There is still a melon at Waitrose that is haunting me. I wrote about it before because it cost £7.88, which I already considered a completely unreasonable amount of money for a melon. I didn’t buy it. I just picked it up and smelled it, and immediately I was somewhere else: Tuscany, home, markets, summer. That smell of proper melon that somehow contains much more than melon when you grew up somewhere where that smell belonged to a particular place and time.

Well, the melon is still there. Except now it costs more than £9, so at this point I think our relationship is going to remain purely olfactory. But every time I see it, I still go towards it, pick it up, smell it and there it is again: Tuscany. And the other day, while standing in Waitrose sniffing a melon I refuse to buy on principle, I suddenly started wondering: how the hell can a smell do that?

Because this happens to me all the time. There is the smell of a particular plant that instantly takes me back to the village where I used to go on holiday when I was a child. Not just to the idea of the village. For a fraction of a second it feels much closer than that, almost as if the place has suddenly opened somewhere inside my head.

And there is the smell of tomato cooking with onion, which takes me directly to my great-grandmother’s house because she used to make this pizza with tomato and onion. One smell, and suddenly there is the house, the food, her, and all the other little things attached to that memory.

I find this extraordinary. You can go years without consciously thinking about a particular afternoon, kitchen, person or place, and then some completely innocent molecule enters your nose while you’re walking down a street and — boom — an entire world appears.

So, being me, obviously I had to find out why. I am basically the child who constantly asked “why?” except that the child grew up and now has Google and ChatGPT, which is probably a dangerous combination. I ask ridiculous questions all the time. Why do humans dance? Does a pigeon know it’s in London? Why does this happen? Why does that happen? I don’t particularly like accepting that something simply happens when I can go digging around and discover what my brain is actually doing.

And it turns out that smell and memory have a particularly interesting relationship. Our sense of smell is closely connected to parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory, including the amygdala and the hippocampus. Researchers have found that memories triggered by smells can feel especially emotional and can produce a particularly strong sensation of being transported back in time.

There is even a name associated with this: the Proust phenomenon, after Marcel Proust’s famous description of tasting a madeleine and suddenly having memories of his childhood return. Which I love, because apparently Proust had a madeleine and I have an overpriced melon in Waitrose.

What fascinates me most, though, is that an odour doesn’t always seem to bring back a single piece of information. It can bring back a whole environment. The tomato and onion don’t simply make me think, “My great-grandmother used to cook that.” They seem to open a door, and behind that door there is a house, a kitchen, a person, food, a period of my life. Things I wasn’t actively trying to remember suddenly arrive together.

And perhaps that is why smell can feel so strange compared with deliberately remembering something. If I decide right now to think about my childhood, I am searching for a memory. I am doing the work. But when a smell triggers one, I haven’t searched for anything. The memory finds me.

I can be standing in a supermarket in London and, for a moment, part of me is somewhere in Tuscany. I can smell tomato and onion and a kitchen that no longer exists in the same way can suddenly exist again. I can pass a plant and find a childhood summer hiding inside it. All because my nose recognised something before I had even decided to remember, and I think that’s incredible.

And then, inevitably, my brain went somewhere else: art. If smell can do all of this, why don’t we use it more often in art? We make things for the eyes. We make things for the ears. We make things people can touch and spaces people can physically enter. But imagine making an artwork where smell isn’t something accidental in the room, but part of the work itself. Imagine being able to trigger a memory, a place or an emotion before the person looking at the work has even consciously understood why.

So obviously I went searching again, and discovered that artists are already doing exactly this. Ernesto Neto has created immersive installations containing aromatic materials such as cloves, while Sissel Tolaas works with smell itself as an artistic material, collecting and recreating the scents of places and environments. There have even been museum exhibitions designed around experiencing artworks through scent. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.

Because maybe an artwork doesn’t have to be something you only look at. Maybe I could make something you see, hear, touch and smell. And the smell wouldn’t necessarily illustrate what you’re seeing. Maybe it could be another layer entirely: something that unlocks a memory the artwork couldn’t reach through your eyes alone.

The strange thing, of course, is that I could choose the smell, but I couldn’t choose the memory it brings back for you. The same scent that takes me somewhere beautiful could take somebody else somewhere completely different. And suddenly the person experiencing the artwork would be bringing something into it that I could never have planned.

I really like that idea.

So no, Waitrose. I am still not paying more than £9 for your melon. But apparently you’ve given me an art project, which is almost as good.