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Browsing by tag: rachel herz

Some level of emotional response

Posted by Robin on 18 January 2024 2 Comments

Anytime we smell anything, it elicits some level of emotional response, whether it be just a vague, “I kind of like this, I kind of don’t like this.” And it can go as deep as triggering the traumatic flashback for someone with PTSD, to bringing us to a state of sublime calm and joy or ecstasy or whatever the case might be just as a function of what that particular scent means to us as a function of our prior association with it and the emotion that is grounded to it.

— Read more in Ten Minutes with Rachel Herz: On Smell at MoMA.

Sometimes it’s just the feeling we recall

Posted by Robin on 1 September 2021 2 Comments

Interestingly, smell has the ability to elicit a strong emotional response without the recollection of an explicit memory. Sometimes it’s just the feeling we recall.

When you encounter a smell tied to something meaningful in your past, you first feel the emotion followed by a cognitive recognition, information that was stored in your brain. Often that happens quickly, but sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, and other times it can happen after some extensive searching in your brain, Herz says.

— Cognitive neuroscientist Rachel Herz talks to Prevention. Read more in The Fascinating Reason Certain Smells Trigger Powerful and Emotional Memories.

An average peak of 9 pm

Posted by Robin on 9 November 2017 Leave a Comment

Averaged together, however, the results showed that overall the circadian clock does affect smell, and that the times when the children’s noses were most sensitive tended to correspond to the evening, with an average peak of 9 p.m.

[...] Smell was at its lowest ebb, intriguingly, from about 2 a.m. to 10 a.m.

— Read more at The Circadian Clock in Your Nose at The New York Times.

The kind of stink that takes home the gold

Posted by Robin on 26 March 2014 6 Comments

It's not enough that the sneakers repel me. They should make me feel faint, or wish I had a clothespin or a gas mask nearby. That's the kind of stink that takes home the gold.

— Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell, on judging the 39th Odor-Eaters Rotten Sneaker Contest. This year's winner is 12-year-old Jordan Armstrong, who apparently never takes her sneakers off, except when she needs to enter them in a contest. Read more at New Mexico girl wins National Rotten Sneaker Contest.

The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell by Rachel Herz

Posted by Marcello on 2 December 2007 5 Comments

The Scent of Desire by Rachel HerzI've been looking forward to Rachel Herz' book for a long time. I found out about her work on the psychology of smell several years ago, and although I never got around to reading her academic work (published in reputable journals like the American Journal of Psychology and Chemical Senses), I did keep track of her frequent interviews in the popular media. The Scent of Desire is her first book, and tackles a wide range of questions on the relation between emotion and olfaction. From odor-emotional conditioning and olfactive memory to cultural differences in odor familiarity, Herz explains how odors influence our social relationships and mental health.

Smell is both a detector of danger, and a vehicle of desire. As the title suggests, The Scent of Desire is primarily focused on the latter. The author's basic premise is that emotional experience and the sense of smell are fundamentally interconnected…

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