Odors are able to connect people in a way other senses don’t. They evoke deep memories and are able to remind us of things we had not thought of in a long time. Odors . It is often joked that people can smell fear on other people but what if it was actually true? In a study done by Akerl et al., women wore under arm pads while they watched a horror movie. Afterwards, the women were asked to smell different pads and were able to identify which pads were worn during the fear inducing trials. The women, quite literally, were able to smell fear. This was once a trait scientists thought animals had and humans lacked. This study sought to disprove that in an interesting way.
In an article by Grella et al., it says, “We hypothesized that odor may shift the organization of salient or fearful memories such that when paired with an odor at the time of encoding, they are delayed in the de-contextualization process that occurs across time, and re-trieval may still rely on the HPC, where memories are imbued with contextually rich information, even at remote timepoints. (2021, 150) This is extremely interesting because it possibly shows the way in which the brain responds to odor and fear as a pair. This is also shown In another study done by Sarah Jessen, where infants showed a decreased neural response to fear after smelling their mother’s odor.
Works Cited
Ackerl K, Atzmueller M, Grammer K. The Scent of Fear. Neuro Endocrinol Lett. 2002
Apr;23(2):79-84. PMID: 12011790.
Jessen, Sarah. Maternal odor reduces the neural response to fearful faces in human
infants. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Volume 45. 2020. 100858.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2020.100858.
Grella, S.L., Fortin, A.H., McKissick, O.P., Leblanc, H., & Ramirez, S. (2020). Odor
modulates the temporal dynamics of fear memory consolidation. Learning &
memory, 27 4, 150-163 .
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