Column for life: You can smell happiness – how nice! | life & knowledge

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What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.

BILD columnist Louis Hagen, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.

★★★

What an embarrassing sentence: “The whole hallway smells like you, but thank God it smells good. I don’t have to see you to know you were there,” said my neighbor Elena, who brings her daughter Adriana to the elementary school across the street at a quarter to eight every day. We meet sometimes, sometimes just our smells, in the case of mine…

We cannot smell away like we can hear away. I can’t smell you, says the vernacular. In terms of evolutionary history, smell is considered to be the oldest human sense.

“What you smell unconsciously has great power over us,” says Bettina Pause, Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Düsseldorf in the Sunday newspaper FAS. “Humans can smell even better than many animals.”

BILD columnist Louis Hagen

Photo: Wolf Lux

And what are we smelling now? Take a sniff: there are daffodils in the air and mowed lawns. Tulips give off a sweet scent, dandelions, daisies and cherries bloom – more than 300 smells flow through spring, and our noses greedily suck them in without us knowing what smells so nice.

▶︎ What we smell can change our lives. Scientists speak of “social scents”. Everyone emits scent molecules all the time. The sense of smell has the task of protecting us from danger. The smell came first. We subconsciously look for partners who suit us because they smell good. In the end, the sense of smell decides – again unconsciously, of course – with which partner we would like to have children and with which we would rather not.

As the French romantic Alfred de Musset put it:

Scents bear more than one resemblance to love, and some people even believe that love is just a scent itself; it is true that the flower from which it springs is the most beautiful in creation.

The scientist Bettina Pause says it more soberly, but no less beautifully: “We know that emotional states can be communicated through body odor. When someone is afraid or stressed, they send out certain chemical signals. And there is evidence that it is the same when someone is happy.”

So you can smell happiness. How nice!

Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittler-shop.de.

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