When Scents Go to Our Heads
摘要
Scents that we perceive with our noses are evaluated very subjectively. We associate them with pleasant memories or unpleasant experiences. And the more intense the positive or negative emotion, the more stable the storage. The things that we experience usually have a smell, even if we don’t consciously remember it. When it reappears, we also remember the experience. This is how scent preferences are formed unnoticed. The scent information and the emotions experienced with it are stored firmly as memories in the hippocampus, i.e., in the brain. They reach—unlike visual impressions—directly into this center for feeling and memory via a single switching point. Thus, a scent can trigger different effects in each person, depending on the situation in which we first encountered it. We have known about these paths of scent perception for some time.