Was wondering if anyone on the forum has tried olfactory training for their infant as a means to develop those portions of the brain/consciousness?
Hi.
I did some training on my own. I would take pieces of paper and scent them with flavors like lemon, mint, orange, some perfumes, etc… Make sure you waft it in front of their face/nose at a safe distance so that they don’t breath in such a concentrated amount of whatever you are having them smell. I didn’t stick with it though but that is only because teaching and reading can be so time consuming with 3 children. Did it work? hm… My guess is that it helped in some way. My 2 1/2 year olds are multi-lingual and appear to process information easily. Of course I can’t say that doing olfactory training is responsible for it because we do many things. LR, LM, Lmus, piano lessons, drum lessons, Sparkabilities, Tweedlewink, Alphablocks, Signing times (American Sign Language), art, cooking (to some extent), swimming, and read approximately 8-10 books daily.
My advise would be to try it and stick with it. Do it in a fun and loving way and there is no way you can go wrong. Will you see a difference??? Hm… I don’t know.
Hope that helps.
John
Thanks very much Humbler9, and thanks also for the heads-up about Sparkabilities, Tweedlewink, Alphablocks - I hadn’t heard of any of those.
My sister is a chef so I had wanted to do something with my son as I remember growing up and her sniffing EVERYTHING before she ate it. However, the closest we got to this was letting my son have at it with my spice cabinet. We had a tall skinny cabinet that he could open and close as he desired. The caps were screwed on tightly and there was no way he could have opened them on his own (toddler). He could smell them by sniffing the caps and we’d say “This one is cinnamon. Smell the cinnamon.” etc. He fell in love with cumin though and that spice jar went everywhere with him - in his crib at naptime, in the bathtub (yes. In the bathtub) and in the car on trips to town. It was the funniest thing…his love of cumin. I frankly, don’t know if it did anything at all, but it sure gave us a lot of smiles…and weird looks in town.
That’s funny! - thanks for the story 
Nice idea to just use the spice cabinet