Event 2: Midterm Presentations

While I enjoyed viewing each midterm presentation, the two that were of particular interest to me were about scent memory and harnessing dreams.

I spent many summers of my youth in my mom’s homeland, and while I remember much of the landscape, people, and food, the first thing I always observe upon recollection of my time there is, oddly enough, the scent of the streets. This iconic smell is one you would probably experience in a construction zone, so every time I walk by one in Westwood, the images of my experiences there flood my brain.

When we recall memories, most of us tend to focus on the visual aspects while scents and textures are often forgotten, unimportant, or uninvolved in memory making. But our sense of smell is tightly linked to memory and is an underrated memory mechanism. The olfactory bulb, which is located in your head and sends information from your nose to your brain, is one of the first areas to sustain brain damage in Alzheimer’s disease.

Turning now to the dream chip, while everyone is believed to dream during sleep, many people don’t remember, so having one of those individuals watch a product of the inner machinations of their mind on a screen would be enlightening but potentially frightening. I like to think of dreams as a visual into a person’s subconscious, and this is not usually a desired experience for some people. Though it has a different purpose, the dream chip reminded me of another dream technology called Dormio. It delivers audio signals during particular times of a person’s sleep cycle in order to alter their dreams. Dormio isn’t exactly like the dream chip since it induces rather than captures dreams, but experiments may shed light on how to determine what someone dreams about.

Images from top to bottom: smells inducing memories, the dream device Dormio, the dream chip

Works Cited:

Beckmann, Sarah. “A New Way to Control Experimentation with Dreams.” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 21 July 2020, news.mit.edu/2020/targeted-dream-incubation-dormio-mit-media-lab-0721.

Kreisl, William. “Can a Smell Test Sniff Out Alzheimer's Disease?” Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 10 July 2019, www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/can-smell-test-sniff-out-alzheimers-disease#:~:text=The%20olfactory%20bulb%E2%80%94which%20sends,affected%20early%20in%20the%20disease.

“Psychology and Smell.” Fifth Sense, www.fifthsense.org.uk/psychology-and-smell/.

Walsh, Colleen. “How Scent, Emotion, and Memory Are Intertwined - and Exploited.” Harvard Gazette, Harvard Gazette, 27 Feb. 2020, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-memory-are-intertwined-and-exploited/.

“Why Can't I Remember My Dreams?” Medical News Today, MediLexicon International, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/why-cant-i-remember-my-dreams#what-else-do-we-know.