Olfactory imagery is the ability to mentally simulate a smell without any physical odor present. Think of freshly baked bread, a campfire, or gasoline. If something flickered in your mind just now, even faintly, that was olfactory imagery at work. It is one of the least vivid forms of mental imagery most people experience, consistently ranking below visual and auditory imagery in studies, yet it activates many of the same brain regions as actually sniffing a real scent.
How It Differs From Other Mental Imagery
Most people can close their eyes and picture a red apple with relative ease. Hearing a familiar song in your head is similarly effortless. Mentally recreating a smell is harder. In large surveys comparing imagery across the senses, smell consistently scores lowest for vividness. One study of over 2,200 participants found that on a 5-point vividness scale, vision scored 3.84, audition 3.79, and olfaction just 3.17. A separate experiment using a 7-point scale found vision and touch rated around 5.5 to 5.7, while smell came in at 4.9.
Some researchers have estimated that only about one third of the general population can reliably create mental representations of odors. Earlier work even questioned whether non-experts could do it at all. The picture is more nuanced than that: many people attempting to imagine a smell show measurable behavioral changes, like faster recognition of a related scent, even when they don’t consciously experience a vivid mental odor. In other words, your brain may be doing more olfactory simulation than you realize.
What Happens in the Brain
When you imagine an odor, your brain activates the piriform cortex, the same primary sensory area that processes real smells. Brain imaging research has shown that imagined odors mimic the neural patterns of perceived odors, not just in location but in their emotional signature. Unpleasant imagined smells produce greater activity in the left frontal piriform cortex and left insula, exactly the pattern seen when people sniff something genuinely foul. Pleasant imagined smells follow the same hedonic blueprint as pleasant real ones. This overlap between imagination and perception appears across sensory modalities, but the olfactory version is notable because people often assume they “can’t” imagine smells, despite their brains clearly doing so at a neural level.
The Connection to Memory and Emotion
Smell and memory are famously intertwined. The Proust phenomenon, named after the novelist who described a flood of childhood memories triggered by the scent of a madeleine cake, refers to how random odors can unlock vivid autobiographical memories. Odor-triggered memories tend to be rated as more emotional and more vivid than memories triggered by sights or sounds.
Olfactory imagery taps into this same pathway. When researchers asked people to imagine specific scents and then report any personal memories that surfaced, the emotional profile of those memories was distinctive. Pleasant imagined smells overwhelmingly triggered happiness-related memories, about 90% of the time, similar to pleasant visual imagery. But unpleasant imagined smells diverged sharply from visual cues: they pulled up memories tied to disgust far more than sadness, anxiety, or anger. Visual imagery, by contrast, spread across a wider emotional range. This suggests olfactory imagery has a tighter, more specialized link to disgust and pleasure than other forms of mental simulation.
Physical Responses to Imagined Smells
Imagining a smell isn’t purely mental. The brain treats anticipatory sensory cues, including the smell or sight of food, as signals to prepare the body. In humans, food odors increase appetite, trigger salivation, and prompt the release of gastric acid and insulin. These responses reflect a deep connection between the brain and the digestive tract, first described by Pavlov. While most of this research focuses on actual odors, the neural overlap between real and imagined smells means that vividly picturing the aroma of your favorite meal can nudge your body toward similar preparatory responses.
How Olfactory Imagery Is Measured
The standard tool is the Vividness of Olfactory Imagery Questionnaire (VOIQ). It presents 16 items organized around four everyday situations, each with four specific smells. You read a prompt, try to imagine the smell, and rate your experience on a 1 to 5 scale:
- 1: Perfectly realistic and as vivid as the actual odor
- 2: Realistic and reasonably vivid
- 3: Moderately realistic and vivid
- 4: Vague and dim
- 5: No odor at all, you only “know” that you are thinking of the odor
Your mean score across all 16 items indicates your general olfactory imagery ability. A score close to 1 means you experience imagined smells almost as vividly as real ones. A score near 5 means you can think about a smell conceptually (you know what coffee smells like) without actually experiencing anything in your mind’s nose. Most people land somewhere in the middle.
Why Some People Are Better at It
Professional training makes a measurable difference. Wine experts and perfumers develop sharper olfactory imagery through years of deliberate practice. A sommelier evaluating a wine will visually inspect it, swirl and sniff it, then taste it, comparing each impression against a mental library of prototypical wines built over years. This process sharpens mental representations through two mechanisms. First, perceptual learning: repeated focused attention on specific scent components makes those features more distinct in memory. Second, richer semantic networks: an expert imagining a shiraz might simultaneously activate associations like “bold,” “vanilla,” “Australia,” and “red,” creating a denser web of connections that makes the mental image more accessible and detailed.
Language plays a role too. Having precise vocabulary for scent qualities directs attention to specific components, making certain odors more salient in both perception and memory. This is one reason wine professionals practice describing what they smell in specific, consistent terms. The words themselves become anchors for mental recall. Experts also routinely imagine how flavors and aromas will combine, such as when creating wine-food pairings, which exercises their olfactory imagery in practical, repeated ways.
When Olfactory Imagery Is Absent
Just as some people experience aphantasia (the inability to form visual mental images), some people report a complete inability to mentally simulate smells. This concept doesn’t yet have a widely agreed-upon clinical name, but researchers have documented it. Some studies have found that certain individuals score a flat 5 on every item of the VOIQ, meaning they can think about a smell in the abstract without experiencing any sensory echo whatsoever.
Interestingly, people are generally poor at evaluating their own smell abilities. Research has found that how vividly someone believes they can imagine smells doesn’t reliably predict how well they actually perform on odor identification or naming tasks. The subjective experience of olfactory imagery and objective olfactory performance appear to be partially independent. You might feel confident in your mental nose and still struggle to name a scent placed under it, or vice versa.