The pareidolias of smell

We know about pareidolia – seeing the face of Jesus on a tortilla, a cloud as a mounted General Custer, or a pyramid on Mars. Last Friday week I noted down the term 'pareidolia of smell' to refer to when you sniff an aroma that reminds you of something else entirely... Two weeks later, I experience just that. I had washed out a one-kilo plastic bucket that had contained Lidl's sauerkraut with carrot (a dietary staple of mine). I reuse these buckets to store spent coffee grounds, which make for an excellent fertiliser. Anyway, the plastic bucket was on the dish-rack on the draining board; I lifted it up to check if it was dry, held it to my nose for a sniff.

And wow.

Suddenly, I was getting the smell of a Greyhound Bus terminus somewhere in America, and the date came to me clearly... it was 1947. A smell that compounded cleaning fluid, stale tobacco, sweaty bodies and diesel fumes wafting in. The moment evaporated in a flash, but I experienced it. Below: for a second, I was here.

More common ones are the smell of my morning coffee, brewed in a Bialetti moka pot, which reminds me of the Italian café on Gray's Inn Road, opposite the Eastman Dental Clinic. It was here, at the age of 13 or 14 that I had my first proper Italian coffee and pizza before crossing the street for orthodontic treatment. The smell in my kitchen each morning triggers that nostalgic memory. And again, AI captures the scene it perfectly. This was it!  Can you smell it?

And another new one; recently I noticed that the teabags I'd been throwing out with the food waste onto the compost heap at the end of the garden do not biodegrade. So I've started doing something my father used to do – let them dry out, then snip the bags and tip out the dry leaves. I drink a lot of Herbapol fruit teas, which are 100% dried fruit – sour cherry and raspberry/cranberry infusions. Once dry and in the bucket, the smell reminds me of the pantry in our kitchen in Ealing, a 1930s built-in cupboard made of oak, full of sweet things beloved by my mother – jams and the like. Again, the smell is a perfect match that triggers the exact memory every time.

One more that occurred about a week ago; half past three in the morning, I wake up for a pee, and let Wenusia out. I open the front door; it's about an hour before dawn, there's a soft drizzle outside, and quite chilly. The smell of air, the petrichor, takes me back to a magical time and place beyond my current experience. I try to replicate it by opening the front door on subsequent nights but never quite get those same precise qualia. Now, from the scientific point of view, are my olfactory organs detecting a molecule-for-molecule match? And comparing them – without my conscious bidding – to qualia memories from childhood and youth, stored in some part of my amygdala? 

And another. Walking between Adamów Rososki and Grabina, I pass an orchard being sprayed with chemicals. The smell reminds me of the precise smell of the cardboard used in the warehouses in which I did holiday jobs in the 1970s – either Pilot-Taylor Gauges of Coventry of Siemens Electronics on the Great West Road, London.

At this time of year, my rural walks are bountiful when it comes to smells; floral scents in particular that waft through the air in corridors; I notice a scent, it intensifies, passes; I walk back a few paces to catch it at its most intense, consider it, memorise it, before walking on. So important. 

Marcel Proust's madeleines made famous in À la recherche du temps perdu; involuntary memory, triggered by the sensory experience of a smell conjure up qualia moments from the past. And, I hold that for me at least, those qualia memories can extend beyond my own lifetime.

This time last year:
Qualia compilation 7: Motorways at night, Yorkshire

[Here, an unbidden memory from 50 years ago unlocks memories from past life.]

This time three years ago:
Interstices (junction of S7 and S2 expressways just ahead of its opening to traffic)

This time four years ago:
Joys of Spring

This time five years ago:
Jeziorki in May

This time six years ago:

Spitalfields and Smithfields – more from London

This time eight years ago

That tune going round your head now...

This time nine years ago:
The eyes... the eyes... 

This time ten years ago:
New old terminal open at Okęcie airport

This time 12 years ago:
Arrogance vs. humility 

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw looking good ahead of the football-fan influx

This time 14 years ago:
Heron over Jeziorki

This time 18 years ago:
Present rising, future loading