I have heard that the sense that triggers memories best is smell. Have you ever remembered something due to smell that you had otherwise forgotten? What does this say about how our memories work?

At my uncle’s house a few weeks ago, I used his bathroom. Upon using his soap, a buttermilk scent, I was suddenly filled with a feeling of revulsion. I couldn’t understand it; the smell itself was quite nice.

It took several weeks of thinking about it for me to remember that we had buttermilk scented soap about a year ago, and during that same time period, the drain in that bathroom sink had to be replaced because it was so clogged up with gunk. I saw the old drain plug get removed, and it was absolutely disgusting.

Sometimes smells cause me to remember things that I thought were simply no longer stored in my brain. It must have been in my unconscious mind, though. How do smells trigger access to the unconscious part of the brain that we don’t normally have?

If I sniffed a candle while studying and then smelled it during a test, do you think it would help? xD