Did you know that smell is one of the most sensitive senses? This sense is capable of taking you back to your memories, influencing your mood and even affecting the way people work, changing their behaviour. Thus some researchers believe that smells like roses or rosemary stimulate memory retention, mint fragrance improves attention and concentration and lavender or jasmine produces a feeling of calm.

(Click to learn how to incorporate scents into your projects professionaly…)

It also has a great ability to take our memory back to events experienced in the past, as fragrances are full of emotional components. Have you ever associated a smell with childhood memories? Do you remember the smell of your grandmother’s fairy cakes just out of the oven or the smell of pencil rubbers at your school? Of course you do. The sensations they cause us are incomparable, making us return suddenly to our childhood. The original connection between a smell and an experience has a prolonged impact on the brain, in some way or other.

Smell is a powerful magician who transports you thousands of miles through all the years of your life -€ Helen Keller.

Smell is the sense that has most connection with our affective memory. In fact, 75% of our emotions are related to it, making it the most powerful sense for memory. If you want to learn how to enhance Immersive VR experiences with smells click in the link…

According to a study by Rockefeller University in New York in 1999: Human beings remember 1% of what they touch, 2% of what they hear, 5% of what they see, 15% of what they taste and 35% of what they smell. Actually, we retain over 10,000 smells while, for example, we only retain 200 colours in our memory.

All this can be explained by the fact that people have what is termed an “olfactory memory”, by means of which we link a smell with a memory or an emotion, having different impacts on us.

Marseille soap, oregano, coffee, freshly cut grass, orange blossom, red wine, caramel, thyme, mandarin, aniseed, violets…are just some of the fragrances included in the Olorama catalogue. Shall we open our memory trunk together? Discover how our Smell-O-Vision solution can help…

Has a smell ever taken you back in time to a memory from years ago? Share it with us!