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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Scent is processed in the olfactory bulb in the brain, which bypasses the ~~hypothalamus~~ hippocampus, normally the structure in the brain which integrates memory. As a result scent, the most primitive of our senses and literally our brain “tasting” the world through our skulls, is wired directly into the evolutionarily ancient parts of our brains.
The result is that scent is a very visceral experience which is processed, stored and retrieved differently than memories of all of our other senses.
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