Aromas and Sensations

Do you know the sensation of passing by a pastry shop when automatically will come to memory different memories of childhood, like of when you went with your parents or grandparents to buy desserts for Sunday or for some party? The sensations that make you activate your memory are the aromas of vanilla and cinnamon that float in the air.

A cologne or body lotion of an especially pleasant aroma will cause an immediate certain type of attraction. And what do you say of the aroma of certain foods? A tempting scent immediately wakes up our appetite.

There is still a lot to know about how the sense of smell works exactly and why the scents can stimulate emotions or body reactions. Many of the theories about this are mere speculations. Let us imagine it in the following way: when lighting a vaporizing lamp the essential oil evaporates together with the water and the molecules of the aroma spread into the air and they arrive at your nose. The sense of smell possesses a great number of receivers, each one for a certain type of aromatic molecule. At the moment that a molecule impacts on "its" receiver a chemical reaction begins that generates some electrical impulses that reach the brain, and in this action the brain will take charge of processing all the information.

From the nose to the brain

It is also possible that the scent is so delicate that it touches the limit of what our consciousness can recognize, but even in these cases it can have a very strong effect.

The sense of Smell: Our more primitive sense

The sense of smell is the oldest of our senses. In that it is the first one that appears to be at the evolutionary level, it is something that we can check at any moment with any baby, as it is guided by the sense of smell before any other sense.

"To have a good sense of smell"

On the contrary to most of the other mammals, the human beings have reduced in importance the sense of smell to a secondary level and we govern ourselves mainly for what we see. If we do an analysis of a secondary nature, that is while we define colours by their names (yellow, red, etc.) and we have notes to classify the sounds (do, re, etc.), with scents we only identify them by means of appearances (scent of roses, sweet, fresh, resin, etc.).