perception of disgusting smells

[noisy_thoughts]

I walk into the kitchen of the lab today and get hit by the lingering smell of something someone microwaved some minutes before. Initially, the strength of it sorta make me feel unpleasantly. Then, however, as I started thinking about the smell a bit more and started to connect it to possible food sources, it took on the dual role of eliciting both

Comments

Just a thought

[kensey_river]

Just a thought about the evocativeness of smell. I had a very strange experience of this once. I was studying in the library at university. I had been studying for a while so I was using my left arm to prop up my head. I was trying to read some wildly thrilling cognitive psychology papers, but my thoughts kept getting interrupted by memories. Specifically memories of my Dad. This worried me a bit, mainly because it was hard to concentrate, but also because hey I didn't want to have a Freudian thing going on. Anyway, after about an hour I checked my watch, which is when I worked out what was going on. My Dad had given me his watch the weekend before, because of the way I was sitting the watch was close to my nose. I must have been getting wafts of Eau de Daddy from the leather watch strap, which were subconsciously triggering my memories of him. It was really odd.

[semioticghosts]

From what I remember, smell really is affected by contextual information, and also, everybody's perception of an unpleasant smell is different. I once saw an OU programme [I think] where it investigated a random sample's perception of the smell of putrecent meat. Some people didn't find the smell unpleasant at all.

Also, and this is me wildly hypothesising, if we consider that the sense of smell is one of the developmentally oldest and that the back of the nose is the only place in the body where the central nervous system lies bare (thus allowing as-good-as-immediate processing of smells) it's not surprising that smells are strongly evocative. I think that the evocative bit is what you're getting at - for what is stimulus+contextual information if not evocative?
Alternatively, I could be talking out of my hind[brain] here, so please discuss!

nasal hair(cells)

[noisy_thoughts]

Trust my friends to be as geeky as I am. That's nice

[one_mirror]

A couple of months ago I made an interesting discovery about myself - I have an almost psychotic reaction to the smell of wet decaying vegetable matter. Putrid meat just makes my nose wrinkle, but this...I'd left a bunch of spinach (with the roots on) in a glass of water for a week. The leaves had been preventing the smell from getting out, and when I emptied it, it felt like this awful tangible smell was literally crawling up my nostrils and ravaging my sinuses with the scent of ancient swamps or something...