The nose doesn’t lie.
When you smell something it passes straight into the brain without any intermediate processing. Unlike vision or hearing, olfaction is unmediated. It’s the real thing, and it works both ways: just as a scent on the air can take us back in time instantaneously and so often overwhelmingly as to be disorienting, so memory can recall smells we have conciously forgotten…

Comrades, Michael Bywater. Granta | 104