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Interlude XXXV - The Invisible Signal: Smell, Chemistry, and the Social Brain
Before language. Before gesture. Before touch.
There was chemistry.
In this interlude of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey turns toward the most ancient and least acknowledged channel of human communication: olfaction. Long treated as peripheral to cognition, the sense of smell is revealed here as a primary architect of emotion, memory, attraction, and social awareness.
Drawing on neuroscience and human ethology, this episode explores how olfactory signals bypass the thalamus and move directly into the amygdala and hippocampus, shaping feeling and meaning before conscious thought…
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