ReminiSCENT
Have you ever wanted your very own time machine? Well, we are born with something pretty close - our sense of smell!
You know the feeling: you catch a sniff of a particular scent on the wind and suddenly you’re thrown back through time. Maybe it’s the smell of popcorn reminding you of sleepovers with your BFF, the smell of freshly cut grass tricking you into thinking for a second that it’s the summer holidays, or the smell of burnt bread reminding you of that time you forgot about the pizza in the oven and burnt it to a crisp… and it even conjures the same butterflies of panic you felt then!
There is a good reason for that.
For mammals (and that includes us humans) the olfactory sense, or ‘sense of smell’, was one of the first senses to evolve (along with taste). Aroma molecules exist not only in the air we breathe but also in water, and they played a vital role in providing early organisms living in the ocean (where life first evolved) with information regarding food, mates and threats. As life evolved on land, so too did our sense of smell, along with how animals lived and behaved.
Your olfactory lobe, the area of your brain responsible for your sense of smell, is associated with two other regions of the brain - the amygdala and hippocampus - that are connected with emotion, memory and learning. And our sense of smell is unique in this way; other senses are processed in a different region of the brain (the thalamus).
One recent study found that the hippocampus is also connected to a region of the brain known as the anterior olfactory nucleus (AON). Not only is the AON important for smell, it has also been found to be important for bringing together information regarding space and time. This enables your brain to recall the ‘where’ and ‘when’ that you associate with the smell. So that smell of popcorn doesn’t just remind you of sleepovers with your BFF, but can trigger a specific memory of that first time, of whose house you were at and how long ago it was. And even though you might smell popcorn a hundred times after that, thanks to something called ‘resistance to interference’ you’ll probably always associate popcorn with that awesome night, the first time you smelled it. Because not only do we tend to remember smells we associate with a positive experience for longer, we also tend to form a greater association with a smell the first time we smell it.
So next time you you head off to do something awesome (go on a holiday somewhere, hang-out with a new friend, go out on a date) stop to smell the roses (or something else new to you; a different flower, or perfume, or herbs and spices… you get the idea) and maybe you can create your very own time machine, and make it an experience you can relive over and over again.
WHAT YOU KNOW NOW
For us mammals our sense of smell and taste evolved before other senses like sight
Aroma molecules in water provided early marine organisms with information regarding food, mates and threats
Different parts of the brain are important for each of the five senses
The part of your brain responsible for your sense of smell is connected to the part of your brain responsible for memory, emotion and learning
References:
The importance of the olfactory sense in the human behaviour and evolution