The Memories That Return With Autumn

There is something suspicious about the first properly cold day of autumn.

And there is actually some science behind it.

• Your senses are better at remembering than you think

  Memory isn’t stored as a neat collection of files that we consciously open whenever we need them. Sometimes, something in our surroundings acts as a cue and brings back a memory without us deliberately searching for it.

  Smell is particularly interesting.

  Research into autobiographical memory has found that smells can trigger memories that feel unusually vivid and emotional. Part of the explanation lies in how closely our sense of smell is connected with brain regions involved in memory and emotion, including the hippocampus and amygdala.

  There’s even a name often associated with the experience: the Proust phenomenon, named after writer Marcel Proust’s famous description of a taste and smell suddenly bringing back memories from childhood. Researchers have been studying versions of the phenomenon for decades.

  Which explains why catching a familiar smell can sometimes feel less like remembering something and more like briefly being transported back there.

• So what does that have to do with autumn?

  Quite a lot.

  Autumn changes an enormous number of sensory details around us at roughly the same time.

  The temperature drops. The air smells different. Daylight disappears earlier. Jackets come back out. School routines settle in again. Outdoor practices get colder. Certain foods return. Different music finds its way back into our headphones.

  And most importantly, we’ve experienced many of those things before.

  Your brain doesn’t necessarily categorise something as the smell of October 2024. But if a smell, sound or feeling was present during an important period of your life, encountering it again can become a cue for memories associated with it.

  That doesn’t mean scientists have discovered an autumn nostalgia button in the brain. Nostalgia is personal, and not everyone reacts to seasons in the same way. Research comparing different sensory cues is also more complicated than the simple internet claim that “smell is always the strongest sense for memory.”

  But it does mean that the strangely specific memories triggered by a season aren’t quite as random as they seem.

• The things we don’t realise we’ll miss

  There is another strange thing nostalgia does: it gives importance to moments that didn’t seem important when they were happening.

  Most of growing up doesn’t feel like growing up. It feels like waiting for the bus, complaining about homework, walking home with someone, staying after practice, hearing the same jokes from the same people and taking the same route you have taken a hundred times before.

  There is rarely a moment when you stop and think, I am going to miss this.

  And maybe that’s what makes nostalgia so powerful. We usually only realise that a certain period of our lives mattered once we’ve already moved beyond it.

  One day, the route changes. Someone moves away. You leave a school. A friendship changes. A routine quietly disappears. Nothing dramatic has to happen. Life simply moves forward, and something that once felt completely ordinary becomes something you can only return to through memory.

  That doesn’t mean we should spend every ordinary afternoon desperately trying to appreciate it. We’d probably drive ourselves insane.

  But maybe there is something worth remembering in it:

  Some of the days that feel completely unremarkable now will eventually become the ones we miss.

  Perhaps that’s part of what makes autumn feel particularly nostalgic. It isn’t only that the season returns.

  We do too.