This explains why a familiar song or the smell of a former lover's perfume has the power to conjure up a detailed picture of past times, says Jay Gottfried of University College London's Department of Imaging Neuroscience, who led a recent study of memory retrieval.
"That's the beauty of our memory system," he says. "Imagine a nice day on the beach. The smell of sun lotion, the friends you were with, the beer you were drinking; any of these could trigger memories of the whole thing."
Gottfried's team made the discovery by presenting subjects with a series of pictures, each paired with an unrelated smell. The subjects were asked to form a mental link between the two: if, for example, a picture of a duck was accompanied by the smell of roses, the volunteers may have imagined a duck walking into a rose garden.
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