Cooking Up Memories is a Northbridge Signature Program rooted in nostalgic tastes and smells. . We know that retrieving pleasant memories, such as singing, dancing and cooking, can bring back happy feelings and emotions, and that is at the core of what the program achieves. Cooking Up Memories focuses on taste and smell to retrieve and recreate treasured memories from the past and the pleasant feelings and emotions that come with them.
Our sense of smell is located in the same part of our brain that effects emotions, memory and creativity. It allows you to identify food, mates and danger as well as pleasures like perfume and flowers or nature. In what is known as a Proustian Memory, a smell from your distant past can unleash a flood of memories that are so intense and striking, they seem real. Although not as powerful as smell, taste is still an important part of Cooking Up Memories. Your sense of taste will change as you age but all taste buds recognize four basic kinds of tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter.
Working together the senses of taste and smell provide a powerful and therapeutic tool for transporting residents back in time where they are able to reminisce about past memories and emotions in a failure free environment.
