An associated benefit to helping people meet their body care needs has always been learning about different smells. What smells good, what smells bad and what turns your stomach in the ”I’m-gonna-throw-up-on-my-shoes” kinda way. (Those mixes definitely didn’t make it into the Lovefresh bunch…)
This has always led me to believe that there is way more to scents than just the yummy factor, so I delved into it a bit and here’s what I found.
All of us go through life building a huge repertoire of memories. These memories can calm, motivate, or energize us and in times of crisis serve as judgement calls – “does this smell like its gone bad??”
Now what can the trigger be for all of this? Well as is scientifically accepted, it’s the nose (and more localized the nose hairs – so not cool to talk about nose hairs, but alas…). Our noses (even if you have the worst sense of smell in the world), detect hundreds of smells a day using the olfactory bulb and are closely related to the amygdala which processes emotions. (A large job I might add.) In this way we associate everything to smell.
For example, and this is also a handy tip, if you really need to memorize something – say for an exam or a meeting- do so while you smell something particularly appealing (think bright citrus scents which coincidentally also aid in mental stimulation) and later on when you smell that scent you will find it easier to recall the information.
So here’s the scenario. If you and I sat down, and I brought out a tub of peanut butter, there could be a world of difference between our two responses. You might be reminded of how you hated peanut butter your whole life because someone had played a cruel joke on you involving smearing some on your chair in the 5th grade, whereas I might just be happily sitting there remembering my mama’s warm peanut butter cookies. Or if you (in revenge) brought out a tub of KFC chicken, I would be forced to leave the table because I would be salivating profusely while remembering the days of eating without recourse (those days are long gone.)
So I pose to you: scent memory – fun, friend, or foe?
