The Nose Knows How to Keep You Feeling Your Best!

Out of all of our senses, the sense of smell is intricately hooked up to our memories.  When you smell a particular scent, a vivid recollection of a place or a time comes to mind and you automatically bring back to life the emotions associated with that event.

In science speak, your olfactory nerve carries messages picked up by our sense of smell, and sends them right into our brain.  Interesting enough, these receptors sit right by a region known as our limbic system, which houses structures responsible for both emotional reactions (amygdala) and memory storage (hippocampus).

Because of their close proximity, the sense of smell can activate this region, and both store new memories and the emotions associated with them or elicit old ones.

How many times have you smelled something and thought of an experience you had as a child?  Grandma’s cookies or your mother’s perfume… even if you can’t recall the details, the scent is saved in your brain and the emotions associated with that memory will automatically resurface.

Imagine your brain as the control center, with several workers. When you smell something, the first worker in the olfactory center takes the scent and brings it straight to the office of the limbic system for sorting. From there, the information is categorized and filed for later so that your brain can call upon it in the future.  Whether that scent was part of an uplifting and wonderful experience, or it was traumatic, your brain needs to streamline what is coming in, and stores it accordingly.

Beyond memory recall, your sense of smell is linked directly to survival and serves as a guide to help keep you safe.  The same way animals can literally smell fear, or the malintent of a potential home invader, when you smell smoke, you know something is burning and you best get to safety.

Your sense of smell is powerful and it has the capacity to shift your mood in a matter of seconds.