How Smell Guides Our Inner World

I was hoping to read an article on how smells guide our bio-chemistry, but it’s more a historical piece.

Sense of smell strikes me as the sense with the greatest discrepency between individuals. Some are incredibly attuned, others are completely oblivious to it.

Clearly the piece is written by somebody very passionate about their own sense of smell.

The sense oft smell must be one of the oldest senses, think of small entities swimming in some "primordial" soup looking for nutritious stuff.

What I found most interesting to learn about our sense of smell some years ago is that "We Smell With Every Organ In Our Body, Not Just Our Noses" cf. https://www.ravishly.com/2014/10/16/smell-nose-olfactory-rec...

Two anecdotes to contribute here: First, due to allergic rhinitis, my sense of smell was pretty muted for much of my life, only in the last few years when I developed a taste for wines did I start making a serious effort to manage that better and develop my sens of smell. It's been quite a pleasure to do.

Secondly, a friend of mine keeps (kept?) drawers full of jars with different things in them that had specific smells associated with them. In the same way someone might keep a photo album, she kept a collection of smells which would vividly recall a memory for her. To this day I still find that absolutely fascinating that she was able to do that so reliably.

The contrast of her experiences with smell vs mine was quite astounding to me and something I've thought about a lot since meeting her a few years ago.

I used to get migraines and sometimes they would be triggered by smells.

Thankfully I have thad a migraine in over 10 years.

smell isn’t integrated in the thalamus with other sensory streams, it does something else entirely

> “The most crucial finding of this data set is really to appreciate that there are differences in olfactory perception,”

Honestly, I'm shocked to learn that. Shocked!