>>11398855It's not a daily experience, and - in that respect - no common. And like I said, it tends to be trigger by very particular smell which are strongly associated with specific experiences. Common smells that you experience often and can tie to your daily experience will not really trigger anything, because the experiential data is too vast (it is common). There have only been a handful of times where completely randomly I've caught a familiar scent and associated it with a clear memory. Other instances, like the books I mentioned, or old deodorants, etc. I can smell and be met with a vague recollection of the time and setting those things are associated with.
I imagine it's similar to people that experience shivers with some music. It's occasional, and the people that report it tend to 1) enjoy music and attribute emotional weight to it, and 2) listen to a lot of
music.To answer your question then: it's not that you CAN'T experience this... because it's not a given that everyone will experience it: you might not be a very sentimental person, meaning that 1) you don't give much emotional weight to your lived experiences, and 2) you don't keep sentimental objects around which you treasure, or you don't return to long-forgotten places. Maybe you have only a few relationships, or the relationships you do have have been stable throughout you life, like if you've had a partner for X no. of years that always wears the same perfume. There are and number of circumstantial reasons why you might not have stumbled across a particularly evocative scent, invoking and particular memory. But you should most certainly be able to pick a scent off of old artefacts/memorabilia and at least be reminded (if somewhat vaguely) of past experiences.
