More on Scent and Emotional Bonding

New research at Edinburgh University may offer valuable clues about the role of scent in the way humans create emotional connections with one another, and also shed light on the causes of autism and anxiety disorders.
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Smell + Sound = SMOUND

Like so many discoveries, the possible link between our senses of smell and sound came to Dr. Daniel Wesson purely by accident.
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When we Smell, we Feel

“Mama’s perfume…is a scent that is softly shocking and deeply moving. A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet, and something else - something spicy, almost biting and exotic. Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only know the smell made me cry.”
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You May Unring the Bell but You Can’t Unsniff the Smell

You may occasionally forget a face, or a favorite old tune, but - whether or not you are consciously aware of it - you will almost certainly never forget a smell. It’s a phenomenon the Whiff-Guys have dubbed Endorphin Branding™.
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Big Nose = Big Heart?

Inspired by the works of such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus, Rice University sociochemist Denise Chen decided to investigate the link between scent and emotion for herself. “The olfactory brain overlaps with the emotional brain, and is believed to have contributed to its evolution,” says Chen. “They share close functional and anatomical connections.”
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The War of the Noses

Those two separate nostrils aren’t just there so your nose can keep up aesthetically with your eyes and ears. According to a study from Rice University, the dual olfactory orifices–like most things–thrive on competition. When exposed separately to different odors, the nostrils do not smell a blend but rather an alternating sample of each individual aroma.

This “nostril rivalry,” as dubbed by the study published in Current Biology, is similar to what happens when the eyes are presented with different images, or the ears with different tones.
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There IS a Cure for the Summertime Blues

Along with the joys of summer, unfortunately, comes the stifling heat and painful sunburns and pesky mosquitoes. Tom Havran, product developer for Aura Cacia, offers some ingenious aromatherapeutic tips to make your summer a little sweeter:

Beat the heat even when there’s nary an electrical outlet for an air conditioner in sight. The Read more

How DO You Smell?

We live in an extremely smelly world. Even with our relatively unimpressive olfactory equipment, the human animal is capable of detecting around 10,000 distinct odors. And it goes without saying that we don’t encounter these odors one at a time, as we might in a controlled laboratory experiment. In the real world, we move through constantly shifting and drifting plumes of odor molecules in ever-varying sequences and combinations. How, then, can we–and our fellow creatures–detect and encode this ever-present, ever-changing information in such seemingly impossible quantities?
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The Consistently Senseless Layout of Scent Sensors

“It had been thought that the layout of the olfactory bulb was variable from individual to individual, but followed a chemotopic order where cells handling similar odor responses are near each other,” says Markus Meister, Read more

The Similar Smell of Mice and Men

Whiff! readers know that our individual positive or negative reaction to a given odor is largely influenced by our own culture and personal experience. Germans, for instance, are partial to the aromas of sausage and bleu cheese but dislike that of cypress oil and fermented soybean, while the Read more

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