The Power of Smell. How the Ability to Recognize Scents Shapes Memory, Predicts Illnesses, and Influences Our Lives

Smell has the strongest influence on our emotions compared to other senses and controls our behavior more than we realize. Neuroscientist, professor of anatomy at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières (Canada) Johannes Frasnelli clearly explains how smell training affects the human brain, how anxiety and depression change our sense of smell, how the loss of smell is related to neurodegenerative diseases, and also touches on a number of other intriguing topics – not only from the fields of neurobiology, anatomy, and psychology but also from the realm of food preferences of people in different countries, revealing an intriguing world of scents and sensations.
«Although we are always smelling – in fact, we perceive scents even before birth – and although smell has a direct “wired” connection to the limbic system, and thus to our emotional world, most people consider smell to be the least significant of the five senses. However, the impairment of smell not only reduces quality of life; it can also be the first symptom of various diseases. Thus, heightened attention to smell is quite justified. We can sensitize our sense of smell, even improve it, and in this way train our brain. The most wonderful thing is that we don’t need expensive devices for this; we just need to pay more attention to our sense of smell and talk to each other more often about scents.» (Johannes Frasnelli)