Article
Culture
Psychology
Weirdness
5 min read

Why smell jumps the queue when it comes to memories

Smells hardwire deep into the brain, writes Henna Cundill, as she explores why they jump-start such vivid memories.
An autumnal scene of a church yard and church framed by leafless trees.
'The smell of dust and damp stone will always cry “safety!”'
Jakub Pabis on Unsplash.

When I was a 22-year-old undergraduate my mother died quite suddenly. I can't remember the name of the undertakers we used, nor the chaplain who took her funeral. I can no longer visualise what any of their faces looked like. I know I visited the chaplain’s house to plan the funeral, but I can't remember exactly where that house was. What sticks is that the day of the funeral was a sultry summer's day, and both the chaplain and the undertakers smelt of perspiration. To this day there are moments where I catch that same whiff of man-sweat in some other location, and for a fleeting second, I am a bewildered 22-year-old once more. 

Here is another memory. I attended a tiny, rural Church of England primary school in the middle of England. At the end of each school year, all of us donned our little Wellington boots, which smelt faintly of slurry (since this was dairy-farming country) and sweaty feet. Then we lined up in a crocodile and trudged through the bluebell-wood (damp leaves) and skirted the edge of fields (silage, which stings the nose) covering the mile or so between our school building and the village church. 

We would enter the church grounds through the back field, hurrying through an eerily muffled graveyard with tombstones towering far above our heads and the grass disturbingly lumpy beneath our little feet. To the chidings of “Quickly!” and “Quietly!” we children scurried down a gravel path, away from this unsettling place of death, to reach the cool sanctuary of a little church, and the comforting smells (for me, at least) of damp stone and dusty hymnbooks. 

Others may not have the same associations, but for me the smell of dust and damp stone will always cry “safety!” and the reassurance that “there are no ghosts in here!” in contrast to that troubling graveyard. From death to life. Yet, at the same time, getting stuck with my nose close to some man’s whiffy armpit on the Tube will forever insinuate that I am just a child pretending to be a grown-up, out of my depth, overwhelmed with one thousand decisions to make (“What flowers do you want for her coffin?”) and no-one to advise. In the midst of life, death again.  

On reflection I will know that my emotions are being manipulated by my nose, in ways which are more or less than helpful depending on the circumstances.

Of course, I am not 22 years old and lost anymore, no matter what that man’s armpit tries to tell me. My rational mind knows better, but my rational mind doesn’t get a say – or doesn’t get the first say anyway. This is because smell is the only one of our senses that bypasses the thalamus (the brain’s ‘filtering gate’ that decides which part of the brain needs to respond to sensory input) and goes straight to the limbic system, where emotional memory is stored.  

Sometimes it is very obvious that this is taking place, such as in the examples given above. On reflection I will know that my emotions are being manipulated by my nose, in ways which are more or less than helpful depending on the circumstances. But it can happen in more subtle ways too. Supermarkets infamously pump out smells to influence our buying choices, and we’re trying to sell our house right now, so we’ve been brewing a whole lot more coffee than we ever usually would.   

Intriguingly, scientists don’t really know why the human sense of smell jumps the queue when it comes to cognitive processing. There are biological theories, such as that the smell of predator could wake up our ancestors while they were sleeping and/or could allow them to follow a scent trail quickly when fleeing danger or seeking food. There are social theories too, such as that we don’t have a lot of good words to describe smells, so the brain just doesn’t bother trying to analyse them. Whatever the truth of the matter, the reality is that (whether we like it or not) our noses are an emotional trip-hazard.  

When I walk through those great oak doors there is a moment, a glitch in the matrix, when the unmistakable smell of church hits my nose. Dust, damp… a little hint of mouse. 

I can’t help wondering what this tells me about my religious practice. Do I go to church because I have made a cognitive decision to worship God each Sunday? Or do I go to church because I am following my nose, getting away from a world full of armpits and responsibilities to a place where I am a seven-year-old girl, all gingham dress and wellies, feeling safe. If so, does it matter?    

Truth is, my mind can give me a dozen reasons not to go to church every single week. In fact, two dozen reasons. More. It has always been a busy week; I’m always behind on work. The house always needs a sort out and the car is never washed. But because certain congregation members are normally counting on me for certain things, and because I’m still pretending to be a grown up, I typically drag myself out the door, and off to church I go.  

And week on week, without fail, when I walk through those great oak doors there is a moment, a glitch in the matrix, when the unmistakable smell of church hits my nose. Dust, damp… a little hint of mouse. My body registers this before my mind; my shoulders drop a little of their tension. Even if it’s just for a fleeting moment, I start to feel that I know for sure what is absolutely real in my life and what is just pretend.  

Is this knowledge irrational – since it doesn’t come from the cognitive part of my mind? Or is there a God who knows that the cognitive part of my mind sometimes tells me all sorts of untrue and unhelpful things. Is there a God who is choosing to reach out to me in more subtle, more ancient ways?  

I can only wonder if I have been following my nose all this time, without even noticing. Drawn along by an ancient scent trail that leads me time and time again…this way…and that way…until I reach a place where there is safety, and bread. 

Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.