Interestingly, smell has the ability to elicit a strong emotional response without the recollection of an explicit memory. Sometimes it’s just the feeling we recall.

When you encounter a smell tied to something meaningful in your past, you first feel the emotion followed by a cognitive recognition, information that was stored in your brain. Often that happens quickly, but sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, and other times it can happen after some extensive searching in your brain, Herz says.

— Cognitive neuroscientist Rachel Herz talks to Prevention. Read more in The Fascinating Reason Certain Smells Trigger Powerful and Emotional Memories.

Averaged together, however, the results showed that overall the circadian clock does affect smell, and that the times when the children’s noses were most sensitive tended to correspond to the evening, with an average peak of 9 p.m.

[...] Smell was at its lowest ebb, intriguingly, from about 2 a.m. to 10 a.m.

— Read more at The Circadian Clock in Your Nose at The New York Times.