The Smell Factor

The nose knows. Smells are far more important than one can imagine. A single smell can conjure up long-forgotten memories or emotions by placing you back in time for that brief moment to the scene where you first encountered that smell. The smell of your mother’s secret family Italian tomato pasta sauce cooking downstairs below as the warm aromas reach your room, wafting into your nose as you breathe in softly awaking you with a smile. Pasta dinner is in the near future. Or a time when a cologne passes your nose as you walk along the sidewalk reminding you of a past love. Suddenly, the smell passes your nose, you breathe in as your eyes close for a split second as his face appears before you. The smell leaves your nose, while the vision stays perfectly clear each time you close your eyes for the next few moments. You feel a tug at your heartstrings...

Nearly all the flavor of food derives from its aroma. When we have a cold and our noses are stuffed, the flavor of food becomes not only odorless, but tasteless. Our taste buds sense sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, yet our sense of smell takes in the aromas as our brain registers them assisting our taste buds. Supposedly, the average human nose recognizes as many as 10,000 separate odors.

Animals depend on their sense of smell to survive using it to seek out food and to find a mate. The basics in life: food and love. It doesn’t get much better than that, righ? Animals and insects have pheromones, which are chemicals produced by an organism signaling them to behave a particular way during mating season. These chemicals can be the whiff of an airborne chemical from a female mouse spurring a male to mate. Human mothers can recognize their babies by smell, and newborns recognize their mothers in the same way. Pretty amazing.

Speculation says humans, much like that of other animals, use their sense of smell for social and sexual information. Research continues to see if humans hold these receptors. Humans are tougher than insects and rodents to decipher due to our ornery and independent nature. We are the toughest to work with since the meanings for our actions are never clear. Humans have so much in their everyday life that affects their behavior. Factors include our environment and upbringing.

Smells are a vital aspects in our lives. Smells not only have personal connotation but they can protect us if we smell a gas leak or smoke. We use deodorant for both health and odor suppressing reasons. While we also use cologne and perfume to create our own signature smell each person has their own particular and unique scent. These scents can either make you more attracted to someone or will have you building an invisible fence so you do not have to get too close. There is something about your man’s smell how the wiff of it can drive you crazy, make your heart skin-a-beat even if he is not in the room, maybe you have a hoodie of his you borrowed, his smell all over the fabric making it seem as though he is in the room with you.

Never take smells for granted.