perception of disgusting smells
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 pleasant and unpleasant feelings. Weird.
On a similar vein, a few days back, during a similar event (with more people around this time) I smelled something I couldn't place and couldn't decide whether it was pleasant or unpleasant. A colleague commented: "mmmmm smells like pasta...". Two minutes later another one (new in the room) added: "yuck, who cooked in here? smells like bad fish".
Is it that our sense of smell (on the pleasant to unpleasant spectrum) is more affected by contextual information (linking the smell to a pleasant/unpleasant food source) rather than by the actual olfactory stimulus? Actually it seems normal that it would be the case, at least partly. The thing that surprised me the most, though, is how the same stimulus could be so ambiguous in its pleasantness depending on what I attributed it to.
Yeah yeah I know... Not the most normal thoughts to be having, while I am supposedly writing that damn hearing perception article, but my mind has always had a mind of its own. So to speak. Or write. Whatever.
Laters
-NT
On a similar vein, a few days back, during a similar event (with more people around this time) I smelled something I couldn't place and couldn't decide whether it was pleasant or unpleasant. A colleague commented: "mmmmm smells like pasta...". Two minutes later another one (new in the room) added: "yuck, who cooked in here? smells like bad fish".
Is it that our sense of smell (on the pleasant to unpleasant spectrum) is more affected by contextual information (linking the smell to a pleasant/unpleasant food source) rather than by the actual olfactory stimulus? Actually it seems normal that it would be the case, at least partly. The thing that surprised me the most, though, is how the same stimulus could be so ambiguous in its pleasantness depending on what I attributed it to.
Yeah yeah I know... Not the most normal thoughts to be having, while I am supposedly writing that damn hearing perception article, but my mind has always had a mind of its own. So to speak. Or write. Whatever.
Laters
-NT