When a you remember a smell, where is that memory coming from? Is it stored in your nose?

Question

How come when I think of the dead body that I saw, I can still remember the way it smelled?**this question was asked by my companion who is sitting next to me, not myself** {Not that that matters, just clarifying for the record that I've neither seen nor smelled a dead body}

Answer 1

the psych courses I have done discuss the fact that smell is one of the big memory areas.
When you smell baking - it may trigger happy memories, or if it is related to something bad - like being burnt by the oven - it could make you uneasy.
memory is in the brain - the nose is just a sensory transmitter - brain does all the clever work

Answer 2

Smell happens when the chemicals in the air land on nerves in yoru nose and they send a signal to the brain, and that signal depends on the exact chemical that lands on it (it is much more sensitive than any machine that has ever been built to analyse chemicals in laboratories by the way)

That signal to the brain is stored in the same memory that you store sounds, touch and sights, which are also just electrical signals being sent form sensors, and it is not stored in your nose at all.

When the brain recieves the signals from your nose it looks in the memory to "remeber" where it last had that signal.

Important ones that made a big impact on you are really close to the front of your memeory as the brain thinks it needs to be well aware for the future.

Answer 3

When you smell something(smell only) for the first time....you store it in your short -term memory,in your cerebellum.This fades after a while.When there is something to associate that smell with,like a dead body,your body stores it in the hippocampus,with something disgusting,like the dead body.Or something pleasant,like blue cheese and smelly feet create different feelings in different people.After a few years of constant exposure to these types of smell,it is stored away permanently...e.g:smell of vomit makes YOU vomit as well....

Answer 4

The smell sense is the most stored in our memory so that in our brains.

Answer 5

Because our olafactory systems have memory cells thusly allowing us to recall smells. It was used long ago when we were primates to help us in keeping ourselves protected from those things which were not good to eat.....or to get away from predators. Now it's apparently good for remembering dead bodies. good luck dead person smeller. lol

Answer 6

we have a sense of smell just like other creatures, but it is usually overwhelmed by our other senses, such as our highly developed eyesight. every once in a while something will really make an impression through this sense, rather than through the others.

Answer 7

i don't know the scientific reason, but i'd say it's just like remembering what something looks like or tastes like, it's part of a memory, for example, i remember a teacher i had and remember the exact way she smelt, it's just part of that memory

Answer 8

The brain, it memorising things so when you know exaclty what it smelly like its not like your acutally smelling it gain but your thinking of the smell.

Answer 9

Your brain controls this. sort of like scent memory