The Effect of Fragrances on Our Brain: A Cultural Take on Scents

 

Scents affect us deeply and more than we think they do. The scents we experience in our childhood leave an indelible mark in our minds.

What is in a Scent?

The season's first rain gushes down. The Earth emits the lovely fragrance of wet soil. We are enamoured and find ourselves longing for all things good. A long-forgotten scent suddenly evokes a memory of a place or someone. An exquisitely rare yet familiar scent makes us realise that a milky pine has bloomed. How many times a day does a scent evoke an emotion in us? Remember how aromas deeply stimulate memories and emotions.

The Scents and Our Lives

Unlike other sensory organs, the nose provides a highly nuanced experience that cannot be easily recorded, defined, or deciphered. Of course, we can always write down those experiences but could end up missing the essence.

Scents surround us all the time but we cannot record them for posterity.
Hence, we make perfumes, scented candles, and potpourri to capture and re-experience the fragrances that help refresh our memories and dreams.

Why We Use Perfumes

Perfumes evolved because we wished to secure the scents that charmed us once. Still, can the subtle scent of a grass field or a newborn’s palm be reproduced as a perfume? Or the pleasant aroma of sun-dried cotton clothes? Many such endearing scents will remain uncaptured even if we encapsulate all the floral and plant-based fragrances into cute little glass bottles.

Scents are as crucial to what we are, as intensely as visuals and audio, but we remain oblivious to the impact. Scents are too private an experience that we will not even discuss with others how important they are to us.

Right from the Womb

Smells follow us right from the womb. Smell scientists say that the olfactory sense is fully developed for a child inside the mother's womb. When no other senses are fully formed, the baby begins experiencing smells. 

Until the age of 10, the olfactory sense dominates. At a later stage, sadly or fortunately one could not say because a heightened sensitivity to smells could be tricky, sight takes over.

The smells we experience in childhood are the strongest of all. We will never encounter odours with similar intensity in our later lives. The childhood scent memories form the reference for all our olfactory perceptions.

Fragrances and Brain

How do fragrances affect the brain and human perception? Do the smells of childhood have an impact on how we understand things as adults?

The same fragrance evokes different emotions in different people.

Inhaled fragrances reach the limbic part of the brain: the Hippocampus, Thalamus, Amygdala, Hypothalamus, and Basal Ganglia. The limbic system is inside the brain right beneath the cerebral cortex and above the brainstem. These are the places where our senses connect with memories and emotions and where stress is managed.

Smell is Taste

When we chew food, some food molecules spread to the nasal epithelium. This leads us to think that we are experiencing the flavour of that food on our tongue. What we sense is the smell of food. Essentially, flavour is nothing but smell. While eating, if we shut our nostrils using our fingers, we will not experience the taste of the food.

Smells and Colours

People often tend to associate colours with smells. For example, the citrus fragrance is associated with the colours, green, yellow, and orange.

How Fragrances Change Us

Aromas are considered mildly beneficial to distract the mind from pain, depression, and anxiety, and to reduce hypertension.

Orange flower oil is a stress-abetting essential oil. Rose and Jasmine are known to boost the reproductive system. Sage, Hop, and Fennel oils contain a specific kind of oestrogen and can impact sexual behaviour, lactation and menstruation.

Fragrances: Burning Incense

We burn incense at home, inside shops, restaurants, and places of worship. The practice helps mask the hovering unpleasant smells - the smell of food, sweat, burning fuel, cigarettes or alcohol.

Agarbatti, Dhoop, Oudh, and Bakhoor. The smoke from many of these incenses, though pleasant to inhale, could create respiratory or other health problems, if inhaled frequently. At moderate levels and from occasional use, they are beneficial and could reduce stress and improve positive emotions.

Smell Experiments

AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision were two movie experiments in which scents corresponding to the mood of movie scenes were infused into the movie theatre, to enhance the cinematic experience.

The stories of movies are not pleasant, always. Naturally, the experiment failed. Who would have wanted to go to a movie theatre on a relaxed weekend to watch a movie and get hit on the head by the smell of tar, tobacco, or blood? The brain's inability to transition from one smell to another in seconds or minutes messed up the experience. The result was confusion and discomfort. 

Even the pleasant smells contribute only to confusion in such a predicament. Olfactory fatigue is another problem when bombarded with too many odours.

Scent Branding

Companies nowadays practise scent branding, filling their offices or commercial spaces with signature scents, believing this would make the customers emotionally attached to the company and memorise that connection in future. For example, the company, Nose or Scent, operates on this presumption. This company helps other companies undertake olfactory brand building. For Nike’s brand building, the company claims it chose the odour of “a soccer cleat in grass and dirt” among others.

Ageing and Scents

The sense of smell weakens with age. This is more about us beginning to neglect the smells than a weakening of the olfactory nerves. Owing to the intensity of other sensory experiences accumulated over a lifetime, the brain tends to receive the scents with less attention as we age. By being mindful of the smells we experience in our routine life, we can keep the sense of smell sharp and not diminish a wonderful sensory experience.

References

The Limbic System, The University of Queensland, Australia website.

The Lingering Reek of Smell-O-Vision, Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, February 5, 2006, Los Angeles Times.

What the Nose Knows, Colleen Walsh, February 27, 2020, The Harvard Gazette.