Anatomy of Limbic System

The role of the Hippocampus is the formation of your long-term memories.

When we feel frightened or pleased by something then the Amygdala is triggered. When we meet
someone we are attracted to or begin the rituals of courtship this area runs into overdrive!
Whats interesting is this part of the brain helps us to recall details of situations too. The crime you
witnessed in the supermarket or what your love was wearing the first time you set eyes on them;
these heightened emotional responses are also responsible fear conditioning and hence, the
dreadful replay of these responses are responsible for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Mammillary body is involved with recognition. The degeneration of this part of the brain is
associated with some strains of dementia.
A separate part of the system is the Limbic lobe which can be separated into three parts:

Parahippocampal gyrus area of the brain is involved in both learning and also spatial
awareness. A preliminary study in October 2011 into sexual differences in brain function found
that when watched on an MRI the right parahippocampal gyrus was more activated in mens
thought processing.
Cingulate gyrus is particularly interesting the field of aromatherapy because it helps to
regulate heart rate and blood pressure as well as attention spans and cognitive processing.

A
clinical trial into essential oils and their effects on rodents suffering from nerve damage
demonstrated that the inhaling of lemon oil affected this part of their brain in a way that caused
them to be able to tolerate their nerve pain and the resultant treatments far more readily.
(This is an interesting read:http://www.molecularpain.com/content/10/1/14)

Dentate gyrus is thought to contribute to new memories.

In addition, these structures are sometimes also considered to be part of the limbic system.

Entorhinal cortex& Piriform cortex

The Fornicate gyrus & Nucleus accumbens are particularly useful in more advanced therapy as
they are involved in reward, pleasure, and addiction responses. Retraining or manipulating these
reactions with the use of essential oils can have profound effects in addiction responses.

The Orbitofrontal cortex is required for decision making. This link is extremely valuable
when learning how to treat people not only with learning difficulties but also those who no longer
have control over aggressive and violent urges.

While aromatherapy is becoming more readily accepted by the medical profession, much is
considered on the fringe and/or often the depth of healing is overlooked or dismissed as
something to pamper yourself with.
Medical researchers assert the key to finding cures to diseases such as Parkinsons Disease rely
on identifying or creating a substance which is able to cross the blood brain barrier. Recently,
science confirmed what many aromatherapists had suspected for a long time; that some essential
oils molecules actually are able to pass through the blood brain barrier and affect the brain
directly. So far this is the only substance they have been identified which has the capacity to do
this. Think of the ramifications of your healing abilities now.
The active components able to do this are called sesquiterpenes and are present in almost all
essential oils. They are found in largest quantities in cedarwood, spikenard, myrrh and
sandalwood.
Remember too, that the mind-body-spirit connection is almost like an everlasting ring. Each of the
three bodies is quintessentially affected by the other. This means the essential oils not only affect
the emotions from the aspect of the physical body but they can also exert influence on the etheric
bodies or the spiritual realm of man and mans health is affected by spiritual dis-ease (or lets say
discomfort perhaps). Essential oils encourage the assimilation of information surrounding you,
feed it through the emotions and so affect health from this angle too.
It is therefore, possible for an essential oil to affect learning, memory or emotions, even if it does
not contain the sesquiterpene molecules which will ensure it access to the limbic system. They
simply affect the health from the spiritual standpoint.

Qualia
In 1947 the eminent neuroscientist Daniel C. Dennet described Qualia as an unfamiliar term for
something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. That is, do
you see the same green as I do when I look at grass? Is the reason some people who dont like
the taste of tomatoes because they actually experience the taste entirely different to me?
It is a fascinating subject which really sets a good aromatherapist apart from the crowd. The
understanding that the scent of geranium which may soothe one child, may have an entirely
different connotation to another is fundamental to understanding the nuances of the limbic system
and in turn, how to use aromatherapy to influence it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDlDirzOSI8