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Creativity Tip 21 - Creativity and Your Sense of Smell
For Proust, it was famously the taste of a Madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea that sent him tumbling into an involuntary memory. Just the smell would have been enough to spark those associations and make him indifferent “to the vicissitudes of life… its disaster innocuous, its brevity illusory.”
Even more than taste, smell has the strongest connection to memories and mood. A quick whiff of something familiar - fresh bread, wet leaves, freshly brewed coffee, the crayons we used as children - can quickly affect how we feel and what we’re thinking.
So for projects needing creativity, scent can be a very powerful creative tool. We are drawn to fragrances and aromas though we almost never pay them close attention or utilise them to their full potential. Tapping our olfactory senses isn't something we give much thought to when we get down to using our creativity. Proust spent thousands of pages trying to explain that memory is often sparked when you least expect it – but with the right awareness we can get ‘sparked’ when we desire.
Do you associate a particular scent with creativity? Scents we are familiar with can easily be used to remember a past event and put us in a desired mood. We all probably remember the smell of crayons; in workshops bringing out a multi-coloured box of crayons will make a group’s eyes light up and invariably someone will bring the crayons under their nose and inhale. You can use this method to get into a powerful creative mood.
Using scents differently can be productive in another way too, as random scents can initiate new stirrings within us. Testing out different and new scents is a surprise to our senses and makes our brain react. If we are in an imagining mood, we can utilise these responses to spark an idea.
Our first reaction to any smell is usually to class it as pleasant or unpleasant, ie is it nice, sharp, or foul? The second reaction is often to try and identify it, by instinctively comparing it to something we are familiar with and this may be the only reaction we need. However, to use our sense of smell to its full capacity in our creativity we have to delve deeper - drawing out all the other things it can tell us. Here we're not really trying to identify the smell; it's more useful to see what reaction it stirs in us.
Of course, you also have to know what to do with the reaction once you receive them as the associations sparked by an aroma are always unique. For you, cut grass might spark thoughts of lazy summers and relaxing lake trips; for someone else it might mean memories of sweaty, wasted days mowing the neighbour’s lawn for a paltry sum. So what works for you might not work for someone else.
Creativity coaching can help with your thinking, so you can find more connections to successful ways of achieving your goals and dealing with your challenges.
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