Why We Have a Sense of Smell

Your sense of smell allows you to pick up information about the world around you.

It is an important sense that can alert us to danger such as smelling a gas leak, a fire, or rotten food. This is why smell is considered as vital for human survival.

Aside from playing a crucial role in protecting us from harm, our sense of smell also affects the way in which we taste!

Researchers have now discovered that our ability to taste is largely influenced by our sense of smell (Spence, 2015). This is why foods can become flavourless when you have a cold or a blocked nose, because smell plays an important role in enjoying the tasting experiences of food and drink.

Smelling also helps to inform our emotional experience of something or recall a specific memory from our lives. For example, smelling clove or cinnamon can take you right back to a Christmas-time memory.

Our sense of smell is always working to provide us with information, helping us to stay healthy through attracting and repelling things for our survival, as well as enriching our lives with experiences and memories (more of which we will discuss later).

How Our Sense of Smell Works

When you first inhale a smell, the odour molecules from that smell travel up your nose, sending signals to your brain.

The part of the brain which receives these signals is called the limbic system, which is home to your emotions and memories.

Why Do Scents Trigger Memories and Emotions?

Your brain has already been exposed to thousands of different scent molecules throughout your life. As a result, your brain has learnt how to associate these scent molecules with previous experiences. For example, if you had sun cream rubbed onto your body when you were on holiday, your brain makes a record of the smell. This means that the next time you smell sun cream, your brain associates it with that memory of being on holiday.

This is why most people tend to associate sun cream with holidays and feelings of happiness, because their brain has associated that smell with how they felt during prior exposure to the scent. It is a learned response of the brain.

How Do We Come to Like or Dislike a Smell?

When we smell something, our brain detects the odour and immediately starts to judge whether we like or dislike it.

There is much debate surrounding theories of how our brain can tell if a smell is either good or bad:

• Some believe that smell perception is related to our memories. If a smell triggers a pleasant memory, then it is likely to be a smell you will like. If a smell triggers an unpleasant memory or experience, you are more likely to dislike it. This is the theory that smell is a learned response governed by individual and personal life experience. This explains why you may love the smell of roses whilst your best friend hates it, because she associates something negative with the smell.
• Others argue that our brains are naturally hard-wired to like or dislike a smell. As an example, you may have never come into contact with the smell of rotting food before, but regardless your body is programmed to dislike the smell in order to protect us from getting ill, so that when you smell it for the first time you are automatically programmed to dislike it. This may have something to do with how our individual noses respond to the molecular density or make up of a fragrance or smell. How far apart molecules are within a scent versus how compact they are, may influence smell perception also.

At ARDERE, we believe that our perception of smell is based upon a combination of human instinct and personal learned experiences, which ultimately decides whether we like or dislike a smell.

We have some all-round crowd-pleasing smells in our candle Self-discovery collection, check them out now!

 

 

References:

Spence, C. (2015). ‘Just How Much of What We Taste Derives from the Sense of Smell’, Flavour, 4 (30), pp. 1-10, BioMed Central [Online]. Available at: https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0040-2 (Accessed: 4 September 2018).