Straight through your nose to your neocortex, no waiting!
 

Oh my god, Oh my god , OhmygodOhmygod. I just signed a lady up that smelled exactly like my maternal Grandmother. She's been dead like 20 years or something. Smelled like what she smelt like when she was alive, that is, before all you wiseacres get going.

my office still smells like Grammy. wow.

That's very cool.

Funny thing, how scents make us remember things so strongly. Was it a perfume or 'her'?

perfume. nasty old musty stuff.

I forget where it was that I heard it - but olfactory memories are stronger than any other type in the human mind. (Something tells me it was Alton Brown, but I'm not positive today).

Hopefully all the memories are positive and the office scent isn't freaking you out too badly. :) (if it is, febreeze works wonders!)

My mother-in-law used to wear this stuff . . . it didn't smell that bad, but I swear I could feel it crawling between my eyeballs and my contacts. I eventually prevailed on Mrs. Dallas to give her a private word about it. ("Steve is far too polite to say anything about it, but he has some allergies that are aggravated by any kind of perfume . . . ")

I walked into the smell of my classroom when I was 8 years old the other day. I think it was a mixture of votive candles (at the shrine to the Virgin obviously) and old lady perfume. It was wonderful.

I wasn't aware they had built me a shrine.

Sorry, just call me Ms. Obvious Sacrilege today!

Smells invoke the strongest memory because of their specificity, IE there is no approximation for a smell. Sound (waveforms) can be reduced to digital steps, as can visual data, reduced to pixels, but olfactory data runs on a "dictionary" system: this exact molecule docks in this exact receptor, and it sends a unique signal to your brain, there is no substitue.

Incidentally, it is theorized that the "dictionary" system of smells gave rise to our spoken language, which runs on the same "this means that" platform. Best factoid about that theory: we have a special category of "bad words" which desribe smelly things (sex, fear, fecal matter).

Evening in Punxatawney : it's what all grannies got for Xmas this year.

My Mum is wearing Jean Paul Gaultier Classique right now. I wonder if in years to come my niece will consider it a typical old lady smell...

Funny, there was about the same age gap between Nan and me as there is between Mum and niece, and yet my Mum isn't nearly as.... old. Did people age differently because they'd been through the war or something?

if you didn't do it in the 'bad place' everytime, it wouldn't be as smelly, ya know.

Is this really true? Or is it a perceptual difference on your part?

Oh, and Jim . . . who said it was "bad"??

Next time I see niece I'll ask - although she's 12 and keen to please, so I might not get her true feelings.

I'm basing it on the things Mum does, compared to Nan. They are closer in type to the things I do and my niece does than anything Nan used to do. Mum I think it's attitude - Mum is open to new things. Food, places, technology, people etc. She embraces life.

Nan just used to stay at home and clean from what I remember. She would tell you all about what a hard life she'd had, but even as a child it didn't sound that hard to me - Mum worked harder and for longer, had more children and less family support.

Meh - maybe that's one of my fears, that I have Nan's genes and will eat myself up inside with bitterness if I start with the self-pity.

Oh, and it might not be bad, but goodness me - it can smell afterwards... You just get browned meat, we get squelchy farts that smell like wet dog.... TMI?

It's starting to look like there's no such thing around here! :p