Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Of all of your bodily senses, there’s perhaps none more powerful than smell. Catch a whiff of cologne or perfume from an old flame. Or the pages of a book from when you first fell in love with reading. Or freshly cut grass on a Saturday morning. All of a sudden, you’re taken back to the time and place where you first experienced and knew that scent for the first time.
That’s because your olfactory bulb, the part of your brain that processes smell, is very close to the region responsible for memory. That means it’s incredibly powerful for triggering strong emotions and memories from long in your past.
As powerful as it is, though, smell is a sense that has long perplexed—and even eluded—scientists. We still don’t have a complete understanding of why molecules create the smells that they do. So, unlike sights and sounds, we’ve been unable to digitize smells. That means being able to literally turn it into a digital format with numbers.