GAINESVILLE, Fla. – You wouldn’t microwave fish around your worst enemy — the smell lingers both in the kitchen and our memories.
It is one smell that few of us like.
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But what makes our brains decide a smell is stinky?
A new study from UF Health researchers reveals the mechanisms behind how your brain decides you dislike — even loathe — a smell.
“Your sense of smell is your most emotional sense,” said first author and graduate research fellow Sarah Sniffen (Yes, that’s her name. We checked). “Smells evoke strong, emotional memories.”
But how do odors acquire an emotional charge? One that can be used by marketers to influence our decisions, from perfume purchases to grocery store designs.
“Odors are powerful at driving emotions, and it’s long been thought that the sense of smell is just as powerful, if not more powerful, at driving an emotional response as a picture, a song or any other sensory stimulus,” said senior author Dan Wesson, Ph.D., a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics in the UF College of Medicine and interim director of the Florida Chemical Senses Institute.
But until now, researchers have puzzled over what circuitry connects the parts of the brain vital to generating an emotional response with those responsible for smell perception.
That’s where UF researchers stepped in.
The team started off with the amygdala, a brain region that curates your emotional responses to sensory stimuli. Although all our senses (sound, sight, taste, touch and smell) interact with this small part of your brain, the olfactory system takes a more direct route to it.
“The brain’s smell centers are more closely connected with emotional centers like the amygdala,” Sniffen said.
In the study, researchers looked at mice, which share neurochemical similarities with people. They can learn about odors and categorize them as good or bad.
After observing their behavior and analyzing brain activity, the team found two genetically unique brain cell types that allow odors to be assigned into a bucket of good feelings or bad feelings.
Initially, the team expected that one cell type would generate a positive emotion to an odor, and another would generate a negative emotion. Instead, the brain’s cellular organization gives the cells the capability of doing either.
“It can make an odor positive or negative to you,” Wesson said. “And it all depends upon where that cell type projects in your brain and how it engages with structures in your brain.”
But why is knowing more about how we categorize smells important?
Well, for starters, smells — and our reactions to them — are a part of life.
Sometimes, however, our reactions to them can be outsized, or take on a negative association so strong it disrupts how we live.
“We’re constantly breathing in and out, and that means that we’re constantly receiving olfactory input,” Sniffen said. “For some people, that’s fine, and it doesn’t impact their day-to-day life. They might even think, ‘Oh, odors don’t matter that much.’ But for people who have a heightened response to sensory stimuli, like those with PTSD or anxiety or autism, it’s a really important factor for their day-to-day life.”
In the future, the research could help clinicians adjust for heightened sensory response that some people struggle with in their everyday lives, Wesson added.
One example? A patient associating a clinic’s smell with transfusions that made them queasy.
Based on the receptor systems in these specific brain pathways, the team members believe they might be able to change those associations.
Potentially, medications could suppress some of these pathways’ activity to allow you to overcome stressful and aversive emotional responses.
Conversely, these pathways could be activated to restore enjoyment to things that people might have grown indifferent to — like those who lose their appetite from illness.
“Emotions in part dictate our quality of life, and we’re learning more about how they arise in our brain,” Wesson said. “Understanding more about how our surroundings can impact our feelings can help us become happier, healthier humans.”