Friday, March 9, 2012

Smells Like Old Times (preview)

Features | Mind & Brain Cover Image: March 2012 Scientific American MagazineSee Inside

Our sense of smell sways our memory and thought

Image: Ann E. Cutting

In Brief

  1. Recollections tied to smell can be stronger than memories elicited by other cues.
  2. Most visual memories hark back to when people were in their teens and early 20s, but the greatest number of odor-related recollections come from when we were six to 10 years old.
  3. An impaired sense of smell may be a sign of cognitive decline and might even hasten memory loss.

Six years ago, on an early morning in September, Molly Birnbaum was out for her regular jog when she was hit by a car. Her pelvis was shattered, her skull fractured, her knee torn. Yet for her, the most serious damage was far less visible: she lost her sense of smell. Birnbaum, now 29, was an aspiring chef, and the loss meant the end of her career. It also meant something else, something that was potentially even more life-changing. ?I felt like I lost a dimension of my memory,? she says. ?It made me worried about the future. If I couldn?t smell ever again, was I losing this important layer??


Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=b4feeaf0f56c1e6722c93a9d45b814a1

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