Alex Wiltschko

And can you tap into that and basically transport somebody back to a moment?

So the first is olfactory receptors do, we call it turnover, meaning the olfactory sensory neurons that are like the cells at the top, inside at the top of your nose, that actually do the sensing.

They don't live forever because they're indirect.

It's your brain directly touching the world, right?

So like your brain leaves your skull.

That is what smell is.

So when you smell a rose, your brain is literally touching the rose, right?

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.