Why do you want to go to Disneyland so bad? Maybe it's the smell.
- The hype around Disneyland can be explained by psychological phenomenons, experts say.
- Perhaps the most interesting one is how our brains react to the park's familiar smells.
If you've ever longed to float down the river on the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at work or have the insatiable urge to traverse Main Street on a Monday night, there may be some science to explain why.
That's according to a new feature from the Los Angeles Times, which broke down the reasons Disney-obsessed adults and children just can't get enough of the magical theme park.
Psychologists and social media experts provided a list of explanations: a dreaded fear of FOMO thanks to social media, a desire to relive childhood fantasies, and a yearning for travel.
But perhaps the most innovative way Disneyland takes your money is through your nostrils.
Around the park, devices known as Smellitzers shoot scents toward passersby. For example, a Smellitzer near the Candy Palace and Candy Kitchen blasts the smell of sweet treats onto Main Street.
"The Smellitzer was named after the famous WWI shell launcher, the howitzer," Gavin Doyle, a Disney enthusiast behind the site Disney Dose, told Insider in 2015. "Instead of launching deadly shells, it launches glorious aromas."
David Ludden, a professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College, told the Los Angeles Times that part of Disney's success lies in its ability to use smell to "influence our behavior at an unconscious level."
"Smell is a chemical sense, and it is evolutionarily ancient, so it connects more directly with the emotional parts of the brain than the other senses do," Ludden told the publication.
This tracks with what a former Disney employee wrote about the reasoning behind why Imagineers designed the Smellitzer.
In a memoir about Disney, former employee Jody Jean Dreyer wrote that the Imagineers wanted to use scents to trigger memories of childhood nostalgia.
"That's why smell can transport us to a time and feeling that we'd long forgotten," Dreyer wrote, Fast Company reported in 2017.