The brain activity associated with the memorable perfume was also greater than that produced by the visual cue of seeing the bottle of perfume.
More recently, in another study in , the researchers again found greater brain activity associated with olfactory stimuli like the smell of a rose than with visual stimuli like the sight of a rose.
Clinical case studies have also linked smells to strong negative emotions, a connection which can play a significant role in contributing to posttraumatic stress disorder. So why is this?
The majority of us clearly rely more on a sense of sight than our sense of smell day to day, so what is it about our sense of smell that works to better trigger our memory and our emotions?
The link may simply be due to the architectural layout of our brain. The process through which molecules in the air are converted by our brain into what we interpret as smells and the mechanisms our brain uses to categorize and interpret those odors is, as you have probably guessed, a complicated one. In fact, the process is so complicated that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in to the researchers Richard Axel and Linda Buck for their work in decoding it. When we come into contact with an odor, or molecules from volatile substances drifting through the air, the neurons that make up your olfactory receptor cells send a signal to a part of your brain called the olfactory bulb.
Axel and Buck found roughly 1, genes played a role in coding for different types of olfactory receptors, each of which focus on a small subset of odors. But scents bypass the thalamus and reach the amygdala and the hippocampus in a "synapse or two," he said.
That results in an intimate connection between emotions, memories and scents. This is why memories triggered by scents as opposed to other senses are "experienced as more emotional and more evocative," said Rachel Herz, an adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University in Rhode Island and author of the book " The Scent of Desire " Harper Perennial, A familiar but long-forgotten scent can even bring people to tears, she added.
Scents are "really special" because "they can bring back memories that might otherwise never be recalled," Herz said. By comparison, the everyday sight of familiar people and places won't prompt you to remember very specific memories. For example, walking into your living room is a repeated stimuli, something you do over and over again, so the action is unlikely to recall a specific moment that took place in that room.
On the flip side, "if there's a smell that's connected to something that happened way in your past and you never run into that smell again, you may never remember what that thing was," Herz added.
Typically, when a person smells something that's connected to a meaningful event in their past, they will first have an emotional response to the sensation and then a memory might follow. Research has shown that loss of olfactory function can be an indicator of something far more serious.
You can read more about other conditions that can cause smell and taste disorders here. Psychology and Smell. Home Psychology and Smell. The Theory and Some Science:. Smell and Emotion. Researchers find receptors that help determine how likes, dislikes from sniffing are encoded in the brain.
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