How Many Relationships Can Your Nose Take Credit For?

More than you might think

Hiya!

If I were to rank my five main senses in order of highest sensitivity, they’d be: Touch, Sight, Hearing, Taste, then Smell. My ability to smell isn’t terrible, but it’s definitely not superb. It’s never bothered me, though, because smell always felt like the least important sense we have. Then again, maybe I thought that because I lack it.

Still, the more I’ve learned, the more I second-guess my assumptions. Especially after I wrote about some research showing our noses play a much more significant role than we thought, including with love and attraction. Now a new study indicates romance isn’t the only relationship influenced by smell.

How Smell Works in the Brain

While I used to view our sense of smell as the least important of our senses, I now believe it to be our wisest. Sight, Hearing, and Touch may have more obvious roles regarding how we experience life, but Scent is the quiet one who whispers ancient wisdom to us from the recesses of our minds.

In fact, we process scent entirely differently than we do our other dominant senses. I discuss it in further detail in the newsletter I linked to in the intro, but let me share the essence.

The area in our brain responsible for our ability to smell is called the olfactory system, which consists of eight parts within our throat, nose, and brain that together register more than 1 trillion scents. I say Scent is the wisest of our senses because it’s part of one of the oldest areas of our brain — the limbic system, which is home to our survival instincts, memories, and emotions.

This is important because the other senses are sent to the limbic system from elsewhere to process and relay the information to other brain regions. Whereas the olfactory system is a step ahead by already being entwined with the limbic system from the get-go.

That “Bad Vibe” Might Be A Bad Smell

Another way Scent is the wisest of the senses is that it performs its most crucial role beneath our awareness. While busy conversing with someone, our sense of smell processes the other person’s emotions through chemosignals.