Hi Cafe! Welcome to another edition of Not Your Average Joe! Have you ever smelled something and taken back to your childhood? Scents play a LARGE role in memories! Today’s essay we’ll be going into the nuances of scent and how they impact our recollection. How scent influences our memories!
Table of Contents
👃🏾 How does Scent Influence Memories?
👃🏾 What Are Scents
Sight. Sound. Touch. Taste.
Smell.
Each play an important role in our ability to interact with the outside world. Yet, smell, is the most overlooked sense.
What is Smell?
Olfaction is the scientific name for the sense of smell. When you smell the air, you’re inhaling odors. Scents are broken in categories: Musky, Floral, Pungent, Peppermint, Putrid, Camphor, and Ethereal (Hutton & Turnidge, 2017).
👃🏾 Musky
Musk is a warm subtle scent defined by a complex range of powdery, sweet, woodsy and earthy aroma impressions. (Phlur Team, 2022)
👃🏾 Floral
Florals are used as the heart notes of the fragrance and are blended with notes of citrus, fruit, wood and musk to create a diverse olfactive signature. (Phlur Team, 2022).
👃🏾 Pungent
Strong and sharp scents usually found in Vinegar, Garlic, and Onions (Hutton & Turnidge, 2017).
👃🏾 Peppermint
Fresh and minty. Its strong, refreshing scent elicits thoughts of winter, chilly weather, or candies (Soap Guild, 2026).
👃🏾 Putrid
Decaying, unpleasant scent, like dead animals (Hutton & Turnidge, 2017).
👃🏾 Camphor
Pleasant smell of sea breeze, trees, and mothballs. Camphoraceous notes are characterized by a strong, penetrating, and cooling scent that is similar to that of camphor. This scent can evoke a sense of cleanliness and has a slightly medicinal quality (Natural Perfume Academy, 2026).
👃🏾 Ethereal
Ethereal typically means light, sheer, clean, something from heaven, otherworldly, etc. Cleaning fluids and Essential oils fall under this category (Parfume Nasreen, 2026).
👃🏾 Memories Stored
A memory is the process of recalling information that you learned through your senses (Cleveland Clinic, 2024). The three types of memory are: Sensory, Short-term, and Long-term.
💭 Sensory: Sound, Touch, Taste, Sight, and Smell all come together to form a memory - these specific memories are triggered by our senses.
💭 Short-term: Repetition of thoughts and organizing into groups are two ways we form short term memories.
💭 Long-term: Declarative and implicit memories include fact storing and building skills.
Memory is broken into 4 parts: Gathering, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval.
💭 Gathering: information you gather from environment
💭 Encoding: brain translates into brain-bytes
💭 Storage: brain files those bytes away in a cabinet
💭 Retrieval: brain finds and selects the byte is wants
👃🏾 How does Scent Influence Memories?
Smell plays a large role in how memories are formed. Scents are stored differently than other memories. You see, other forms of sensory memories go through the thalamus, the relay station of your brain (Cleveland Clinic, 2025). Scent, on the other hand, goes through olfactory bulb, which then gets bypassed to the amygdala (emotional center of the brain) and hippocampus (memories turn into brain bytes).
Why Does Smell Get Special Treatment?
Smell is important in keeping us alive! As one of the oldest senses, it’s evolution helped us understand what was fresh vs rotting, what a potential partner could be vs danger (Cleveland Clinic, 2025). In early childhood, smell is the strongest, throwing out as many connections as possible!
Scent is a fascinating thing. Time travel is possible with scents; it can transport us to different times and places. Have you ever smelled a pastry and were taken back to childhood? What about flowers that your grandmother grew in her garden? Has your dog ever let out a fart and you’ve run to get the air freshener?
Smell is the connection between memories and our emotions. We run from putrid smells, feel attraction to musky scents. We appreciate places that have a ethereal scent, and spend time in nature appreciating the floral scents. Our emotional connection to smell has helped us stay alive. So, Cafe, go out and create new memories today!
Did this essay make scents to you, Cafe? I hope you enjoyed today’s topic. Recently, I was walking through a parking lot and was suddenly transported back to childhood. It smelled like Greggs Bakery, and I was craving a Chicken Bake - which we don’t get in my area.
Memories are a funny thing - I never knew the extent a smell played on my memories! Learning that they bypass the rest of the memory-making process, made me appreciate my sense of smell.
What’s the memory attached to your favorite scent?
☕ What’s Next for the Cafe?
Last week of June! Look forward to the monthly recap dropping on Thursday, then back to regularly scheduled posts on Tuesday!
🔖 Read Something Else?
ℹ️ Sources Cited
Cleveland Clinic. (2024). Memory: What it is, how it works & types. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/memory
Cleveland Clinic. (2025). Scent and sensibility: The link between smell and memory. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/smells-and-memory
Hutton, P., & Turnidge, M. (2017). How do we sense smell? | Ask a Biologist. Ask a Biologist. https://askabiologist.asu.edu/explore/sense-smell
Natural Perfume Academy. (2026). Natural Perfume Academy Main Glossary. https://www.naturalperfumeacademy.com/mod/glossary/showentry.php?eid=4353
Parfumerie Nasreen. (2026). Ethereal scents - pt. 1 – Parfumerie Nasreen. https://parfumerienasreen.com/blogs/news/ethereal-scents-pt-1
Phlur. (2022). Ultimate Guide to the Floral Fragrance Family – phlur. Phlur | What Is the Floral Fragrance Family? https://phlur.com/blogs/perfumery-dictionary/what-is-the-floral-fragrance-family
Soap Guild. (2026). Common scents: Peppermint. https://www.soapguild.org/tools-and-resources/resource-center/89/common-scents-peppermint/
This is not really a memory connected to my favorite scent, its more of a connection what I love doing. Vanilla candles always remind me of how much I love to bake.