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New research shows your sense of smell can lift your spirits, make you feel sexy—even help you lose weight Think of your favourite scent: say, freshly ground coffee, biscuits baking, evergreen trees in the mountains, or roses from the garden. Now try to describe that smell. Nearly impossible, isn’t it? As tough as they are to capture in words, odours are indelibly linked with memories, like the familiar combination of suntan lotion and wet seaweed that brings back childhood summers by the sea. As Helen Keller, who had neither sight nor hearing, said, “Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived.”
Smell is so mysterious that its mechanisms baffled scientists for decades. Then, after 15 years of intensive research, two US scientists made a stunning discovery that won them the 2004 Nobel Prize in medicine. Richard Axel and Linda Buck found the roughly 1,000 genes responsible for our ability to recognise and remember some 10,000 different odours. Their studies help us understand the complex process that enables us to tell the difference between the sweet scent of a hyacinth and the clean, citrusy spritz of lemon.
Smells can lift our spirits, calm us, make us feel sexy; they may even help us lose weight. Some odours can repel us too: they tell us that milk has gone sour or meat rancid. They can even be life-saving: we smell smoke long before seeing fire. Our sense of smell is incredibly complex. It’s also our most primitive sense—the one we employ immediately (an hour after birth, newborns can recognise their mothers by smell).
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