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Other Things You Didn't Know About Your Sense Of Smell

by — Last updated: 2023-03-31 in Ear, Nose, Throat, and Dental problems

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Which one is your favorite smell? Is it the smell of flowers, eggs and bacon cooking or fresh coffee? Whichever it is, you can detect it thanks to your sense of smell. Learn more about this sense and the mechanisms our body uses to identify odors.

Smell disorders

Can you imagine a world without odors? People suffering from anosmia are not able to sense smell.This condition is usually caused by a head trauma that damages the olfactory neurons or a severe sinus illness, but can also be caused by nose abnormalities, inflammation of the nasal passages due to high fever, some antibiotics, alcoholism and drug addiction, some neurodegenerative diseases and other mental problems. 

In anosmia, not only the sense of smell is altered but also the sense of taste.

Smell and taste are intimately linked and the combination of what we perceive with each one of them is what creates the flavors we can taste in food. 

Whenever the sense of smell is disrupted, for example when going through a cold, the only perception the brain gets from food is the one detected by our taste buds, which is very simple, compared to what our nose can detect. This is the reason why food seems to be flavorless.

It smells like home

Have you noticed that when you detect a certain smell you tend to remember situations, people or things related to that particular odor? For example, does the smell of freshly baked cookies remind you of your grandma’s house? Or does the smell of specific man cologne make you think of your boyfriend and the day you two met?

This relation between smell and feelings or memories has a scientific explanation and it has to do with the fact that many of the areas that are involved in smell are also part of the limbic system.

The limbic system is in charge of emotional behavior and memory processes, so it is the one that makes us develop feelings towards situations we live, people we meet and objects we own. It is not strange then that certain smells make us recall childhood memories or wake up feelings inside us that we had not felt in a long time.

See Also: Nasal septum, Deviation and Septoplasty

Senses make us aware of the world we live in, but I believe that the most impressive one is the sense of smell. It plays a major role during our growth and development as kids; the smell of pheromones attracts us to our significant other and not somebody else; and it can even save us from threats like fires or gas leaks.

We could say that an odorless world would certainly lack of excitement. Think about this and next time, don’t take your sense of smell for granted.