The Court of Unreliable Memory: scent, emotion, and the limits of autobiographical recollection

What a scent can awaken—and what it cannot establish.

Odor-evoked autobiographical memory research examines how real smells sometimes shape the felt quality, age distribution, and accessibility of recollections. The Court of Unreliable Memory is a separate imaginative instrument: its materials are names, colours and metaphors. No smell emerges from a screen, and no score identifies whether an event happened.

Bring a gentle memory, or leave the entry blank. The private testimony remains in this tab; the authored rules simply allow you to compare two competing ways of describing a recollection. By the end you can export an opinion, not a verdict.

Research entry points: Herz & Schooler (2002) · Chu & Downes (2002) · Hackländer et al. (2019)