Wake up and smell the roses

If you are like me, chances are that the first time you take notice of your sense of smell is when you get home in the evening and start preparing your evening meal, although in my own case I have to admit that even then I sometimes have to be reminded before I take any notice.

The reason why we do not engage our sense of smell is that our modern day environment leaves us with very little to enjoy nose wise. Most of us are challenged since our early morning drive to work by smelly exhaust fumes and general suburban smog.
Scientific discoveries however indicate that our sense of smell is probably one of the senses that have the strongest links to memory, and that smell, together with hearing, touch and taste are important components of our ability to recall events or information.

According to an article in ScienceDaily, Dr Jay Gottfried explained that: "...rather than clumping together the sights, sounds and smells of a memory into one bit of the brain, the memory is distributed across different areas and can be re-awakened through just one of our sensory channels. This mechanism would allow human beings more flexibility in retrieving their memories."

By waking up our senses we are in fact gearing our memory and increasing our brain activity. Fortunately our daily morning routines provide ample opportunity to wake up in the true sense, and a simple way is to choose any of the activities we automatically go through every morning before starting our day. A practice like shaving gives a man a lot of opportunity for indulgent sensory delight, from the smell of the shaving cream to the bite of his after shave, and women have an even wider choice of wake-up routines to choose from.

Just a 10 minute indulgence of our senses can make a world of difference in how we start our day. Once we start our day with our senses in high gear we will find that our minds generally follow the trend set by our senses and we start to see the world much clearer. As if by magic we notice more color and feel more alive. By waking up our senses we open a whole new world of discovery, and all it takes is notice.

In a sense this kind of awakening is a lot like life itself where everything tends to go by pretty much without any excitement until we actually start to notice. When we do we suddenly find answers to questions that have haunted us for months, and solutions to problems we thought were impossible to solve. With the latest scientific research supporting the value of our senses we can no longer ignore that fact that our senses are more than just vestiges of our evolutionary past, they actually make sense!