Can You Train Your Nose?

Sarah Bellum says:

I’ve always been a fan of fragrance and have even  aspired to a career as a perfumer myself.  Just imagine – being one of the special few who actually get to CREATE new scents – how exciting! Almost anyone can reproduce a visual memory (like a favorite place) or a sound memory (like humming a catchy tune). But it takes a special kind of person to actually “remember” smells in the way perfumers do.

Sadly, the so-called “experts” has always told me that you have to BORN with a “good nose” to be able to detect and remember all the thousands of scents you’d have to know to create new perfumes.   Not everyone, they say,  has the right olfactory equipment to be a perfumer. Could this be true? Could I be banished from my career of choice by bad nasal genetics?

Passion for perfume

The answer, according to Science Daily, can be found in a recent study conducted by researchers at the Laboratoire Neurosciences Sensorielles Comportement Cognition and the Institut des Neurosciences de Grenoble. Researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to look inside the brains of professional and student perfumers.  They found that the degree of brain activation depends on the subject’s level of expertise and (here’s the important part) this capacity develops with experience.

Follow the link above to learn how you can activate your brain (specifically the primary olfactory cortex) just by remembering a smell.  And the  good news for ME is: I can still be a perfumer!!