That song from eighteen years ago suddenly flooding back is not a coincidence. Some of the neurology of emotional memory, and its use in therapy.

Mind and brain

Why memory is so sensitive to smell and music

That song from eighteen years ago suddenly flooding back is not a coincidence. Some of the neurology of emotional memory, and its use in therapy.

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Why do some memories return with a single scent or a few notes of a tune, while others cannot be recalled no matter how hard you try? The answer is in the architecture of memory, not in your willpower.

Emotional memory takes a short route

Most of our memories travel through the hippocampus: recorded, reviewed, consolidated. But emotional stimuli — especially smell and music — take a different route, through the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. That short route is why a memory returns without review and without effort.

Clinical work makes use of this: when a traumatic memory is hard to work with, the body's response often arrives before the mind's — and working with the body is sometimes more effective than working with the narrative.

Three things that genuinely help

Smell is direct

Olfactory receptors lead straight to the amygdala, with nothing in between.

Music is temporal

Music writes rhythm and timing into memory of time.

Work with the body

A body's memory often returns before a mind's — and that is where we start.

What you can try tomorrow

Make a new list this week: 'scents that take me back'. Put an approximate date beside each one. It is the simplest way to see which periods are still alive in the body.

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In short

Emotional memory does not fade because it is symbolic; it returns because it was never symbolic. What frightened or soothed you matters more than the story you can tell about it.

«A familiar smell I could not name suddenly took me years back.»

Niloufar Rostami

Clinical psychologist

Author

Written by Niloufar Rostami

Author

Niloufar Rostami

Topic

Mind and brain

Reading time

8 min

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