The effect of odors
Certain odors act like a time machine. In a matter of seconds, they catapult you back into the past, awakening memories and bringing long-forgotten moments back to life. Somehow magical. A few odor molecules get lost in our nostrils, hit the olfactory mucosa at the upper end of the nasal cavity and BÄMM starts the journey.
Recently I visited a friend jottwede in the green bacon belt of Berlin. Where wild boars ravage the front gardens at night and drive few cars, the world smells differently than around the Gedächtniskirche. When I arrived at his house after a long walk, he was just finished mowing the lawn. He stood sweaty beside the raked grasshopper and I stood by him. The freshly mown grass smelled intensively of fresh green and suddenly, as if a hidden door had opened in my brain, I was in the garden of my parents' house. I was six years old and watched my father mowing the lawn, every detail was obvious. And just as suddenly as she had opened, the door in my head also closed again and I was back in my friend's garden.
I had experienced similar moments before and always these memory flashes were triggered by a smell. When I got home in the evening, I started searching the net for a name for this phenomenon and quickly landed at the so-called?Proust effect?. The French author Marcel Proust describes in his work "In Search of Lost Time" how a man dices a pastry into his tea. The resulting odor releases his childhood memories, which were previously hidden in his subconscious.
Okay, now I have a name for the phenomenon. What was missing was the explanation of how the Proust effect comes about. I make it unscientifically short: the visual, auditory, tactile and gustatory sensory impressions, ie seeing, hearing, touch and taste, are filtered and processed in the cerebral cortex. The olfactory perceptions, that is, smells, however, rush unrestrained and unfiltered directly into the limbic system. This biologically oldest part of the human brain is responsible for the processing of emotions and the control of shoots. This explanation would be considered inadequate in a medical paper. For me as a layperson, she goes on to explain why certain odors immediately trigger chains of association and awaken memories or desires.
I recall a biology lesson in my schooldays when our teacher, Mr. Stakenkötter (after all, some people in Westphalia are really called), asked us which of our senses we would most likely forgo. The class voted and the nose won. So of course, of course lost, because most would have dispensed with the sense of smell. At that time I decided to taste, food was never so important to me. Mr. Stakenkötter then explained to us that tasting and smelling are in a kind of symbiotic relationship. People whose sense of smell is defective, are also severely limited in the perception of different tastes. The Swiss among you already know that. In Switzerland, the word? Gout? for both smell and taste. Accordingly, the Swiss can gout a cheese fondue with "gusto", while we Banausen it just taste and smell. Actually smell more. Which brings us a seamless transition to the theme of "unpleasant odors? to have.
Do not smell someone? Being able to do that is far more than a trite phrase. In fact, the evolution of a human's odor is one of the most important criteria in mate choice. The pheromones (fragrances) secreted by the human body contain information about its genetic material. The more different the genetic material of another from our own, the better we can "smell it". The reason for this: Various genetic material also means a different immune system. Potential offspring thus benefit from a genetic mix of two different immune systems and are thus better prepared for disease. In addition, this "odor instinct" protects? against incest, which often leads to genetic defects in the offspring. That, of course, explains why I never could smell my sister so well? ? our genetic material is just too similar.
Just at that moment a smell from the kitchen blows over: My fiancee (whose genome must be very different from mine, as well as I can smell it) sizzles something in the pan. My limbic system is shouting loudly about HUNGER, overriding the rest of my brain, who actually wanted to put in a tip here. Maybe, next time?
