Strange discovery of childhood sense of smell

The smells first felt from childhood have a special meaning, recalling an object, a memory. There is a hypothesis to explain why.

Do you know why any smell can remind you of some recollection of childhood? That's because an odor you are exposed to for the first time in your life is often associated with a prioritized subject in the brain.

The smell you get for the first time in your life is often associated with a prioritized object in your brain.

Yaara Yeshurun ​​and colleagues at the Rehovot Institute of Science, Israel, show volunteers to experiment with an object like a chair or a pencil, and emit a certain odor or sound. An hour and a half later, people showed them the same thing with a different smell or sound to 'crush' the original smell and sound.

A week later, the researchers showed the volunteers the above objects and asked what odor or sound they attached to the object, while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging. .

It seems that all volunteers said they paid the most attention to the first smell. This is entirely consistent with the images obtained when scanning the brain, represented by a picture typical of the operation of the graph (hippocampus). This image does not appear when volunteers smell the second odor, or they come into contact with the original sound, not the smell.

Yeshurun ​​concludes that the brain stores images of special activity into memory, associated with the sensation of an object's smell, even one event, and these two parallel recordings are most likely the impression of childhood.

The brain evolves and retains these priority memories, especially it makes us feel the danger associated with an unpleasant odor.