“The more you use, the stronger it gets.” Dawn Goldworm, co-founder of “olfactive branding company” 12.29 “Think about your brand in a new way by considering how scent can play a role in making a more powerful impression on your customers.” “In an age where it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand out in a crowded market, you must differentiate your brand emotionally and memorably,” they wrote. Scent branding is in vogue across a range of industries, including hotels that often pump their signature scents into rooms and lobbies, noted the authors of 2018 Harvard Business Review article.

Today, the aroma of a home or office is big business. Several years ago, Harvard scientist David Edwards worked on a new technology that would allow iPhones to share scents as well as photos and texts. And then there was AromaRama or Smell-O-Vision, brainchildren of the film industry of the 1950s that infused movie theaters with appropriate odors in an attempt pull viewers deeper into a story - and the most recent update, the decade-old 4DX system, which incorporates special effects into movie theaters, such as shaking seats, wind, rain, as well as smells. Think of the cologne or perfume worn by a former flame. Instead of tasting the flavor, he said, “all you can taste is sweet.”įor decades individuals and businesses have explored ways to harness the evocative power of smell. When you are eating all the beautiful, complicated flavors … they are all smell.” Murthy said you can test that theory by pinching your nose when eating something such as vanilla or chocolate ice cream. When you chew, molecules in the food, he said, “make their way back retro-nasally to your nasal epithelium,” meaning that essentially, “all of what you consider flavor is smell. “The olfactory signals very quickly get to the limbic system,” Murthy said.īut, as with Proust, taste plays a role, too, said Murthy, whose lab explores the neural and algorithmic basis of odor-guided behaviors in terrestrial animals. Odors take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory.

Smells are handled by the olfactory bulb, the structure in the front of the brain that sends information to the other areas of the body’s central command for further processing. “Smell and emotion are stored as one memory.” Dawn Goldworm, co-founder of “olfactive branding company” 12.29 Murthy walked the audience through the science early in the panel discussion “Olfaction in Science and Society,” sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Harvard Brain Science Initiative. Smell and memory seem to be so closely linked because of the brain’s anatomy, said Harvard’s Venkatesh Murthy, Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor and chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. This should not be surprising, as neuroscience makes clear. For French author Marcel Proust, who penned the legendary lines in his 1913 novel, “ À la recherche du temps perdu,” it was the soupçon of cake in tea that sent his mind reeling.īut according to a biologist and an olfactory branding specialist Wednesday, it was the nose that was really at work. It’s a seminal passage in literature, so famous in fact, that it has its own name: the Proustian moment - a sensory experience that triggers a rush of memories often long past, or even seemingly forgotten. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.” “… I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine.

Making memories of us meaning