“It has been a long cultural belief that in order to be a reasonable or rational person you could not be dominated by a sense of smell,” says McGann. “Smell was linked to earthly animalistic tendencies.” The truth about smell, McGann says, is that the human olfactory bulb, which sends signals to other areas of a very powerful human brain to help identify scents, is quite large and similar in the number of neurons to other mammals.

Source: The human sense of smell: It’s stronger than we think – Medical Xpress