Alex Wiltschko

So those cells get subject to a lot of environmental, you know, change.

And so they do die and the brain replenishes them.

And so this is why if you lose your sense of smell, you're waiting like two weeks for it to start to come back.

That's the transit time for neurons to come and regenerate the ones that are lost.

It's happening continuously though.

Then number two is like, why is it so emotional?

And why is it also so tied to memory?

And that's because it's directly jacked into your centers of emotion and your centers of memory.

So every other sense before they can create memories or can create emotions have to go through a bunch of steps.

And one of the way stations in the brain is called the thalamus.

Smell is so old evolutionarily, it skips that.

So it goes directly to the signal once it's kind of collected outside of the nose, inside of the skull in a place called the olfactory bulb.

It goes right to the amygdala, which is the seat of emotion.

And it also forks and goes at the same time right to the hippocampus, which is the seat of memory formation.

So smell is privileged anatomically in terms of how it's wired in your brain.

And that is why it can create these immediate emotions, these immediate memories, and why you smell something once, you know, associate it with a memory.

20 years later, it's instant recall, unavoidable.

You can't even fight it.

And that's because of how it's wired in your brain.

And then can we tap into that?