The Smell of War

Jacki Morie was walking across an open field when she smelled it-an aroma so heart-wrenchingly wonderful that she stopped still, unable to move for five minutes. This was in Dallas in 1990, but she was lost, transported 40 years back. Morie can´t say what she smelled, or even provide a rudimentary description. All she knows is the scent was from when she was a baby, and the transfixing power of the experience convinced her that for VR to be truly successful, it must have smell.

Everybody has stories like this about aromas that trigger precise memories, often very sentimental ones. The concept resonates in literature, most famously in Marcel Proust´s Remembrance of Things Past, in which the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine provokes, well, past remembrances, thousands of pages´ worth (â€But when from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone . . . remain poisedâ€).

The smell/memory/emotion connection is tantalizing to military simulation experts. A handful of studies have shown that odors can enhance your memorization skills. Some research supports the theory that odor-linked experiences form more distinct memories in your cluttered brain. (These reliable qualities are known as-what else?-Proustian characteristics.)

Findings like these encourage Morie. When I arrive at the ICT for my visit, her research assistant is putting the finishing touches on a paper about Scent Collar experiments done with soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia. The primary finding: People tend to learn more in the state of emotional arousal that olfaction-enabled VR can provoke.

In her sunny corner office, Morie clears space on her desk and brings out dozens of scent bottles. I hand her the new ones, which she uncaps and begins smelling. The first forest fragrance is good, she says, with plenty of Douglas fir; the second one is even better; the third . . . no, too citrusy. Number two it is. I play my trump card, Wet Earth. â€I like this one,†Morie says. â€It has much more dirt in it than the one I used before for the culvert."

Morie uses a glass pipette to draw half a length of Wet Earth and lets the liquid trickle out into an empty bottle. Then, for a fuller representation of the culvert, she adds a quarter of a pipette from a bottle labeled â€Bat Guano†and an eighth of a pipette of â€Mildew.†She passes me the mixture. â€Not bad,†I say.