Ok. Lets get real here, we all have the one perfume or cologne that reminds us about the special loved one, that ex boyfriend/girlfriend that was dumb to leave us or we were smart to dumb, or an old friend you wish you still talked to. That little pause that we take when we smell that familiar smell and we have a mini flashback. Isn't is amazing in how our olfactory cells send those signals to our brain and it becomes part of who we are, and takes a special place (no its not our heart) in our memory. I still remember how my high school crush smells like, and every time I come around another person wearing the Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce cologne I get reminded of him (not such a good thing because a lot of guys where it nowadays). But yes, I myself created a special meaning to that certain smell and now i can differentiate it from others. We never put to much important to our olfaction, because it is part of who we are and and the end of its our noses job to smell, and in most instances even taste. Thats why when we were little and got sick our moms would make us drink the awful medicine that made us want to throw up, and we would shut our noses to minimize the taste. I don't know about you, but this topic is sooooo interesting, I mean think about it! The smell of our moms cooking, the smell of rain, and the smell of our favorite fragrance all come together to interact with the social and interpersonal aspect of our selfs. We have these awesome olfactory receptors that have to decode the smell to be process by our brain. We have hundreds of them and they are all work similar to the G protein ( making connections between each other to carry a signal). Then these signals find their way though the olfactory bulbs to its target cell and from there the magic happens where the smell is distinguished because it is transported to the olfactory area in the brain in the cerebral cortex.
What really intrigues me, is the concept that we all have out own unique sense of smell. What might seem pleasant to me might not to you or vise versa. This come to show me that out sense of smell and brain work together to also provide a deeper and more complex reason why we are attracted or not to certain smells. For example I used to have iron deficiency when i was younger and my mom would make me eat beets, now every time i smell them i get disgusted, due to the fact that i associated it with a bad experience:) But here is a personal advice when you are face with an unpleasant smell: smell coffee! it filters you olfactory receptors.
You are so right! I remember the smell of that special someone, and it is hard to erase that smell from your memory. We can also link our smells to pleasant memories not only the bad ones. For example, I can never forget the smell of my grandmother's house in Mexico, because it always smells like food! Not to mention when Christmas time arrives you can relate happy memories to those special aromas of food being cooked and those delicious desserts. The brain always has something new to show us, and it is magnificent how much we can link one memory to a certain pleasant or unpleasant scent. Of course, we are all different and the special scents that I like many will not like them or they might even get disgusted by them. At the same time, let's talk about pregnant women. When my sister was pregnant there were some scents that she loved while pregnant, after she had the baby, up until this day she finds some scents sickening. I know that she used to like how vanilla candles smelled like, now when she smells something that has to do with vanilla, she starts making all these weird faces. It's interesting that at some point she enjoyed that scent but not anymore and it probably has something to do with a certain event she experienced that can be linked to the smell of vanilla. The olfactory system is very interesting!
oh girl tell me about it! I remember when i was 14 i had a crush on this guy whose cologne was soo strong that whenever he would give me a hug his scent remained on my clothing. Whenever someone i know has the same scent memories come rushing back and thats because i haven't seen this guy in years! What i think is cool is how any scent can be stored in our memory. How chemicals can automatically be associated with an image and how we felt at the moment we encountered that particular scent. Then our brain picks up all of this information and stores it until we smell the same scent later on and recall everything that was associated with it. I also wonder how all of our olfactory receptors come to be? I mean i know we have hundreds of different kinds of olfactory receptors, but how does our body know the different types of scent there is before we actually smell it?
You are so right! I remember the smell of that special someone, and it is hard to erase that smell from your memory. We can also link our smells to pleasant memories not only the bad ones. For example, I can never forget the smell of my grandmother's house in Mexico, because it always smells like food! Not to mention when Christmas time arrives you can relate happy memories to those special aromas of food being cooked and those delicious desserts. The brain always has something new to show us, and it is magnificent how much we can link one memory to a certain pleasant or unpleasant scent. Of course, we are all different and the special scents that I like many will not like them or they might even get disgusted by them. At the same time, let's talk about pregnant women. When my sister was pregnant there were some scents that she loved while pregnant, after she had the baby, up until this day she finds some scents sickening. I know that she used to like how vanilla candles smelled like, now when she smells something that has to do with vanilla, she starts making all these weird faces. It's interesting that at some point she enjoyed that scent but not anymore and it probably has something to do with a certain event she experienced that can be linked to the smell of vanilla. The olfactory system is very interesting!
ReplyDeleteoh girl tell me about it! I remember when i was 14 i had a crush on this guy whose cologne was soo strong that whenever he would give me a hug his scent remained on my clothing. Whenever someone i know has the same scent memories come rushing back and thats because i haven't seen this guy in years! What i think is cool is how any scent can be stored in our memory. How chemicals can automatically be associated with an image and how we felt at the moment we encountered that particular scent. Then our brain picks up all of this information and stores it until we smell the same scent later on and recall everything that was associated with it. I also wonder how all of our olfactory receptors come to be? I mean i know we have hundreds of different kinds of olfactory receptors, but how does our body know the different types of scent there is before we actually smell it?
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