It's funny isn't it. As humans, we have very sophisticated tools for capturing and identifying images and sounds. But smells? What? Forget it :-) It's really hard to capture a smell or identify it. Smells are like magic to us. They're mysterious.
Indeed. Something about our noses being connected to a more primal part of our brains, one that doesn't deal with conscious thought but with emotion and place memory.
Which is why a smell can remind us of a certain mood, time or place, but we can't fully verbalize what it is we smell, and must thus settle for analogies like, "it smells like a log fire."
The upside is that an evil corporation like Disney can take advantage of that. Having Main Street smell like cookies or the hotels of snug log fires is essentially changing customers' moods, persuading them to buy things and to have fond memories of ludicrously overpriced hotels for years afterward.
It certainly works on me... I just realized my least favorite hotel had hallways that faintly smelled of manure.
