As I understand it, the olfactory nerve terminates near a memory center of the hippocampus, which means there are some overlapping synapses, but that still doesn’t make specific sense to why the neuronal pathways are interconnected.
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Smell is wired directly into the hippocampus/amygdala, areas of the brain responsible for emotion/fear/longterm memory. It’s a very evolutionary old wiring setup that’s conserved across many types of animals, and along with sight is the only cranial nerve not connecting in through the brainstem. The brainstem setup filters and routes things before getting to higher processing centers, whereas smell bypasses this and gets straight to it.
Smell can drive behaviors in animals and can be useful in detecting predators/mates/food. So in a way it makes sense to bypass the “router” and go straight to long term memory/fear/emotion centers to associate danger and produce a fight or flight response for example with a predator smell.
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