When you see, hear, touch, or taste something, sensory information first heads to the thalamus, which then sends that information to the relevant brain areas including the hippocampus for memory-related tasks and the amygdala, home to a good deal of our emotional processing. But with smells, it’s different. When it comes to olfaction, scents bypass the thalamus and go straight to the olfactory bulb which is directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus. This helps us understand why the smell of something can so immediately trigger a detailed memory or even intense emotion, and why we are focusing on this sense today.
Today’s background music is “We Know” by Ketsa and is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.