Do smells influence our emotions? The explanations of a neuropsychologist

Europe 1 4:42 p.m., September 15, 2021

"We are very influenced by our vision and our hearing, but we have also inherited a sense of smell that we are not necessarily aware of": this is, in essence, the message of Sylvie Chokron, neuropsychologist and guest of Europe 1, Wednesday noon, in

with Mélanie Gomez and Julia Vignali.

The specialist dissects the links between smells and emotions and how the former can directly act on the latter to modify our perception of the world.

>> Find all the shows of Mélanie Gomez and Julia Vignali from 11 am to 12:30 pm on Europe 1 in replay and in podcast here

First element to take into account: "We know that without our knowledge, we will often memorize the smells associated with memories", describes Sylvie Chokron.

"The first explanation is that the region that handles odors in the brain is very close to the circuit that handles emotions and memory. If you go back, for example, to the school of your childhood, nothing but the The smell of chalk or a wet board brings up many memories. When you encode a memory, it seems that you automatically encode the smell that goes with it. "

Odors perceived without the subject's knowledge

According to the neuropsychologist, "the brain builds a repertoire of odors" and will detect new smells to "process them completely automatically, without our knowledge". Moreover, if we say that there are people who have noses or flair, "it could very well be that it is not intuition, but that it is really smells that we perceive in our knowledge and which will modify our behavior, scare us away or automatically attract us ".

Flee or attract: odors therefore have the power to modify our behavior, without our knowing it.

"Researchers showed spectators more or less frightening videos. And while they were watching these videos, they took their sweat and they also asked them how much fear they were. They realized that they weren't. only the more we are afraid, the more we secrete these odors, but these smells are all the more marked when we have been afraid. So there is really a smell of fear, secreted without our knowledge. "

The usefulness of lavender

Conversely, there would be something which would approach the smell of happiness: "The same team of researchers took subjects who were in a situation of pleasure. They took these secretions, they made them smell. completely naive subjects and there, they observed manifestations of joy and happiness. It could very well be that here too, we are unwittingly attracted by skin secretions, sweating, happy people. "

Abstract smells? Not totally, according to Sylvie Chokron, who identifies ... lavender as a pleasant smell: "It could be that it has a chemical composition that has the power to reassure us and to inhibit in our brain the regions that will trigger the The researchers asked participants to play and while they played they were sprayed with either lavender or cloves or nothing at all. participants were more generous, more confident, etc. " Could lavender soon be used to pacify social relationships?