History of the Self: Smell and Memory

Summary

Throughline: History of the Self – Smell and Memory

Host: Christina Kim
Guests: Rachel Hearns (Neuroscientist), Mark Smith (Sensory Historian), Ernestine Deane (South African Musician and Medicine Woman)
Release Date: December 19, 2024

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Introduction

In the episode titled "History of the Self: Smell and Memory," Christina Kim delves into the intricate relationship between our sense of smell and the formation of memories, emotions, and even societal structures. Through personal anecdotes, scientific insights, and historical analysis, the episode explores how olfaction not only shapes individual experiences but also influences broader historical narratives.

Personal Connection to Smell

Christina begins by sharing her deep personal connection to scent, particularly the Spanish perfume Alvarez Gomez Agua de Colonia, a fragrance worn by her grandmother and mother. She vividly describes how specific smells evoke powerful memories:

Christina Kim [01:49]: "It's like home. The act of smelling a perfume is like hearing a full orchestra."

However, Christina's life takes a dramatic turn in the summer of 2022 when she loses her sense of smell due to COVID-19. This loss severs her connection to cherished memories, including her grandmother's comforting hugs and her mother's reassuring presence.

Christina Kim [05:35]: "It felt like my tie to my mom and my grandmother was severed."

Determined to regain her sense of smell, Christina consults Rachel Hearns, a renowned neuroscientist specializing in the psychology of smell.

The Science of Smell

Rachel Hearns explains the biological mechanisms behind olfaction, detailing how our noses detect and process a vast array of odor molecules:

Rachel Hearns [16:13]: "Our ability to detect smells is actually far greater than our ability to detect any other sensory experience."

She emphasizes the evolutionary significance of smell, highlighting its crucial role in the survival of prehistoric humans by detecting predators, prey, and environmental changes.

Christina recounts her journey back to olfaction through smell training, a method Rachel recommends. This involves regularly sniffing distinctive scents to reactivate the olfactory pathways.

Rachel Hearns [18:37]: "All you need are four distinctive scents... try to keep on going at it for at least 12 weeks."

After months of diligent practice, Christina successfully redevelops her sense of smell, allowing her to reconnect with both past memories and present experiences.

Historical Impact of Smell: Plessy v. Ferguson

The episode transitions to a historical analysis of how smell has been intertwined with societal constructs, particularly in the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Mark Smith, a sensory historian, explains how racist perceptions of smell were legally codified to justify segregation:

Mark Smith [28:27]: "If you don't pay attention to smell, you've really missed the foundation of modern segregation in the United States."

In 1890 Louisiana, Homer Plessy intentionally violated segregation laws by boarding a whites-only train car. The prosecution argued that Plessy's race could be identified by smell, an assertion rooted in racist ideologies rather than scientific fact.

Prosecutor [33:46]: "I can smell it."

The Supreme Court's decision in a 7-1 vote upheld segregation, illustrating how subjective interpretations of smell were weaponized to maintain racial hierarchies. This case underscores the societal power of scent perception and its manipulation.

Memory and Emotion

Rachel Hearns elucidates the profound connection between smell, memory, and emotion, explaining that olfactory signals are processed in the brain regions responsible for both:

Rachel Hearns [17:49]: "That's the amygdala hippocampal complex. And this is where we go, ah, it's lemon."

This neurological link explains why certain scents can instantly transport individuals back to specific moments in time, evoking vivid emotional responses.

Personal Stories: Ernestine Deane

Ernestine Deane shares her poignant narrative of how scents connect her to her heritage and family history amidst the traumatic legacy of apartheid in South Africa. She recounts how the smell of roasted almonds at a German Christmas market transported her back to her grandmother's kitchen in Constantia, eliciting memories of family traditions and the pain of forced relocations.

Ernestine Deane [37:33]: "It was like patchwork quilts... the scent was so familiar and reminded me so much of my grandmother's kitchen."

Her story highlights how smell serves as a "bookmark" for personal and collective histories, enabling individuals to preserve and pass down memories through generations.

Conclusion

The episode concludes by reinforcing the idea that scent is a powerful, often underappreciated sense that shapes our identities, memories, and societal structures. Christina reflects on her restored sense of smell and its newfound significance in her life, particularly as a mother:

Christina Kim [49:06]: "I'm thinking about what smells do I want to pass down to my daughter?"

Through "History of the Self: Smell and Memory," Throughline invites listeners to appreciate the profound impact of olfaction on both personal and historical levels, encouraging a deeper understanding of how our senses intertwine with who we are.

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Notable Quotes:

• Rachel Hearns [10:44]: "The fabric of our existence... is deeply connected to our sense of smell."
• Mark Smith [27:20]: "We're kind of hostage to visual conceits."
• Ernestine Deane [43:08]: "They're very important bookmarks that remind us of who we are and also really who we are."

Key Takeaways:

1. Olfaction is Integral to Memory and Emotion: The sense of smell is uniquely linked to the brain regions that process memories and emotions, making scents powerful triggers for recalling past experiences.

2. Scientific Understanding of Smell: Advances in neuroscience, particularly the discoveries by Linda Buck and Richard Axel, have deepened our understanding of how humans perceive smells, revealing the complexity and vast capacity of our olfactory system.

3. Historical Influence of Smell: Smell has played a role in societal and legal constructs, as illustrated by the Plessy v. Ferguson case, demonstrating how sensory perceptions can be manipulated to uphold discriminatory practices.

4. Personal and Cultural Significance: Individual stories, like those of Christina and Ernestine, showcase how scents are tied to personal identity, heritage, and memory, serving as conduits for preserving and transmitting cultural narratives.

5. Restoration and Enhancement of Smell: Practices like smell training not only aid in recovering lost olfactory abilities but also highlight the importance of actively engaging our senses to maintain cognitive and emotional health.

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This episode of Throughline offers a comprehensive exploration of how the seemingly simple act of smelling is interwoven with complex threads of memory, identity, and history, urging listeners to recognize and appreciate the profound role of olfaction in their lives.

Transcript

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[Christina Kim]

Before we get started, a note to listeners that this episode includes exploration of racist material.

[Narrator]

So the other day I was reading this book about the First Crusade. It's a moment in history that anyone who knows me knows I have long been obsessed with, and in one passage there was a detailed description of what the city of Antioch was like. Then there were details about the way the streets looked, the size of the citadel, how loud the central market was. But there was something noticeably missing. No description of what it smelled like. It was weird because I register a lot of thoughts and memories in my head through smells. I'm sure you do too. And I realized I almost never stopped to think about how or why I smell things like why does a rose smell like a rose? Would the people in medieval Antioch have described the smell of a rose the same way I do? Well, Christina Kim, a reporter and producer on the Throughline team, has been thinking about those kinds of questions a lot over the last last few years. The other day she even described smell as a superpower that allows us to time travel. Yeah, she went deep on some of the big questions about our sense of smell and ended up on this winding historical journey. And now you get to go on it too. Christina is going to take it from here.

[Christina Kim]

Ever since I was a little girl, I've been enveloped by the smell of lemon, rosemary and spice spices. It's the smell of this Spanish perfume called Alvarez Gomez Agua de Colonia, the classic fragrance that's been made in Spain since 1912 that my grandmother, Mil Yaya and my mother have always worn. It's the smell of Maya sitting on the couch in Madrid with her legs crossed, wearing her kitten heel house slippers, right? Reminiscing about being a little bit wild, un poco travieza as she reaches over with her soft hand to give mine a squeeze. It's the smell of my mom running after me whenever I'm in my childhood home in California with a bottle of it, trying to spritz some over my head, a foos foos before we leave the house to smell fre and the smell of her reassuring hugs, which let me know I am never alone. The top note is crisp, sharp, like a Mediterranean lemon whose yellow hued brightness makes my nose tingle once I let the inhale get to my chest. I reach the fragrance's heart note, and it becomes more green and fresh. And finally, when my breath makes it all the way to my belly, the base note rounds everything together. It's like the umami part of the fragrance, this kind of fullness and richness that expands throughout my whole body like a soft hug. Like home. The act of smelling a perfume is like hearing a full orchestra. In order to actually smell it, your nose has to parse through thousands of different molecules, translate them, and then transmit it to your brain so that you can smell what you recognize as your favorite scent, be it a perfume or a rose. And that's just what has to happen to smell a single thing. The reality is that for most of us, our noses are parsing through a massive number of different odor molecules a day. And it's so easy to take this riot of smell for granted, unless it disappears. In the summer of 2022, I became one of the 15 million estimated people to have lost their sense of smell because of COVID The minute I noticed that I wasn't able to smell anything, I ran around from room to room, sniffing anything I could get my hands on. I went to the kitchen and opened a jar of peanut butter. Nothing. I took a spoonful of peanut butter and put it in my mouth. Instead of the sweet, salty, nutty flavor I expected, all I could sense was how it felt. A thick, flavorless paste sticking to my tongue and gums. Finally, I ran to my bedside table, where I kept my giant glass art deco bottle of Alvarez Gomez Agua de Colonia. I took a big breath, waiting for the fresh herbal scents to take over and make me feel better. But all that I inhaled was an empty void of what I knew was there, but I could no longer access. It felt like my tie to my mom and my grandmother was severed. After I gathered myself, I did what any journalist would do next. Hello? Okay, you are here.

[Rachel Hearns]

Okay, Wonderful.

[Christina Kim]

And that meant calling up someone who's dedicated their life to studying and understanding smell.

[Rachel Hearns]

My name is Rachel Hearns. I'm a neuroscientist, and I've been studying the psychological science of smell for over 30 years.

[Christina Kim]

Rachel is the person for all things smell. She's the author of the Scent of Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. And she immediately empathized with how I was feeling.

[Rachel Hearns]

The fabric of our existence, the literally the threads that weave together how we feel within the world, both with other people, with our past experiences, and fundamentally with ourselves, is deeply, deeply connected to our sense of smell.

[Christina Kim]

I felt vindicated. I wasn't being overly dramatic. This was a big deal.

[Rachel Hearns]

And when that becomes broken, those relationships, those outer relationships and our inner relationships with ourselves start to really stumble and fumble and fall.

[Christina Kim]

But even though our sense of smell is such an important facet of our lives, it turns out we still don't seem to know that much about it.

[Rachel Hearns]

We really do not still fully have a grasp or grip on how it is that we perceive smells. So it really still is this enigma.

[Christina Kim]

The deeper I dug into what we know about smell, the more I started to realize how much our sense of smell has shaped not just our personal experiences, but also the world we live in and our understanding of the past and the present. And it got me thinking about how smell is kind of like the science of history because it's so wrapped up in who we think we are and how we remember the past, which kind of makes it the perfect Throughline episode. So here we go. I'm Christina Kim, and today on Throughline from npr, I'm asking you to go on a little adventure to unpack the enigma of smell. We're going to explore how olfaction actually works from our nose to our brain, how smell has been used to legally divide us, and finally, how harnessing our sense of smell and memory can make us all into time travelers. Coming up first, how we know what we know about the science of smell.

[Rachel Hearns]

This is Khadijah from Seattle, and you're listening to Throughline from npr.

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[Rachel Hearns]

To smell is to feel.

[Christina Kim]

It's 1988, and a young scientist named Linda Buck is sitting in a laboratory at Columbia University, struggling to wrap her brain around a question.

[Linda Buck]

That's one of the things I love about doing science. It's really puzzle solving. What you find is so beautiful. Nature's designs are so elegant.

[Christina Kim]

This is Linda Buck's voice from an interview she did with the American Academy of Achievement. She sat at her desk in the lab, astonished by a simple reality. One of nature's elegant designs, one many of us take for granted.

[Linda Buck]

I'm.

[Christina Kim]

I know I did smell. Well, at that point in 1988, scientists didn't really understand it at all.

[Linda Buck]

The first question was how you can detect up to 100,000 chemicals in the environment in the nose. How was that done? I became completely obsessed with this. This was it. I had to solve the problem.

[Christina Kim]

It may seem unbelievable, but. But scientists didn't understand exactly how the nose and brain were able to process and make sense of the wide range of chemicals we breathe in.

[Linda Buck]

So I decided that the first step had to be to find out how odorous molecules or odorants are detected in the nose. Nothing else mattered.

[Christina Kim]

From that research bench at Columbia, Linda began her quest to understand how the sense of smell worked.

[Linda Buck]

This was actually a very high risk project, and in retrospect, it was potentially suicidal. I mean, potentially suicidal in terms of a career.

[Christina Kim]

Linda, along with her mentor Richard Axel, invested much of her time in this research, research that was not well funded and largely ignored. And she passed on other job offers to study other topics along the way.

[Linda Buck]

I'm a very empirical scientist. I don't theorize because what usually happens is that the answer, the biological mechanisms that are used are usually far more elegant than the theories that people come up with.

[Christina Kim]

She ran experiment after experiment using rats, an animal whose sense of smell works similarly to humans. She studied their genetic code relentlessly. This went on for years. And then one day, eventually she figured it out.

[Linda Buck]

It was a Saturday night, I think, and I was in my kitchen sitting.

[Christina Kim]

In her house, looking at the results of her experiments. She recognized a pattern and I had.

[Linda Buck]

Colored pens and I had written down the sequence.

[Christina Kim]

Her life's work, the genomic sequence of the smell receptors in the nose.

[Linda Buck]

It was really beautiful. I remember just being stunned looking at them. When I first had the first set of them.

[Christina Kim]

Linda couldn't believe what she was seeing.

[Linda Buck]

And I had a friend in the other room who was watching TV or something. I kept running back and forth saying, look at this. Can you believe this? It was like patchwork quilts where bits and pieces were exchanged between the different receptors to make proteins that would have different be able to detect different odorants.

[Christina Kim]

Linda and Richard Axel solved the puzzle. They'd found 1,000 smell receptors.

[Linda Buck]

It was just absolutely thrilling.

[Christina Kim]

Over the next decade, Linda Buck, Richard Axel, and their collaborators continued to build out how our brains perceive smell, which.

[Rachel Hearns]

Then led to them winning the Nobel Prize in 2004.

[Christina Kim]

Rachel Herz says the Nobel Prize made Linda Buck into a rock star in the science world. Suddenly, everyone was paying attention.

[Rachel Hearns]

And so a lot of people who were working in the molecular biology and biochemistry in other systems went to study smell. And this led to basically an explosion of research looking at the molecular basis of how the sense of smell works.

[Christina Kim]

The thing that surprised me the most about all of this was we, as in humanity, knew very little about this, that I was now learning to live without. Like the smell of onions sizzling rain on warm concrete or my yaya's perfume. How does that go from out there in the world into my nose, up into my brain, and become a fundamental part of my memories, emotions, my story. Well, after Linda Buck's discovery, we have a better understanding of how we smell. What we smell.

[Rachel Hearns]

What smells are, is that they're chemicals that float through the air.

[Christina Kim]

Air, what we breathe in every moment is made of chemicals like nitrogen, oxygen, helium that we can't actually smell.

[Rachel Hearns]

So air is like a blank canvas, and the scents that we can perceive are like the paints on it that are the world that we exist in today.

[Christina Kim]

We know that humans can detect around a trillion scents. This number dwarfs the amount of tones. We can hear about 340,000, or shades of color. We can see around 1 million.

[Rachel Hearns]

So our ability to detect smells is actually far greater than our ability to detect any other sensory experience.

[Christina Kim]

This is because smell was extremely important for our prehistoric ancestors, who lived in an inhospitable world, a world where they needed to be able to smell predators or prey from long distances away. A world where their instincts were driven by the smells they encountered on a daily basis. And the accuracy of those instincts were often the difference between life and death.

[Rachel Hearns]

We're breathing, we're inhaling through our nostrils, taking a deep inhalation in every couple of seconds.

[Christina Kim]

And with each breath, we are carrying in the odors in the air, air.

[Rachel Hearns]

That we can't smell coming into our nostrils and traveling up our nostrils, right.

[Christina Kim]

Into our nasal passages, which are actually quite complex.

[Rachel Hearns]

There are sort of there are these. All these sort of little curvy structures and kind of curves and bends inside the nose, which are actually there to create as much turbulence to bring up the air carrying these odor molecules.

[Christina Kim]

The odor molecules move up and up lightning fast, and eventually they're stopped, landing.

[Rachel Hearns]

On this patch of mucous membrane, which is basically at the level of our eyebrows. And on this patch of mucous membrane, this is where all the receptors that are capable for detecting, you know, smells exist.

[Christina Kim]

The genes responsible for those receptors are what Linda buck discovered in 1991. They detect the chemicals, then start communicating with other neurons that will carry that information to a part of the brain that processes scent.

[Rachel Hearns]

And that's the amygdala hippocampal complex. And this is where we go, ah, it's lemon.

[Christina Kim]

This also happens to be the part of the brain where our emotions and memories are processed.

[Rachel Hearns]

The same part of the brain that's giving us the experience of emotion is also giving us the experience of scent. And so instantly that we are consciously registering a scent, we are also, to some degree, experiencing an emotion.

[Christina Kim]

I mean, to smell is to feel is what you just said. It's the exact same system.

[Rachel Hearns]

It's exactly that. It's perfectly said, to smell is to feel. I love that.

[Christina Kim]

So after Rachel patiently explained to me exactly how smell worked, I had one obvious question. How do I get it back at.

[Rachel Hearns]

This point in time? The most supported way to, you know, engage or reactivate your sense of smell after smell loss, and especially if it's from illness like Covid, is with smell training.

[Christina Kim]

I know what you might be thinking. Same thing I was thinking when she said it. Smell training really well. Rachel walked me through it.

[Rachel Hearns]

All you need are four distinctive scents. So, for instance, maybe peanut butter, shampoo, maybe suntan lotion and coffee. Let's just, for random example, let's actually try it together.

[Christina Kim]

Like us, go ahead and grab something to smell. Ready?

[Rachel Hearns]

Several times a day. So at least three times a day, sit down, unscrew the jar, sniff at what is in the jar, and even if you can't smell anything, think about, okay, lemon. I know this. Lemon. Lemon. Maybe I'm even salivating just thinking about it. I put lemon on fish or whatever. So you have a little thought connection as well as the scent itself. You know, thinking about what it is, even if you can't smell anything.

[Christina Kim]

Okay, I'm using peanut butter because I love that smell. So open the jar and breathe it.

[Rachel Hearns]

And then you try to do it at least two more times a day and try to keep on going at it for at least 12 weeks.

[Christina Kim]

According to Rachel, studies have shown this should help smell reemerge.

[Rachel Hearns]

So our sense of smell is constantly regenerating, which is one of the great things about unhealthy sense of smell. And what we're hoping to do with smell loss is like start up that process again. And if there hasn't been any damage to the pathway between the nose to the brain, then this is something that you can help do by just actively sniffing. So like sort of turning on the genes that will then turn on the receptors to re engage and regrow.

[Christina Kim]

But Rachel says this is something anyone can and should do, even if they haven't lost their sense of smell.

[Rachel Hearns]

I think everybody should be doing this, regardless of the sensibility of your sense of smell, at least once a day, every day. And this is because our sense of smell is directly involved with the health of our brain and our body.

[Christina Kim]

Smell is a deeply personal thing. It's a conduit for our deepest memories and thoughts. But it isn't just about what's happening in our minds. Smell has played an important role in shaping our society in deciding who does and does not belong long. Coming up, how one of the most infamous legal cases in US History came down to ascent.

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[Christina Kim]

You're listening to through line on npr.

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

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[Rachel Hearns]

To Judge I was in the backseat of the car on a beautiful summer day and the windows were rolled down. We're going through pastoral landscape, and all of a sudden from the front seat my mom says, oh, I love that smell. She says, it it's got to be good. It's a beautiful day. I'm all really happy. So I make this connection between positivity and scent. And I disclosed this on the playground when I was about seven years old. I made this comment that, oh, I love that smell. I actually still didn't know what it was called at this point. And then everyone turned to me and yelled, ew, that skunk. You're so weird. And I was met with derision and screeches and children pointing fingers at me and running away.

[Christina Kim]

To smell is to learn. Sense of smell allows animals, including skunks, to detect danger and navigate their environments. We humans also use our nose to discern dangers, like the smell of a gas leak or a fire. But we've also ascribed emotions and perceptions to certain smells, associating them with feelings like fear, delight or something putrid. And those associations aren't natural. They're learned.

[Rachel Hearns]

So the culture around me tells me that skunk is a bad smell. So I would say have learned that. And yet I have this personal experience which is really positive, and that's actually going to supersede the cultural aspect of it. So it's A multi layer system between sensitivity, cultural learning, and personal experience. And it's the meaning which determines how much you like it.

[Christina Kim]

We create the meaning of smell, but the cultural constructs around what we decide smells good or bad can be weaponized.

[Rachel Hearns]

So for instance, the, the immigrants who moved in next door, you know, using the smell of both food and then the smell of the person who eats that food as being other and bad and not part of my tribe, and, and someone or a group that should be pushed away from who I am. So it's not pure. It's a sense is very much tied up in the culture. It's very much tied up in the particular moment in that instance in time, let's say politically, where whatever is going on that that scent then takes that meaning and where it's coming from.

[Christina Kim]

Simply put, smells can have as much of a history as a black and white photo can.

[Mark Smith]

We're kind of hostage to visual conceits.

[Christina Kim]

This is Mark Smith.

[Mark Smith]

We fetishize the ocular. We look at the visual as the preeminent source of truth and reason.

[Christina Kim]

He's a sensory historian at the University of South Carolina and author of the book A Sensory History Manifesto.

[Mark Smith]

And I think what sensory historians tried to do is say, hang on a minute, historians should examine all of the senses.

[Christina Kim]

Mark says that historical writings are full of descriptions of sounds, textures, tastes, and smells.

[Mark Smith]

All of a sudden, what was implicit is now explicit. And all of a sudden, your world has increased by a factor of five. So history becomes much more robust, more.

[Christina Kim]

Meaningful, and those sensory descriptions can provide important details that are key to better understanding our history.

[Mark Smith]

For example, Plessy versus Ferguson.

[Christina Kim]

Yes, that. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case that legalized separate but equal treatment segregation in the United States, was founded in part on an argument based on racist perceptions of smell.

[Mark Smith]

If you were to explain how that case actually worked just by relying on eyewitness accounts, you'd have no idea why that case was so important. If you don't pay attention to smell, you've really missed the foundation of modern segregation in the United States.

[Christina Kim]

So to understand, we have to go back to Louisiana in 1890.

[Mark Smith]

We're in New Orleans. This is in the aftermath of the Civil War. Slavery is being abolished.

[Christina Kim]

An educated, wealthy, black and Creole population is thriving.

[Mark Smith]

But a new system of bodily control, social authority has been erected, and that's called segregation.

[Christina Kim]

Segregation was a key part of a larger system that would later be called Jim Crow. It was a wide ranging effort to reverse the progress black people had made since emancipation to Achieve that a strict separation of life from black and white people was enforced. Separate entrances, separate schools, and one of the most public spaces at that time, railroad cars.

[Mark Smith]

And what you have is a group of whites who want to segregate railroad cars in New Orleans. One of the things about New Orleans is, is that it has a very high African American population and a very, very robust, elite African American population that has been there for many, many years. And they want to push back against this segregation.

[Christina Kim]

A group of prominent black leaders, the citizens committee, came together and organized to specifically challenge this segregation law on train cars. So the group decided the best way to do this is to create a setup to stage an act of disobedience that will allow them to bring a case to court to challenge the law and ultimately have it struck down. Think Rosa Parks. So in order to do this, they needed someone that could blur the lines of segregation.

[Mark Smith]

And they choose a man named Homer Plessy.

[Christina Kim]

Homer Plessy. He was a shoemaker and activist born into a family of french speaking Louisiana creole people.

[Mark Smith]

And they choose him because he is visually ambiguous. He is considered to be black under Louisiana statute, but visually, he looks white.

[Christina Kim]

And it's because of this ambiguity that he was the perfect person to challenge the validity of segregation laws.

[Mark Smith]

Segregation is based on the assumption that race can be seen and always detected. In other words, that race can be fixed, that it is a stable category. And we know that race is an invention. It functions to fulfill the mandates and imperatives of people who have power at the time. So here they have homoplasty, and they say, we want you to go onto the white car.

[Christina Kim]

So Homer Plessy boards the whites only.

[Mark Smith]

Car, and he sits down, apparently.

[Christina Kim]

And a conductor who was in on Plessy's plan asks him if he was, quote, colored.

[Mark Smith]

And it's Homer Plessy, because he's trying to prove a point that has to tell the conductor, sir, I'm on the wrong car because I'm black. So what you have here is a really powerful illustration of the fact that you cannot see race in all instances. And if you can't see them in all instances, then how on earth could you erect an entire system on segregation that assumes that you can detect race?

[Christina Kim]

Everything went as planned. Homer plessy was arrested and charged for violating the law. And the case went to criminal court in front of judge John h. Ferguson.

[Mark Smith]

So we're in the courtroom, and the way that it's framed is these black leaders in this parish of New Orleans are trying to say, hang on, A minute. If you want to prosecute my client, Homer Plessy, for violating a segregated car statute for going into the wrong car, surely you have to be able to say, well, we could identify him as black. Please tell us how you know that my client is black. Because if you can't tell us that, then he's innocent. And Louisiana's prosecuting attorney replies to this claim by the defense counsel. He said, well, I don't really need to see him to know that he's black. I don't need to see his race. I can smell it.

[Christina Kim]

I can smell it. And what the prosecutor argued was I.

[Mark Smith]

Might not be up to the task of locating race and identifying homoplesis race, but my nose is. And that's the conceit, right? That's the invention. They're not true, they're inventions. But if you have the authority to make the claim that you smell, it becomes the social truth, broadly accepted.

[Christina Kim]

Homer Plessy was found guilty by the state and his legal team appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the damage had already been done.

[Mark Smith]

I mean, it doesn't matter if omoplessy is innocent or guilty. What matters is that people have now articulated very clearly that they can rely on the sense of smell in order to adjudicate judicial cases and that they relying on that argument, that's going to have long term implications.

[Christina Kim]

In an overwhelming seven to one decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Homer Plessy, laying out the legal foundation for segregation in the United States. There's little objectivity to how we interpret what we're smelling. Most smells aren't innately good, delicious, putrid, or even foul.

[Mark Smith]

And yet if you don't pay attention to smell, you won't reveal the power hierarchies of that time. You'll actually be in a kind of blind spot because, hang on a minute, that's natural, isn't it? And the whole idea behind power is to naturalize it. It's always been this way, it is this way, and it will remain this way.

[Christina Kim]

So next time you really like how something smells, ask yourself why. Start thinking about where you learned to like that smell and what that tells you about your history and identity. Coming up, how our sense of smell can help us what we can't always see, both in the past and the present.

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[Ernestine Deane]

Part.

[Rachel Hearns]

Three to smell is to remember.

[Ernestine Deane]

Germany's bigger than Christmas. It's just such a huge festival and there are many traditional Christmas markets. And there was one particular stand at the Christmas market selling roasted almonds.

[Christina Kim]

This is Ernestine Deane. She's a South African musician and medicine woman who lived for a few years in Germany. That's where she smelled those roasted almonds, a scent that took her on a journey.

[Ernestine Deane]

It was if there were these kind of fingers, like wafting drawing me in, these tendrils, like the scent was so familiar and reminded me so much of my grandmother's kitchen. And I was back there when I smelled these roasted almonds, that sweet scent, this kind of nutty aroma, chestnutty, beautiful almond scent. And it was just such a delicious experience for my body.

[Christina Kim]

Ernestine may have been thousands of miles away from her childhood home in Cape Town, but in that moment, the smell of roasted nuts transported her.

[Ernestine Deane]

You know how it is when you can have something like that and you instantly are back there, Your eyes are closed and you are this visible one.

[Christina Kim]

It's something that's happened to a lot of us. We smell something and all of a sudden we're jolted out of where we are into a memory of a place or a person that almost feels real.

[Rachel Hearns]

Scent memories are bringing back a very discreet episode that's, you know, fully fleshed out as one moment in time. That's a very special kind of specific time travel that scent enables us to experience and in a way that other sensory experiences don't, because we feel much more back in that original time and place. It's so much more visceral, like we've actually kind of moved from now to back then.

[Christina Kim]

This is Rachel Herz again. She says the reason our smell memories are so evocative goes back to how Our brain processes what we smell when we smell something familiar. My grandma's perfumes, say, or those almonds Ernestine Dean smelled in the German Christmas market. The parts of our brain that light up are also the areas that process our emotions, the amygdala and our memories, the hippocampus. Which is why today researchers are looking at whether or not smell can improve cognition, address PTSD and stave off dementia. And it's also why smell triggers such emotional memories that enable us to momentarily travel across time and place.

[Ernestine Deane]

I feel like they are bookmarks.

[Christina Kim]

Ernestine says she uses these certain smells to archive her memories.

[Ernestine Deane]

If I looked at our stories as pages of a book, they're very important bookmarks that remind us of who we are and also really is who we are.

[Christina Kim]

Bookmarks that help her remember her family's history in South Africa during the decades long era of apartheid as mixed heritage indigenous Khoi people.

[Mark Smith]

According to God's will that the white race should be preserved. I think it is a generally accepted fact today that the non European is.

[Christina Kim]

At the lowest stage of development under apartheid. Racial discrimination and segregation were completely legalized in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. And many, like Ernestine's family, had to abandon the homes they'd known their whole lives.

[Ernestine Deane]

My family was forcibly removed in the 1960s at the time of the Group Areas act, where certain crew or certain places were zoned for white occupation.

[Christina Kim]

Between 1960 and 1980, an estimated 3.5 million black and mixed race South Africans were forced to leave their homes. Ernestine's family was part of that number. They lost their home in Constantia, a lush fertile suburb of Cape Town, and were forced to relocate to the much drier Cape Flats and the suburban neighborhood called Grassy Park.

[Ernestine Deane]

I was born into this amniotic fluid of grief.

[Christina Kim]

Ernestine was born after the forced removals. But she still inherited her family's deep sense of loss.

[Ernestine Deane]

It took a lot out of my grandparents to do that. My grandfather made sure that some animals came along. And he said that when everything had been packed up and had been packed on, the donkey car came to the back of the house. It was now empty. And he stood there. He just stood and took a last look at this place that they had never imagined would at some stage not be home. And he said he stood there at the back of the house, out of the sight of the family and everyone and he cried like a baby.

[Christina Kim]

Ernestine inherited that grief, but she also inherited a connection to the land her family had to leave behind.

[Ernestine Deane]

Consentia is a particularly fertile part of the Cape. And so when I close my eyes, I'm already smelling that dark, rich soil, you know, that kind of chocolatey, brown, rich, grainy soil. A place of such comfort for us because it's where we come from.

[Christina Kim]

Several times a year, the whole family would go back to Constantia to bring dahlias and lilies to the tombstones in the family graveyard.

[Ernestine Deane]

And when you walk in there, you walk on, you're crunching acorns with your feet and, like a bed of pine needles, which also brings, like, releases, so much earth, a dryness of it in the summer and then in the winter and autumn months where it's more wet, it also feels so alive. And that's where there's so many pine trees there, and there's so many cones on the ground that we would collect.

[Christina Kim]

And those pine cones are what brings us back to the almonds that Ernestine smelled while visiting that German craft Christmas market many years later, the one that transported her back in time to her grandmother's kitchen in South Africa, to Grassy park and back to Constantia.

[Ernestine Deane]

One of the things that we did with them as children was to go back and gather pine cones, bring it back to Grassy park, roast it either on the fire or in the wood stove, and this heat would then release the poems that open them and release or make visible pine kernels.

[Christina Kim]

They'd roast the pine nuts together with her grandmother, aunts and cousins, and make a traditional sweet dessert known as tamaleki.

[Ernestine Deane]

The whole house smelled like. It was just this incredible roasted kind of caramel scent in the house. Wood fire to begin with, the heat of the oven and then the. The pine cones opening. We would take the pine kernels out and mash them, add brown sugar and butter, and there is nothing, nothing like that smell and that comfort that I experienced in childhood. You know, when I think of it now, as a woman, as a mother, my own children older than I was as a kid, I see that lust more now.

[Christina Kim]

Ernestine's smell triggered memory was layered, complex. It was happy, it was sad. It was both a window into a childhood memory and a whole country's history. And at its core, it was an act of resistance, because at the same time that Ernestine's family was making tamaleke, the brutal system of apartheid was literally obliterating her sense of smell.

[Ernestine Deane]

You cannot breathe. You start kind of choking, and the throat is constricting.

[Christina Kim]

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the Anti Apartheid movement was growing in Grassy Park. And the response by the South African apartheid government was fast. Riot police were a daily presence. And the air always smelled like burning tires and tear gas.

[Ernestine Deane]

The smell feels like an attack, literally feels like an attack. It's a burning sensation, like your nasal passages, your throat, your mouth into your chest. Your eyes are burning and tearing. That's why it's called tear gas.

[Christina Kim]

Tear gas is an assault on the senses. It's meant to disorient and dislocate. But in the face of that, Ernestine's family made sure she knew that the smell of pine cones, of rich, fertile earth, of dahlias and lilies and of sweet tamaleki were part of her. That she and her family were more than burning tires and suffering.

[Ernestine Deane]

There's so much grief, there's so much sorrow there, and there's also so much joy and pride. We are so strong as a people.

[Christina Kim]

It's been 30 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa, and until recently, Ernestine lived just a few blocks from where she grew up in Grassy Park. She still goes back to Constancha, only now she's bringing her three kids and passing the smells and rituals on to them.

[Ernestine Deane]

I need them to know certain rights that are also survival and hold our story.

[Christina Kim]

The grief is always still there. To this day, Conscia is still a predominantly white and incredibly wealthy suburb. And while there's been a real effort to restore the land, evicted families lost, there's been very little traction. But Ernestine still takes her children back to tend the graves. And she's found that by staying engaged with her sense of smell, there's room for healing all around her.

[Ernestine Deane]

Because I'm on the other side of the acute grief that I was raised in and the acute trauma of the times in the past eight, I'm starting to smell other things that must have been there. They were always there. But I'm smelling the lick. I'm smelling the wet kind of the marshiness of this part of Grassy park, on flay water, on the pond.

[Christina Kim]

When she steps out of her house now, the toxic bouquet of burning tires and tear gas no longer clouds the air. And in its absence, she's discovered that a piece of Constantia of her family was always in Grassy Park.

[Ernestine Deane]

What's beautiful is that there are many lilies here, arum lilies, which is, in a way, the totem flower of my people of Constantia. It has a very. For me, it has a very fresh green scent, almost cucumber like. You know, I'm sure it would smell different for different people, but it has a green smell.

[Christina Kim]

It's an old scent in a new place, a new bookmark in her and her family's history.

[Ernestine Deane]

It's been special to be able to walk out into the water now and be amongst the lilies here and feel somehow that my ancestors are with me.

[Rachel Hearns]

Who we are is a collection of the stories of our past, and our life narrative is how we define ourselves. And our life narrative is dependent upon remembering who we are and the things that have happened to us. And absolutely, scent is the key to that.

[Mark Smith]

The smell of your mother, the smell of your first child, the smell of pain, the smell of working out. These are things that kind of knit your experience together, and if you take them out of your sensory experience, generally, you're not going to have that more robust sense of your own past.

[Christina Kim]

It. A year after I recorded on her couch in Madrid, she passed away. It's been over six years now, and yet I find that she's never that far from me. She lives in my memory, of course, and the recordings I have of her, of her monogram necklace that I wear around my neck. And she's embodied in the scent of Alvarez Gomez Agua de Colonia. After months of diligently smelling an array of different scented essential oils, from lemon to clove to mint, my nose actually pricked up one day and I felt the faint warmth of clove invade my nostrils. With time, I redeveloped the ability to smell the symphony of the world all over again. And you better believe that I doused myself in Alvarez Gomez Colonia. I smelled fresh, clean, and most importantly, I had a piece of my yaya back with me. The minute I smelled the colonia, it's like I could remember her more clearly, more fully, to the point that I could bring myself back to the moment of one of our last hugs. To this day, all I need to do is smell it and I can conjure myself. Steam. Standing in the hallway of her home again, both of us in our nightgowns, hugging for well over a minute. I can hear the beep of her hearing aid, feel her tiny frame holding mine. And I smell the faint scent of Alvarez Gomez in her perfectly coiffed hair. It's like I'm there, and so is my Yaya in all her fullness. I went from having no sense of smell to being able to smell a chocolate wrapper from across a room. And now I have a new reason to be obsessed with smell. I recently gave birth to my first child. She's made me think about smell in a totally different way. I'm no longer just thinking about how certain smells shape my past and identity. I'm thinking about her, too. What smells do I want to pass down to my daughter? What scents will bookmark her life and remind her of me, of her dad, of her Yaya, of who she is and where she comes from? One thing I know for certain is that she will definitely know the smell of Alvarez Gomez Colonia, and she'll know that she comes from a long line of strong Spanish women of traviesas like my mom and my Yaya.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

[Narrator]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Next week on our series hit History of the Self, we take on modern love.

[Linda Buck]

Dating becomes this thing you can do on your phone all the time, just like you do everything else all the time. It's sort of where everything happens.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Christina Kim]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Peter Balanon Rosenberg, Thomas Liu, Irene Noguchi.

[Narrator]

Thank you to the American Academy of Achievement for their permission to use excerpts from their interview with Dr. Linda Buck. And special thanks to Hiro Matsunami, Duane Jethro, Melanie Bohe, Elise Perlstein, Connie Chang, Natalia Fiedelholz and Yolanda Sanguine for sharing their time and expertise. Fact checking for this episode episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. Audio was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Thanks to Johannes Durgi, Kiara West, Edith Chapin and Colin Campbell.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya.

[Christina Kim]

Mizani, Naveed, Marvi, Sho Fujiwara.

[Narrator]

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write [e-mail].

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Thanks for listening.

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