Scent Psychology
Powerful
We often think of the most vital of our five senses being sight and hearing, but did you know that smell is the most powerful?
Smelling a fragrance can trigger a treasured memory and provoke enjoyable thoughts.
So how does this happen?
Smell and Memory
The sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses.
Walking through a meadow, the aroma of the wild flowers can remind you of childhood picnics.
Or the delicious scent of baking bread wafting from a bakery door as you walk along the high street can transport you back to a Parisian cafe you visited a few years ago. This can often happen spontaneously, with a smell acting as a trigger in recalling a long-forgotten event or experience.
Without getting too technical, scent is a chemical particle that floats in through the nose, to the brain's olfactory bulbs, then directly to the brain’s limbic system, which is the centre of our memories and emotions.
When we smell something for the first time, a link is stored in the limbic system between that smell and whatever we were experiencing at the time – the colours, place, person, occasion and sounds, and the feelings we have about those things. Whenever we then smell it again, it instantly elicits memories and the same emotion as the first time, even decades later and sometimes not even consciously.
Emotional Connection
Smell is also highly emotive. One of the reasons for this can be based on our survival instinct, as smell, responsible for detecting food, mates and danger is our oldest sense to have evolved.
Many of the connections we’ve stored are linked to childhood as this is the first time we came across certain smells – Christmas smells, baking, fires, crayons and an array of others can cause us to feel nostalgic and content.
The smell of freshly cut grass, can make us drift back to summertime childhood memories stirring happy, carefree feelings.
Impact of Smell Loss
I can remember whilst flying home from Australia last year (2020) to pass the long flight, one of the many programmes I watched was a documentary about the INXS singer, Michael Hutchence. During this, they talked about how he received a punch from a Danish taxi driver that caused two areas of brain damage and deprived him of his sense of smell. This brought on a personality change that resulted in depression and his increasingly self-destructive behaviour, ending with his suicide in 1997.
I was fascinated by this as didn’t realise losing your sense of smell could cause such a downward spiral. Reading up on this later however, I learnt that our sense of smell clearly plays an important part in our psychological make-up, in addition to it being one of the five ways in which we connect with the world around us; its absence can have a profound impact. People who lose their sense of smell (known as anosmia) often talk of feeling isolated and cut-off from the world around them, and experiencing a ‘blunting’ of the emotions. Loss of smell can affect the ability to form and maintain close personal relationships and can lead to depression.
Going back to the points made about the strong connection between smell and memory, it can be seen that losing your sense of smell can result in the loss of an important sentimental pathway to memories.
“So, we need to celebrate our sense of smell and never take it for granted. Smell the roses, smell the coffee - smell whatever makes you happy!”
