Aromatherapy Essentials

Introduction

The five most used senses that humans are born with are sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Each of these five senses provides information to our brains that is received, processed and stored for future reference in our memories. Scientists learn more and more about how the five senses work as time goes by but they still don’t know everything that there is to know.

Of theses five senses that we are born with, the one that is usually least developed is our sense of smell and it is the sense that scientists seem to really know the very least about. They know how it works, of course, but they really don’t understand how smells, scents, aromas and odors are processed in our brains or what reactions that they cause.

Each of these five senses are directly connected to our memory. You can bring up a picture in your mind and remember very precise details about a situation or an event that has occurred in the past. You can actually remember the scene, how people looked when they smiled, what they were wearing. You can recall the sound of their voices. You can remember how a fresh ocean breeze felt on your skin. You can recall how special dishes that your mother prepared tasted. The one thing that you cannot recall is how things smelled. You can remember that you liked the smell...or disliked it. You can remember whether it was pleasant or unpleasant but you cannot reproduce the smell in your mind from your memory the way that sights, sounds, tastes and touch can be recalled.

But when you are exposed to a smell that you have experienced before, it will bring great detail of the situation to the forefront of your mind. For example, the smell of movie theater popcorn can cause you to remember in great detail a childhood experience of going to a movie with your mother and father. The smell of the ocean can cause you to remember every detail of a summer vacation when you were ten-years-old. The sense of smell is possibly the one that is most closely linked to memory.

Physically humans are not nearly adept at smelling as other animals. A dog, for example, has about one million smell cells in each nostril and each one is one hundred times larger than smell cells in human nostrils. Dogs probably think humans are ‘smell challenged’.

Smells affect emotions. There isn’t much controversy about that. Smells also cause chemical reactions in our brains that can affect our physical health. There is some controversy about that but the controversy centers around ‘how’ and not ‘if’. There is no doubt that there is a mind/body connection and that the sense of smell has a great deal to do with the health and well-being of both.

The nose knows!

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