In a recent article by Neurohacks Psychologist Tom Stafford found on BBC’s web site, the relationship between smell and memory is explored. Stafford walks through the history and background our oldest and arguably the most powerful sense from its origin to the technical differences between the processing of olfactory information versus other senses. We find that an interesting sidebar is the fact that we can differentiate thousands of smells but don’t have names for them. One example, Stafford points out, is that “while we have names for colors which mean nothing but the color, such as “red”, we generally only have names for smells which mean the thing that produces the smell, such as “cedar”, “coconut” or “fresh bread”.” Now we know why it is so hard to adequately describe the library of scents that we produce for our clients.
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