I thought about this the other day when Jenn and I were shopping in the perfume section of Nordstrom…

People make associations in their brains. Like the way people remember the words to a song based on how the song sounds - the rhythm, the melody, etc. In some cases, people use songs and rap as a sort of mnemonic device to help themselves remember stuff. A popular example of this is the Schoolhouse Rock series. Hey, that’s how I learned the preamble to the Constitution.

It’s also pretty well known that people can remember thousands of different scents. Who doesn’t know the smell of chocolate or coffee?

So what if people started exploiting the ability to remember smells and exercise that to help in remembering things? I’m not sure how that would work exactly, but the ability to do something like, “Hmmm… spearmint. That reminds me that the Wright brothers made the first airplane.” Or something like that.

I think scratch-and-sniff stickers would become popular again. People in classes would start carrying around these huge sticker notebooks and be madly scratching at stickers during tests. Schools would have to start pumping out a sort of smell neutralizer to stop kids from cheating.

Might be interesting.