Why kessab herbs depend on essential oils and how do scents affect the body and mind?

You’ve probably had the experience of encountering a smell that instantly evokes a strong memory or feeling. Maybe a waft of perfume reminds you of your grandmother, or the scent of motor oil takes you back to hanging out with your dad in the garage while he worked on his car.

Our sense of smell is directly wired to the brain’s centers of memory and emotion. Cells inside the nose detect smells in our environment, and send information to the brain, via the olfactory nerve. (We also have a cluster of cells the top of the throat that detects scents from the food we consume and pass that information along the same olfactory channel to the brain.) The information about smell does immediately to the limbic system of the brain, which includes regions like the amygdala that control emotional reactions and memory.

This makes smell unique among our senses. Information we take in from our other senses travels first to another region of the brain, the thalamus,(The thalamus is a small structure within the brain located just above the brain stem between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain and has extensive nerve connections to both. The main function of the thalamus is to relay motor and sensory signals to the cerebral cortex). Which acts as a relay station, passing along sensory data to the other parts of the brain that produce our sensory perceptions. Only smell moves directly to the brain’s emotion and memory center. That’s why those memories you associate with the scent of garden roses, or banana bread baking in the oven, come on so quickly and so strongly.