One whiff of the scent of baking bread and your brain suddenly floods with memories of visiting your grandmother while you were a child. You remember the sound of the creaky oven door, the bright patterns on grandma’s apron, and the warmth of the freshly baked bread on your fingertips. But try to recall the phone number to that Chinese food restaurant that you’ve dialed countless times while in the throes of late night hunger pangs and your mind goes blank. How is it that you can remember events from your childhood tied to the smell of baking bread but can’t dredge up a phone number you dialed not ten minutes ago? Your nose tells the tale.
Your olfactory senses – that is, the organs involved with smell – have strong links to your brain’s memory headquarters. The main part of smell processing, called the primary olfactory cortex, forms a link with the amygdale and the hippocampus, which are two big components in memory creation and storage. The amygdale is a key player in the formation of emotions as well as emotional memory, which is a powerful form of cognitive recall. Think about it: some of the most vivid memories you possess are those punctuated by periods of powerful emotions. These include loves, heartbreaks, losses, and triumphs. The hippocampus, on the other hand, is integral to working memory and short-term memory. With the primary olfactory cortex so closely linked to both of these memory centers of the brain, it is clear that smell and memory are intimately intertwined.
How can you take advantage of this for the purposes of memorizing for an examination? The key is in finding objects with distinct smells that you can also take with you to the classroom. Obviously, a vanilla bean-scented candle has a distinct smell, but you can hardly whip out a candle during test time without distracting your classmates, let alone light it in class. However, you can spray a pencil with a certain cologne or perfume that your nose is not accustomed to smelling and regularly smell that scent as you study. Ideally, your brain will kick into gear and begin absorbing the sight of the text you are reading and the words you are saying. Then, you simply need to sniff that same perfumed pencil during examination time and you should be able to recall more of what you studied than if you did it without the aid of smells. This method of studying is obviously not fool proof, so you should not rely on scent memory alone to help you pass your history test, but it certainly can help.
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