The Greatest Gift to Loved Ones might be the Shirt Off Your Back

There was an almost terrible beauty to that most memorable scene in the film Brokeback Mountain, that single moment when the gruff cowboy veneer of the Heath Ledger character cracked beneath the weight of his grief as he buried his face in the plaid shirt of his dead lover, desperate to catch his scent. (I’m by no means alone in thinking so–that shirt, worn by Jake Gyllenhaal, sold on eBay in February of 2006 for $101,100.00.)

We’ve known for some time that women are inclined to seek comfort in snuggling with the clothing of a dear-but-not-near loved one. Even Nancy Reagan admitted to sleeping with one of Ronald’s shirts during his hospitalization after the 1981 assassination attempt (see Olfactory Fact #87). But it wasn’t until December of last year that we got the data on men. According to a study published in December’s issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, fictional-cowboy-Ennis is representative of a full 2/3 of men who have cuddled with the body-scented apparel of their loved ones.

121 students at the University of Pittsburgh were asked a series of questions, such as whether they’d ever deliberately smelled or slept with the clothing of another person, or given an unlaundered article of their own clothing to a loved one, for the sole purpose of evoking memories of the wearer in the mind of the sniffer. Not only had the majority of the volunteers–male and female–performed this ritual with the apparel of a romantic partner, many had also comforted themselves by smelling the clothing worn by a child or other close relative.

These results might seem bizarre, in a culture obsessed with masking body odor with deodorants and breath mints, but the study’s lead author, Melanie Shoup, has been familiar with the phenomenon for quite some time. “When I was going through high school and college, I would wear a boyfriend’s shirt to bed when I was separated from him. And when I asked my friends, they said they had done similar things.”

The explanation is aptly tucked into a succinct nutshell by Whiff-Guy C. Russell Brumfield: “When we smell, we feel.” Our sense of smell is the most direct expressway to our brains, leaving all other senses in the dust. When the other senses (sight, sound, taste, touch) reach our receptive centers, they are first routed through the interpretive reasoning centers of the left brain, needing to be identified and assimilated before circuitously making it to the emotional centers which tell us how we feel about the information. But when the olfactory bulb detects a smell—while we are eating, drinking, making love, having an emotional experience, or simply shopping for shoes—it alerts the cerebral cortex and sends a chemical message directly into the limbic system of the right brain, before any left-brain analysis can muddy the waters.

Likewise unsurprised by the results of the study is Philip R. Muskin, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, who points to the close proximity of the olfactory bulb and the limbic system (the part of the brain responsible for processing emotion) in the most ancient region of the brain, and freely admits his standing in that 2/3 ratio of men who seek comfort in the smell of absent loved ones. “I had an aunt who wore very heavy perfume,” he says. “When she passed away, her sister gave us one of her jewelry cases. Whenever you open it, the scent of her perfume just rushes out. And for an instant, it’s like she’s there.”