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"When the brain's smell center (the olfactory bulb) detects something--during eating, sex, an emotional encounter, a stroll through the park--it signals the cerebral cortex and sends a message straight into the limbic system, a mysterious, ancient, and intensely emotional section of our brain in which we fee, lust, and invent. Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation.
A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them. What you see and hear may quickly fade into the compost heap of short-term memory, but, as Edwin T. Morris points out in Fragrance, 'there is almost no short-term memory with odors.' It's all long term."
from "Natural History of the Senses" by Diane Ackerman |
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