You Photographed the Whole Trip. A Smell Will Remember It Better.

Open a travel bag you haven't used in years. There is a real chance it still smells like wherever you took it, and within two seconds you are not remembering that place. You are back in it, mid-conversation, maybe walking down a street in Italy. A photo almost never does that.

Smell reaches the brain's emotion and memory centers through a shorter route than sight, sound or touch, and research suggests it can make a memory feel more emotional and more like being brought back to the original moment. Studies also suggest smell-cued memories skew toward childhood. The evidence that they are more detailed or accurate is mixed.

The Sense Nobody Takes Home

Most of what we call memory of a trip is visual, because that is what we can post, share and scroll. The entire habit of documenting travel assumes that seeing does the remembering. Nobody brings a jar to capture the smell of a favorite dinner, and anyone who tried in public would get a few looks.

Yet ask someone about the most disorienting or exciting moment of a trip, the kind where for a second you are not thinking about the past so much as feeling it again, and the description tends to run through the senses, not the photo. We document the sense that is weakest at transporting us back and ignore the one that is strongest.

The Shortcut Smell Takes

Sight, sound and touch are routed first through the thalamus, a structure that works like a switchboard, sorting and relaying signals before they reach the parts of the brain that process feeling. Smell does not wait in that line. The olfactory bulb connects almost directly to the amygdala and the hippocampus, the two structures most associated with emotional response and memory formation. A review of this pathway by Yoann Soudry and colleagues describes how olfactory and emotional processing share brain structures.

One caution on the shortcut story. It is a simplification. The same review lists the thalamus among the structures that receive olfactory information, only later in the chain. What makes smell unusual is not that it avoids the thalamus entirely. It is that it does not need the thalamus first.

Same Memory, Different Cue

In 2002, psychologists Rachel Herz and Jonathan Schooler tested the effect directly. People recalled a personal memory, and then the same memory was cued again with the smell, with a picture of the same object, or with its verbal label. Memories recalled with the odor were rated significantly more emotional and tended to make people feel more brought back to the original event.

Mulled wine does this to me. I spent two winters in Moldova, and holiday markets there, and later across Scandinavia and the Baltics, were a constant. Mulled wine has roots as far back as spiced wine at Roman banquets, and it shows up under different names, glühwein in Germany and glögg in Scandinavia, built from roughly the same cinnamon, cloves and orange peel. In my photos, I see mulled wine and think, yes, I had that. When I smell it, my hands are freezing and then thawing around the cup and the spices are sitting at the back of my sinuses. More of the memory arrives with it, details I wasn't trying to recall. The photo confirms the memory. The smell restages it.

Why a Smell Can Reach Back Further

A second finding is stranger. In 2000, Simon Chu and John Downes mapped which ages memories came from depending on the cue. Word cues pulled memories mostly from adolescence and early adulthood, the stretch memory researchers call the reminiscence bump. Odor cues produced a different pattern, with memories concentrated in the first decade of life, around ages 6 to 10.

A later study came to a similar conclusion in a different group. In 2006, Johan Willander and Maria Larsson gave 93 older Swedish adults word, picture or odor cues. Memories cued by odors came mostly from childhood, under age 10, while word and picture cues brought up memories from early adulthood. The odor-cued memories also produced a stronger sense of being displaced in time, and they had been recalled less often before.

I had my own version in Poland. I ordered pierogi, and the smell of the dough, the caramelized onions, the butter and the kielbasa reached me before the food did. I wasn't in a restaurant in Poland anymore. I was in my mom's kitchen around the holidays, the two of us making my grandmother's recipe from scratch. I hadn't thought about that in years. It felt like time travel, and it left me more aware of the restaurant I was actually sitting in. I wrote about what that dish means in There's No Correct Pierogi. There's Only the One That Feels Like Home.

What the Episode Didn't Cover: Richer or Just More Emotional?

This is where the research gets less tidy. In the episode I said smell-triggered memories were not necessarily more detailed or accurate than photo-triggered ones, that they just hit harder. A 2018 study by Maaike de Bruijn and Michael Bender complicates that. Across 170 participants, childhood-related odors produced significantly richer memories, rated on vividness, detail and emotional intensity, than childhood-related images or odors unrelated to childhood. Yet the same study's analysis of the language participants used found no difference in affective content between the odor and image groups.

So there are two studies pointing in slightly different directions on what exactly smell adds. Herz and Schooler found more emotion and a stronger feeling of being brought back. De Bruijn and Bender found richer memories overall but no extra emotion in the words people used to describe them. Both are lab studies with specific cues, so neither tells you what a smell in a Moldovan winter market does to you. What the evidence supports is that smell is an unusually potent cue. It does not yet support the claim that smell memories are more accurate.

The Sense You Can't Save

This is what bothers me. We built the whole modern habit of documenting travel around the sense that is the weakest trigger for being transported back, and we rarely notice what a place smelled like, let alone try to hold onto it. There are perfumes and candles, but they won't return you to that exact moment with that exact smell.

The sense that hits hardest is also the one you have the least control over keeping. You don't schedule it. It ambushes you in a doorway, or in a bag you haven't opened in years. That means the smell you can't bottle is worth noticing in the moment, since it may be doing more memory work than anything you deliberately capture. Stopping to name a smell costs almost nothing. Where is it coming from, what is it made of, what does it remind you of? If you want the wider argument about photos versus attention, I made it in Taking the Photo Isn't Paying Attention. It Might Be the Opposite.

The Question to Take With You

The next time an unexpected smell catches you off guard somewhere you are traveling, a shop, a kitchen, a street, do you stop and notice it, or do you let it pass on the way to the next thing on the itinerary?

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