. The key, they point out, is in selective coding and higher recovery of olfactory memory.
The mechanism is a direct application of neuroscience: an aroma designed, being inhaled repeatedly in the specific context of a consumption experience, is indelibly associated not with a divine concept, but with the abstract values of a brand (luxury, freshness, comfort, innovation). Each new reactive exposure, at the limbic level and preconsciously, the emotional memory and feeling of familiarity associated with this corporation. Thus, loyalty to a brand is managed not only through visual discourses, but also through a physiological reaction of well-being and recognition triggered by a patented chemical signature.
We can conceive of personal identity as a narrative, but it is based on a pre- narrative basis of re- incarnate sensations. Smell is the main reactivator of this base. The "chemistry of the self" operates through a cadence of associations: the first significant odors (the unique smell of the mother, the aromas of family cuisine, the olfactory geography of childhood) establish primary emotional patterns. Subsequent odors, similar or contrasting, will activate these patterns, strengthening or challenging our sense of continuity. The critical importance of this path is revealed in its deterioration. Clinical neuroscience today states that the loss of the smell (anosmia) and its decrease (hyposmia) are early biomarkers and predictive of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The atrophy in the olfactory processing areas precedes and correlates with the general cognitive decline. The erosion of the smell could be, the erosion of a channel fundamental to autobiographical memory and, ultimately, to the coherence of the self.
