The Nose Knows

I want to give you a link to an article, but a subscription is required to read it on the interwebs. I found it in a book, The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2007, and (unlike most of the drivel in the book) this article lives up to billing.

It's entitled "The Olfactory Lives of Primates", and it has some trivia in it that are not so trivial. For example, you might not have known that men (yes, human men) are attracted, albeit subconsciously, to ovulating women... more specifically, to the armpit-sweat of ovulating women. Gross and true.

Even cooler: in the middle of the 20th century, neurologists were trying to figure out which part of the brain does what. One group found that an interconnected network of small regions (amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, etc) is vital to mammals' sense of smell, so they named it the rhinencephalon - literally, "nose brain". Another group, however, designed their study differently, finding that the same network is responsible for the emotions.

Which is it? Smells or emotions? The answer is "yes".

Your sense of smell is inexorably linked to your emotions.

Does anyone else suddenly have the overwhelming desire to pop a breath-mint?


Sapolsky, R. "The Olfactory Lives of Primates". Virginia Quarterly Review. Spring 2006, p86-90.