A woman approached and sat in the table nearby me (a few feet away), and I was aroused by her smell as soon as it hit my nose. She wasn’t my type, maybe a 4-5 tops on my looks meter. I found her voice attractive, but it was the smell that aroused me. Was it something to do with pheromones or can someone be aroused by someone else with a similar scent to a past girlfriend or a particular brand of perfume?
Maybe she smelled like chicken salad and you were hungry?
Nice guess but it wasn’t in a restaurant or at meal time.
Not necessarily pheromones (IIRC, there isn’t consensus on whether pheromones really are a “thing” for humans). But the sense of smelling is very strongly connected to memories. The olfactory cortex is in the limbic system and amygdala and is direct, immediate and"primitive" for lack of a better word.
That’s your answer – the sense of smell goes straight to our lizard brain, bypassing all the higher functions. Maybe the smell triggered a powerfully sexy memory or reminded you of a person or place that you found deeply sensual.
Out of curiosity, what sort of smell was it? Perfume or something else like cinnamon or lemon or gee, I dunno, wood smoke or the like?
What they said. I once had a boyfriend who used a particular skin oil. Every so often I’ll catch a whiff of it on someone else, and yowza.
There was probably enough perfume to make me wonder if it was something other than pheromones, although I guess they put pheromones in perfume nowadays for that effect. Or maybe I could just tell that she was ovulating or horny by her scent? I dunno.
The olfactory nerve is the only sense organ that goes from the outside world directly into the brain, bypassing all other modulators, dampers, filters, etc. As a result, it can trigger a wide range of powerful emotions and responses. Scent molecules hit the cribriform plate in the nasal cavities and trigger nerves that feed right into the CNS for a nice, atavistic experience at times.
Other times, you just smell something stinky . . .
Embarrassingly enough I had a lizard brain reaction to my ex-wife’s perfume once. Heart pounding in my throat, unable to speak… bleech. This was after she destroyed my life and stomped on my soul. Sometimes you can’t control it.
Obligatory Buffy quote:
[QUOTE=Rupert Giles]
Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a… it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It’s-it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible. It should be, um, smelly.
[/QUOTE]