Scent and Memory

Of all of the five senses, the one that is sometimes most overlooked is the sense of smell. Our noses are not only important to balance the rest of our features in our face, but also the main avenue for our sense of smell.

Have you ever been in the line at the grocery store and someone walks by you who wears a cologne or perfume that your first girlfriend or boyfriend wore, and you can’t help but smile because that smell immediately takes you back to those amazing yet perhaps awkward times? Or how about catching a smell that has the same scent of the home you first grew up in as a child? Why are certain scents so connected to nostalgia when the other senses don’t have the same impact?

Studies suggest that it is because the place in the brain that produces our sense of smell (olfactory cortex) is the most closely located to the hippocampus, the segment of our brain that stores all of our long term episodic memories. This means that the memories that lie the most dormant, or the ones you do not use every day, are most easily activated by the sense of smell.

Whether your sense of smell brings back good or memories, protect the most prominent object that links you to your memories. Just like your sense of smell, Nosesecret does a great job of joining the look you had, to the look you have today, and finally to the look that you desire.

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/11/09/smell-an...