Hippocampus

Food Memory Smells like Nostalgia chose to share a story about my past experience this summer with memory being triggered by taste and how the two senses work together to bring back a unique memory from a certain time period. During my time from K-8 1 had a really great friend that I would always hangout with after school. We would walk to his house each day after school and when we got to his house the first thing we would always do is raid the snack cabinet. This was no ordinary snack cabinet, it had everything you could ever dream of for a snack!
His mother would only allow us to have one thing from the cabinet and then would lock it up till dinner. There was only one snack that always would chose, and it was Fruit Gushers. These little guys are a soft candy that burst when you bite into it. Inside the gummy candy is a little bit of fruity syrup so you can get two different textures from the one candy bite. Was so in love with fruit gushers because I could only get them at my friend’s house. My parents would never buy them for me or let me pick them out, so going over to Tyler house aftershock everyday was quite a treat and is one of my most endnotes memories.
This memory was recently relived, this summer 10 years later from having Fruit Gushers friends. I had the day off from work and I was over at a different friend’s house playing Pollination 4. Lost contact with my friends my middle school after we split to different high schools. After a while my friend got hungry and ask me if I wanted a snack from the pantry, and of course said “Sure! , surprise me! ” He comes back up stairs and he throws me a yellow package. Sure enough it was the same Fruit Gushers that I had when was younger.

It was nostalgic and instantly got thrown back into time and remember all of the fun things I used to do in middle school and how life used to be without any worries. This was very interesting to me that the senses of taste and smell and trigger long lost memories of ones life. For this project decided to do a little research to actually find out why smell can trigger pas memories. My research found that after a smell enters the nose, it travels through the cranial nerve through the olfactory bulb, which helps the brain process smells. The olfactory bulb is part of the limbic system, the motional center of the brain.
As a member of the limbic system, the olfactory bulb can easily access the magical, which plays a role in emotional memories (it’s also where the “fight or flight” reflex comes from) this close relationship between the olfactory and the magical is one of the reason odors cause a spark of nostalgia. It is very interesting that I found this study to be true and what was experiencing was pure nostalgia, and that is an amazing aspect of the human body, being able to relate a certain smell with a past experience in life that you normally would have forgotten.