Tip-of-the-Nose Phenomenon

The tip-of-the-nose phenomenon is the common experience of smelling a familiar odor, recognizing that it is familiar and knowing roughly what kind of thing it belongs to, yet being unable to retrieve its specific name. First described in a 1977 study by Harry Lawless and Trygve Engen, it is considered the olfactory counterpart of the better known tip-of-the-tongue state for words, and reflects the broader finding that people are often surprisingly poor at naming even very common odors, correctly identifying only about half of them without being offered candidate names to choose from. The phenomenon suggests that recognition memory for smells and the verbal labels attached to them are stored or retrieved somewhat separately from each other.