Creating false memories through smell: the Anemoia device
Cyrus Clarke’s latest research promises to translate old photographs into bespoke fragrances, exploring the intersections between AI, synthetic memories, and the human brain.
Anemoia is a neologism, coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project that invented names for feelings that had previously gone unnamed. The term describes nostalgia for times one has never lived, often evoked through images or film. Cyrus Clarke has built a machine that tries to make you live through them.
The Anemoia device is a machine that translates photographs into fragrances using AI, using smell as a direct anatomical route to the brain’s memory and emotion centres. Whether it actually delivers a proper emotion or not is debatable, but the project is opening up a new frontier in synthetic memories.
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The device is part of a broader research by Cyrus Clarke at MIT Media Lab, whose work treats data as a medium for poetic experience, beyond mere utility. Earlier in his projects, he worked on storing information in plant DNA and translating carbon footprints into garden installations. The Anemoia device continues on the same logic: taking something intangible and giving it a physical, sensory form.
The machine works by feeding it an analogue photograph, as a vision-language model reads the image and generates a short narrative. Three physical dials, controlling perspective, time, and mood, let you shape how that narrative is framed, whose point of view, which era, and which emotional register. The dial inputs are passed onto a large language model (LLM), which produces a prompt. That prompt is then run through a curated knowledge base, mapping narrative and emotional cues to olfactory profiles, and an algorithm selects and blends up to four fragrances from a library of 44. The result is a fragrance meant to smell like the synthesised memory of a life you never had, embedded in that photograph.
The choice of using scent is effective, and scientifically grounded. Olfactory signals travel a more direct route to the brain’s limbic system than visual or auditory input, which is why a smell can trigger memory with a visceral force a photograph rarely matches. This is also why smell is so often used in immersive artistic experiences, or even simply by brands in their stores.
The harder part is the translation of mapping narratives to fragrances, as there is no established vocabulary, which was instead created by Clarke’s team at MIT and Harvard. The chain of inference is long enough that the final scent probably has little to do with the original image; however, one could argue that this is fine, as memory itself works this way, reconstructive and unreliable. The research paper published by the team positions the device as “an inquiry into memory malleability in an age of AI.”
As AI systems grow more capable of generating persuasive sensory and narrative experiences, the ethics of synthetic memory become consequential, especially in the broader landscape of technologies that manufacture emotional responses. The Anemoia device is a small, elegant prototype for a much larger and much more troubling set of possibilities.
