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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Emilee O’Leary, even though I podcast about comic book TV shows, the only comics I read growing up were Archie comics, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned after I was inundated with smells that brought back strong memories.
Word of the Day!
Today’s word of the day is olfaction. O-L-F-A-C-T-I-O-N. Olfaction is the term we used to refer to the sense of smell. I thought this word was appropriate, given that my theme today has to do with smell-induced memories. Another form of the word is olfactory, an adjective meaning “of, or relating to, the sense of smell”. It’s used in conjunction with system or nerves to describe and refer to the systems in human and animal anatomy which does the work of processing any smell that is brought in through the nostrils. The olfactory system is used for olfaction.
This is one of those involuntary processes that happens without our say-so. But this is usually a good thing, right? We notice when the smells around us change dramatically; smelling something rancid in the fridge, for example, comes in useful to know when to toss an item that’s gone bad. But if we were to notice every single scent that came through our olfactory system, we’d be inundated with so many sensory inputs that we wouldn’t be able to cognitively process the information and carry on with our daily lives. As we grow up, our brains learn which smells are important and which can be ignored. I’m sitting in my living room composing this episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday and it’s only when I breathe in deeply that I really think about what I’m smelling. Otherwise everything just smells normal. But if you were to come and sit with me in my living room, you’d likely smell things that I don’t. Maybe it’s the lotion I wear or the way I brew my coffee, but your brain isn’t necessarily used to the same things I’m used to, so we have different triggers.
Super Smeller
I don’t know about you all, but one of the ways I deal with fear is through research. I find that I can reduce anxiety by simply researching and getting to know the object of my fear better. This doesn’t always work, of course. I still have major anxiety before speaking in front of a group of people and traveling to New York still makes me panic… but I deal with those stressors in different ways. They are the exception, not the rule.
They say fear is contagious and happiness is infectious, and my lesson learned today is about my attempt to convert one into the other. The term mind over matter might be misused and abused in today’s era, but I want to present it in a way that is starting to come to life for me. It has to do with seeking a balance between the heart’s emotional response to olfaction and the brain’s foundation for that response.
One of the things I’ve feared since my dad died is the wave of memories and emotion that crash on me when I’m least expecting it. They’re not the waves produced by a boat cruising along the surface of a smooth body of water; they’re the rogue waves found in the middle of the ocean, appearing suddenly and without warning.
Sometimes one of these rogue waves hits at work and I can’t stop the tears from spilling right there in the office. Sometimes it hits while I’m lying in bed trying to fall asleep; or sometimes it hits after a vivid dream. Researching something as fluid and unpredictable as a proverbial rogue wave, though, is just as enigmatic as trying to capture the wave itself.
Yesterday we were out on the boat for the first time this summer at the cabin. We took my cousin Eve wakeboarding. It was pretty chilly, but the sun was out and the fresh air felt good. There are so many smell triggers up at the cabin that are more heavily and more directly associated with my dad now that he’s no longer here with us. If it’s any testament to how powerful our brains are, having my brain associate those smells immediately with my dad, after twenty-some years of never directly making that association before, is pretty crazy. But his absence is very noticeable, and I think that’s why the association is stronger.
What is most frustrating about these smell triggers is that they’re connected to every single summer from my childhood. Our senses are finely tuned instruments that feed critical perception data into our brains. Scientists have been so keen to research the senses because the manifested effects are so accessible and measurable, and as such we know things like… flavors from food are a combination of taste and food, because while chewing air is forced up the nasal passageways, into the olfactory system, which delivers a message to the thalamus where that data is coupled with gustation data, or our sense of taste. Without smelling the food internally, taste would be primitive, limited to observations like sweet, sour and salty.
We also know, because of accessible sensory research, that researchers found the sense of smell is an initial symptom of degenerative diseases. In both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, the sense of smell is one of the warning signs. And in general, as we age all of our senses decrease in sensitivity. Think about how descriptive that is to other characteristics of these states… Alzheimer’s progressively destroys a person’s memories. As we age our memories tend to fail us; not always, of course, but they are never what they used to be. Without our sense of smell, critical identifying characteristics of our surroundings and of ourselves and our lives fade.
So it’s frustrating that this same sense that is building up my world at the cabin, telling me that summer is beginning, and bringing back sensations of familiarity, is also colliding with a strong feeling of noticing my dad’s absence.
I’ve said it in recent weeks, and I’ll say it again… it would be so easy to just let these feelings of sadness overwhelm me. And what’s more, it wouldn’t be wrong for me to just feel what I feel when I feel it. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being sad or mourning a loss… but it’s when the thoughts take me captive, that’s when the lack of control sets in. That’s when emotions drive me, that’s when my brain creates ruts of bad behavior of mistake pathways.
My mom repeatedly reminds me, and my family, of a verse found in 2 Corinthians 10. To set the stage for you a little, to provide context for this verse, in this passage from the Bible, the author is talking about how those who claim to love and follow Jesus are called to arm themselves with the weapons of God, not the weapons of man, which help to protect the part of ourselves which is most like Him: our souls. In verse 5, Paul writes: “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
I love this verse, and I love being reminded of this verse, because it pulls me out of my own head and reminds me that even though I struggle right now with the heaviness of my own spirit, I can control the manner of my own thoughts. I mourn with hope, the hope and assurance I will see my dad again.
When these memories come crashing back after being triggered by a rogue scent, I can transform my perception of them. As I’ve been saying on Stuff I Learned Yesterday for a couple weeks now, it takes staying in the moment, taking those thoughts and memories captive as they come, and transforming them into something that honors myself, my family, and my God. Every place I visit is now tinged with loss, and unfortunately there’s nothing I can do to change that.
Here’s what I learned.
I can either let those rogue waves knock me down every time or I can, altogether, stop perceiving them as rogue waves. I can take these thoughts captive and find happiness again.
One of the first concepts we learn in Philosophy 101 is David Hume’s skepticism of the self. He posited the idea that the individuality we conceive in ourselves or other people is not a single soul, but the totality of a person’s conscious life. We are the collection of our memories. Our perceptions are fleeting, we change our minds, we flip flop, our tastes change. The physical presence we have in this world is continuously being fed information that causes it to see things differently.
Whether or not you’re on board with Hume, the point I wanted to make is that, in a very real way I am a product of my memories. Without the memories of my dad and our experiences together at the cabin, I would not be the person I am today, and losing that, I think, would be more of a slap in the face to my dad than wallowing in the sadness of my memories. The new memories I’m acquiring will influence the pre-existing ones, and unless I’m careful they will taint my past forever.
Plus, being sad is exhausting. It zaps me of energy. The only option I see is to hold onto my memories, to let those scents hit me when they hit me, but to build a foundation and a context for them. Capture the sadness, acknowledge it, and then re-associate them with feelings of joy and hope.
Sometimes I takes everything I have in me to do this. Sometimes I fail, completely. But even in the couple months since my dad’s death I’ve seen a measurable change in my own well-being and emotional state when I stop myself from despairing in memories that are only sad because of what I’ve lost.
It’s not that I am, or should be, preventing myself to feel what I feel when these memories surface, as I said before. But I realized that even in my sadness, I don’t need to allow that emotion to corrupt my memories. I can be sad without the sadness permeating my historical reservoir of happiness. Experiencing this loss and grief is already changing me, but that is what’s supposed to happen. We are supposed to change and adapt, that is what our bodies and minds were designed for. However, once I let that grief start changing my own perception of my memories, that’s when, I believe, the change is for the worst. That change is a fundamental assault on my core identity, part of who I am because of my dad.
If you’re experiencing grief, you may be scratching your head right now and wondering how in the world you can be sad without it corrupting memories. Or perhaps you’re wondering what I mean by corrupting memories. The answer to these questions can only be found by actively engaging more than the heart muscle that aches when a smell triggers a memory. Our brains are equipped to help us balance the extremes we feel in our hearts. We are creatures of logic and creatures of emotion. So while our olfaction sparks a memory that triggers an emotional response, we can create a foundation for that emotion. Because it’s only after the memory fades and the emotion settles that we are left with the choices we made during that time, we’re left with the things we said to other people and the residual feeling of whatever that emotion spawned. It’s the aftermath that often hurts more than the strong emotion, because it begins to create those ruts that our brain falls into, repeating the same mistakes or forming a depression in our hearts.
So I’m learning how to be sad, but not let my sadness corrupt my memory and my identity by seeking balance when strong emotions hit. Sometimes it takes everything I have, but the energy I put into it is returned to me after the fact when I’m not controlled by the negative effects of my sadness.
I’m Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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