Day 24. The Nose Knows
The most powerful sense of all
Hello, my fine fellow drawers.
It’s Day 24. Our last day of our focus on the five senses. There may very well be more than five senses, true, but that’s where this rational drawing train stops. Sorry, witches.
“Wait, I know that smell...”
Have you noticed how a certain smell can bring back a memory like nothing else? A smell transports us to a place and time, and into the feeling of the experience. One whiff and we are right back there again. It seems like smell has a stronger link to our memories than any other sense. Why is that? Well, neurologists figured it out.
According to a 2019 study1. Smell information connects more directly and more strongly to the memory centers in our brain than any other sense. That strength and proximity = a direct shot of nostalgia. Huh, cool. While it’s nice to know why that phenomenon occurs, no amount of science can convey what that emotional teleportation feels like. To explain that, we need art.
Through writing, music, drawing, painting, theater, film, and so many other mediums, artists create experiences that connect us to deep, universal truths. Who hasn't read a book and thought, “Oh, I’ve had this idea.” Or, “I know this feeling.” Who hasn’t cried listening to a piece of music as it somehow taps into all your loves and losses? While neurology can tell us how smell transports us via our brains, only art can conjure the experience in our hearts and bodies.
Smell memory
We’ve put our attention on the present these past few weeks, and using our senses to help us be more attuned to the moment. And for good reason. As we learned earlier, using our senses to ground ourselves in the present can help us reduce anxiety, cope with trauma responses, help us focus, and calm our nerves. And drawing is an easy, fun tool to help us do that.
At the same time, there is also an argument to be made for putting our attention on the past and paying attention to our memories.
Feeling grounded in our past can help us approach uncertainty and fear around what’s ahead. We can get some perspective on what we’ve been through before, and how far we’ve come. From the brilliant and wonderful Rebecca Solnit’s book Field Guide to Getting Lost:
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.
So today, for the final day of our attention to the senses, we are wandering into the past. We are going to reach inside our hearts and souls (but not so much our brains) and draw forth a memory from our childhood that connects directly, immediately, to a smell. Let’s dedicate our attention to those full sensory experiences - small and large - that made us who we are. And let’s deepen it through drawing.
