The Smell That Puts You Back on That Street

[0:00] Open a new bag that you haven't used in years, one that actually traveled somewhere with you, and there's a real chance it still smells like wherever you took it. It also probably has a few random items from the trips still left in it, but we're not talking about our sloppy unpacking in this episode.

[0:19] Instead, we're going to be talking about the bag's smell. Yes, the smell. With that bag you're holding or still thinking about, there's a post-travel smell. And within about two seconds, you're not remembering that place. You're back in it. Mid-conversation, mid-moment, maybe even walking down the streets of Italy.

[0:41] It's a memory in a way that a photo never actually manages. And I'll admit, it's a weird thing to make a video about, honestly. I can't put a smell in a podcast episode for you to actually connect with, but I trust you know what I'm talking about.

[0:57] If not, go smell your travel bag and then report back to the episode. But the mechanism behind this travel bag smell is worth talking about anyway, because smell is doing something to our memory that no other sense does. And it's not subtle once you see how it works. I'm Kiara and this is Put the Guidebook Down.

[1:17] Most of what we call memory of a trip is actually visual, because that's what we're most familiar with and what we're able to post about online and to share with our family and friends to make it seem like they're there in the moment, tracing our exact footsteps. We take photos to remember it all.

[1:33] We have them so we can reference and scroll through them in our old camera rolls and to feel our travel all over again. The entire habit of documenting travel assumes that seeing is what does the remembering, because we always say the famous line, seeing is believing.

[1:50] Then smell isn't even part of that travel memory recall system, because nobody takes a smell home in their phone. No one is also bringing a jar with them and capturing the smell from their favorite dinner in a bottle. And if we see someone doing this in public,

[2:07] we all will probably look at them and be like, what are they doing? And then low-key judge them. Like, let's be honest here. And yet ask everyone. Anyone about the single most disorienting or exciting experience that they've had, the kind where for a second you're not thinking about the past, you're feeling it all over again,

[2:26] and they're going to be explaining what they experienced in that moment. So then why are we leaving out this whole smell component? There's a specific reason for that gap between what we think preserves memory and what actually detonates it, and it comes down to the fact that So let's just jump right into it.

[3:07] Why does smell hit differently? And why is it the direct route to memory and emotion? Every other sense you have takes a detour on its way to the parts of your brain that handle emotion and memory. Sight, sound, touch, all of it gets routed first through a structure called the thalamus,

[3:25] which acts like a switchboard, sorting and relaying all of the signals before it reaches anywhere that actually processes feeling. Now bear with me, we're not going into a full biology lecture here, but essentially smell skips that step. The olfactory bulb, the part of your brain that processes smell, connects almost directly to the amygdala and the hippocampus,

[3:47] the two structures most responsible for emotional response and memory formation. Researchers who've reviewed this pathway describe it as a two-step connection from your nose to memory and emotion, while every other sense needs at least one extra relay first. That's the physical reason a smell can pull you back into a place faster and harder

[4:15] than a photo ever will. In 2002, researchers Rachel Herz and Jonathan Schooler tested this directly. They had people recall the exact same photo once when it was triggered by a smell and once when that same memory was triggered by a photo or a written description instead. Same memory, same person, different cues.

[4:36] The odor-triggered version was rated as significantly more emotional and people were far more likely to say that it felt like actually being brought back to the moment, not just remembering it. The smell-triggered memories weren't necessarily more detailed or more accurate. They just hit harder. They were just easier to recall.

[4:57] And I've experienced this directly in my own travels. I spent some time in my first year. I was like, okay, fine, I'll bite. My favorite moments from those Christmas markets was the sights and the smells. And one of my favorite smells was mulled wine.

[5:26] And it still brings back a whole stream of memories every single time I think about it. And it's not easy to recall just from looking at the photos on my camera roll or on social media. If you've ever walked through a Christmas market, you know the smell I mean. Mulled wine actually goes back to ancient Rome.

[5:44] Spiced wine served at banquets, and it's spread across Europe from there, which is probably why it shows up under a different name in almost every country's Christmas markets. Glühwein in Germany, Glocken, Scandinavia, but built from roughly the same coarse spices wherever you find it. And this is the smell I'm talking about. Cinnamon, cloves, orange peel.

[6:07] It's something warming and it just makes you have that it's Christmas time moment. During my two years in Moldova, getting mulled wine at the holiday markets became one of my constants. It was the one thing I made sure to do every winter and it followed me through Christmas markets across Scandinavia and the Baltic region.

[6:25] Because that same spice smell was everywhere. Specific enough that I'd recognize it from streets away, nowhere near the Christmas market. When I smell it now, I'm not just remembering mulled wine. When I'm looking at my photos, I see the mulled wine, but it's not the same as actually smelling it.

[6:47] Because when I look at it, I'm like, oh yeah, I had... mulled wine. When I smell it, I'm back in it. My hands are freezing and then thawing around the cup. The spices hang in the back of my sinuses with the wine warming me up from the inside out in a way that's almost... almost physical, not just visual.

[7:07] And once that happens, more of the memory comes with it. Details I wasn't even trying to recall. It just really makes me back in the moment, which is something that those photos don't trigger. It's like looking at it all from a different lens. But that checks out with what the research says. An emotional, almost physical replay.

[7:25] Not just the memory, but might as a smell from a few years ago. Recent enough that maybe it's not surprising I can still call it up clearly. The stranger question is what happens when a smell doesn't just replay something recent but reaches back way further than that? And this is talking about why that happens.

[7:45] Why do the smells reach further back than anything else? And it's this kind of odor-cued memory bump. So there's this whole second layer to this explanation. Smell doesn't just hit harder, it also reaches further back in time than other memories do. In 2000, researchers Simon Chu and John Downes mapped out which ages of

[8:09] a person's life get pulled up most often depending on what actually triggered the memory. When people were cued with a word, just a label for something, most of their memories clustered in adolescence and early adulthood. The stretch of life memory research already knows produces the most memories overall.

[8:27] But when people were cued with an actual smell, the pattern broke completely. Odor-triggered memories spiked earliest, concentrated around 6 to 10 years old. A stretch word-cued memory barely touches at all. Smell was the only cue reaching that far back in any volume. Which means the smell of a place you're visiting right now isn't only going

[8:51] to remind you of that place later. If it happens to be close enough to something from early childhood, it can reach past every single year in between and put you back somewhere you haven't consciously thought about in decades. And there's actually a very well-known cinematic experience of this, even if most people don't clock it as science.

[9:10] In the movie Ratatouille, the food critic, Anton Ego, takes one bite of the ratatouille at Gusteau's restaurant, and it instantly drops him back into a memory that he hadn't accessed in decades. He's a kid again, having just scraped his knee from falling off his bike,

[9:26] and his mother is setting a bowl of ratatouille down right in front of him to make him feel better. One bite, and those 30-something years disappear. He's back in the moment of when he was a kid, and then back into the restaurant at Gusteau's. And it's often pointed to as a nod to Proust's own madeleine.

[9:45] The same moment this whole effect is named after, and it holds up because that's exactly what smell and flavor linked memory actually does to people. Not just movie critics or Disney movies. And I have my own version of this in Poland of all places.

[10:00] I had ordered pierogi for the first time there and the smell hit me before the food even did. The dough, the caramelized onions, the butter, the kielbasa on the side. And just like that, I wasn't in a restaurant in Poland anymore. I was back in my mom's kitchen around the holidays,

[10:17] the two of us working through my grandmother's recipe and making pierogi from scratch. It's not a memory I think about often, especially because that was a lot of work to make pierogi from scratch. I hadn't thought about it in years before that smell pulled it back up.

[10:32] Unprompted and complete with details I didn't even know I still had. It didn't feel like remembering. It felt like time travel, and it left me appreciating the actual moment I was in, a restaurant in Poland, 10 times more than I would have otherwise, which tracks with exactly what the research says these older smell-triggered moments do.

[10:54] They don't ease you in, they just arrive completely. Which means smell isn't just the most... Now here's what actually bothers me about this. We've built almost the entire modern travel documentation habit around that one sense that's the weakest possible trigger for actually being able to be transported back. We photograph everything.

[11:31] We rarely even think to notice what a place smelled like, let alone try to hold on to it. I mean, there's like perfumes and different products, but it's not going to take you back to that exact moment with that exact smell. So that's what bothers me, because there's not really a way to fix this whole situation.

[11:58] And that's kind of sort of the point. The one sense that hits the hardest is also the one that you have the least control over keeping. You don't get to choose when it shows back up either. It's not something you can schedule. It just ambushes you in a doorway,

[12:13] in a bag you haven't opened in years, entirely on its own timeline. Remember that bag example we started with back in the beginning? This is what I'm referring to. Which means the smell that you can't hold on to or bottle is actually worth paying attention to in the moment,

[12:28] since it's doing more memory work right now than anything you're deliberately trying to capture or Now, this line might sound familiar if you've listened to any of my previous episodes. It's just another reason to put the phone down and be in the moment. So the next time a specific,

[12:41] unexpected smell catches you off guard somewhere while you're traveling, maybe a shop, a kitchen, a restaurant, a street... stop for a second instead of letting it pass by unnoticed, and take a minute from rushing to get to the next thing on your itinerary. Breathe. Check into this scent. Smell it. What does it smell like?

[13:13] Take this time to do the identification and grounding. Sure, you can't photograph it. You can't really post about it to the full extent on your website, social media. But you won't need to. It's already going in deeper than anything else you took a picture of that day. It has a higher chance of sticking in your memory.

[13:31] It's just another reason to slow down, be present. So rather than focusing on taking the photos and videos all the time, maybe we should be thinking about our other senses and seeing what else we can document on our own as humans so that we can recall those travel memories better, stronger, and see more value with our trip.

[13:56] I'm Kiara. This is Put the Guidebook Down. Guidebooks tell you where to go. We're here for why you went. I'll see you in the next one. Bye!