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Scent University
Do you know there are more than 1000 different of "smell neuron receptors" in your nose?
That means we have the ability to smell and differentiate thousands of smells.
It all starts in the brain with the limbic system. Interestingly enough, that's the part of the brain that governs emotion.
Here's how it works:
Your 1,000+ olfactory receptors smell the aroma. They transmit a message to your brain (the limbic system), which catalogues it and determines what to do with it. That is when your brain decides what you just smelled. And because our sense of smell is handled by the same part of the brain that handles memory and emotion, our sense of smell and our memories and emotions are inextricably linked. That's why a smell can take us back to a time and place in our past, and it can motivate us to action.
Scent Basics
Sniff Publishing
Scent-Sational Books
We often take it for granted, but our sense of smell helps us live our lives every day. Smell can alert us, entice us, relax us - even help us make decisions. Researcher Dr. Alan Hirsch (1991) says even "concentrations so weak that they are below the threshold of consciousness, still affect peoples' moods subconsciously."
Studies are being done around the world about the relationship between our sense of smell and the emotion, memories and actions it causes.
Other studies, like a report in the Journal of Marketing (Spangenberg, Crowley and Henderson, 1996) found that scents or aromas in the retail environment "improve a customer's perception of the store, the environment and the products; and makes the customer want to revisit the store to buy something."