That stinks.

[mrissa]

Sometimes when I quit reading things, I have little pithy snarky posts about it. This time I wanted to highlight a factual error so that none of you will repeat it, because I've read this wrong, wrong thing more than one place:

It is, in fact, possible to remember and/or imagine a smell.

No, really. It is. I checked with timprov, who doesn't have

Comments

[tiger_spot]

I frequently have a difficult time remembering or imagining smells for the same reason I have a difficult time remembering a particular song while a different song is playing. The world is quiet rather more often than it is odorless.

I'll just file "smells cannot be remembered" with "dreams are in black and white" and "thoughts are in language" under weird things that are apparently true for some people.

(Though if he's also got the the-thoughts-that-I'm-consciously-aware-of-are-mostly-words thing going, maybe that's part of the problem? There's practically no useful descriptive language for smells, so if he's trying to remember a description rather than the odor itself, that's probably hard.)

[mrissa]

That seems to be exactly what he's doing, yes: he talked at some length about the dearth of smell vocabulary. Which makes me wonder whether he thinks he also recalls music as "okay, dominant, minor third up, dominant again, major fifth down...."

[rushthatspeaks]

My response to this is that the man has spent no time whatsoever around anyone associated with professional perfuming.

There is a technical vocabulary to the level of conversation-does-not-read-as-English.

[mrissa]

Yes.

Even my mom and I have shorthands that don't parse for other people, because people who want to talk about smells a lot need them.

[houseboatonstyx]

Me too, on all counts. Synesthetic as hell, though.

[moiread]

> There's practically no useful descriptive language for smells ...

Oh man, tell me about it. And it's even worse when you've got synæsthesia, too. I'm into BPAL perfumes, and trying to talk about them with any of my other BPAL-enthusiast friends is a mess. I often feel bad for them. I mean, when they ask about smell preferences and all I can say is that smells "up hereabouts" (with hand gesture to a location above and in front of my head) put me right off, but the ones kind of down here and to the left are really good, what the hell are they supposed to do with that?

[mrissa]

It is so inconvenient that synaeshtesias are not directly translatable, because I have spatial mapping with smells as well.