When you see something, the signal travels from your eyes through the thalamus before reaching the parts of your brain that process emotion and memory. Same with hearing. Same with touch. The thalamus acts as a relay station, a checkpoint between sensation and meaning.
Smell skips it entirely.
Olfactory signals travel from the nose to the olfactory bulb, and from there they reach the amygdala and related memory structures in as few as two to three synaptic steps. No relay. No checkpoint. The shortest sensory pathway in the brain, straight to the regions that process what something means to you emotionally.
This was confirmed in humans using specialised diffusion-weighted MRI in 2025. Researchers mapped direct monosynaptic connections between the olfactory bulb and multiple subregions of the amygdala. The architecture has been suspected for a long time. Now it has been seen.
This is why a scent can stop you before you have processed what it is. The feeling arrives before the thought.
At Amatrius, this is where our interest starts. Not with what fragrance does to a mood. With why it can do it at all.
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Yang, Q., Zhou, G., Sheriff, A., et al. (2025). The human olfactory amygdala: anatomical connections between the olfactory bulb and amygdala subregions. Imaging Neuroscience. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00571
Wilson DA, Sullivan RM. (2023). Neuroscience: Building better cognition through smell. Current Biology, 23;33(20):R1049-R1051. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.09.030.
