I got my first whiff of the Osmanthus today. I was sticking cuttings and listening to the radio and daydreaming about entirely different things. It is a beautiful sunny, cool fall day, with a little breeze to keep the temperatures perfectly pleasant. It was just a passing scent.....tooti-frooti, bubble gum.... rising above all the other smells of fall, and hanging for a moment just beyond my nose. Instantly I put down the branches, and left the table in search of those hidden blossoms. Sure enough, no more than a few flowers open among thousands of buds was enough to call my full attention to the present. Or maybe I should say the past....
It's fascinating how smells bring memories flooding back uncontrollably. I have many associated with the fragrance of Tea Olive, but if filtered, they seem to share a sense of a comfortable place, a childhood bouquet in some make believe play, sharp spiney leaves, , a mystery scent calling from down the path.I decided to look up the phenomenon of memory and scent and found some very interesting and compelling research uncovering the bases of the link.
....Traditionally, we humans have five senses - they're smell, hearing, vision, touch and taste. But only two of these senses are based on chemicals - smell and taste. Smell and taste let us sample the chemicals around us for information. But smell is different from all the other senses in a very special way. A smell from your distant past can unleash a flood of memories that are so intense and striking that they seem real - and we're getting close to understanding why.
....This kind of memory, where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings back a rush of memories, is called a "Proustian Memory". It's named after Marcel Proust, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. He describes this phenomenon in the opening chapter of his novel Swan's Way, the first novel in his mammoth seven-part work, Remembrance Of Things Past.
.....Whichever way it happens, electrical signals get generated in the receptor cells and do go to the limbic area of the brain. Now here's a really weird thing. The limbic area of the brain evolved directly from primitive smell structures. In other words, according to Professor Rachel S. Herz, "the ability to experience and express emotion grew directly out of the brain's ability to process smells."
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/07/05/313350.htm
It is no wonder at all, then, that the very first and most primitive sense- smell- is so directly tied to memory. And yet it is a most wonderful tool for the imagination; a sticky web to catch the pasts, then wrap them into the present. One crisp fall day perfectly preserved over and over in the tiny flowers of your Grandmother's Tea Olives.
"For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little".
* Marcel Proust
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