


What makes it so widely relatable a phenomenon is because the drink includes spices like cinnamon, clove and nutmeg that we are more exposed to during the holidays, particularly in western culture. On some level, the same thing may happen to us when we drink pumpkin spice lattes. McGann recalls a famous scene in Proust’s masterpiece, “Remembrance Of Things Past”, where the narrator eats a madeleine cookie and it’s as if he’s literally transported back to another time and place. “Smell anatomically has a more direct connection to classical memory regions in the brain.” A Portal To Happier Times “From there it goes to the amygdala, which controls emotion, and to the hippocampal formation, the entorhinal cortex,” explains McGann. Instead smell goes straight to the olfactory bulb. In this way, smell is totally unique from all other senses, which pass first through the thalamus, a sort of relay station of the brain.

So, your brain is putting all of these things together.”Īnd your brain is also assembling memories and emotions. Then there’s an additional sense of pungency, the burning feeling of pepper from hot wings. But there also additional components: the feeling of creaminess, which really contributes to a perception of flavor your sense of touch. “About 70 percent of our of taste is retronasal smell and then maybe 25 percent of it is true taste: salty, bitter, sweet. “Most of what we refer to colloquially as taste is actually smell,” says McGann.
