Question. (Dwight Shrute voice off.)

You often see claims that smell is the sense most closely related to memory. This is received wisdom, never challenged. Is it actually true? Is there experimental data to show that smell relates to memory in a way that taste, sight, etc. do not? I guess the olfactory nerve is part of the limbic system, which would tie it to memory, but…I don’t know. It sounds like such a facile observation about such a thorny area of vast human ignorance that it seems little suspect. And ever since I found out the “taste map” of the tongue was BS, I’m skeptical about stuff like this in general.

Anybody know of research on the topic, or is this some bogus “everybody knows” thing? Personally, I do get wafted back to the past very easily by smell: diesel fumes = Seoul, Korea. The sickly, lukewarm smell of institutional food anywhere = my first grade school cafeteria. But I can get the same nostalgia wave from sights, tastes…especially songs. “Sister Havana” just came on KEXP–a song that I doubt I’ve heard in fifteen years–and suddenly it was the summer of 1993.