Associative Learning; Smell as a None Instinctual Sense

 

Associative Learning; 

Smell as a None Instinctual Sense

An interesting feature we commonly do not think about when we talking about smell, is the fact that it is a learned sense. When we are growing up, we tend to be taught what scents are good versus bad, as opposed to knowing, instinctually, whether it is good or not. A great example of this, is the fact that we start to associate smells with certain memories, which makes us believe the smells are good. I tend to think of freshly baked cookies as a smell we associate with good memories. For me personally, I remember the smell of cookies as something that always arose in the winter, especially Christmas, so I have those warm and fuzzy Holiday feelings.

Author Deborah Green talked a lot about the association between different scents and their cultural influences.

“More intriguing, however, is R. Yohanan ben Zakkai's response, which turns bad odor into a positive” (The Aroma of Righteousness)

An interesting thing about scent being associative is the fact that it means “bad” odors can be taught to be positive. Odors we believe to be bad have been taught to us, which means that in other cultures and religions they are not a negative thing. A great example of this is how many people (like myself) hate the scent of fish, however to plenty of people if they grew up around fish they think of it as a positive scent.

One type of scent that usually tends to be associated with a religious context is incense and essential oil (think oil diffusers), because incense is used often in religious practice. Green talks about the understanding of culture scent association. She goes on to also talk about how certain scents can be associated with certain images, a point I found particularly interesting. Rabbi’s commonly use incense and smells to formulate smell association providing what could be considered a more religious rich experience. For example, if they use a scent that appears in a religious text you can associate that moment back to the current moment. 

 Overall, I believe that scent association is a really interesting topic because it means that we can be trained to like or dislike certain scents!