It Stinks.

[mrissa]

When you are a scent-oriented person, when scent is the first thing in your sensory world, articles like this one are at the same time a relief and tiresome. "Humans can smell where something is coming from"? Gee, who'da thunk? This is like if I walked up to one of you visual people and said, "Hey, did you know, I've done a study, and many humans can use their eyes to determine what color things are! Not all, mind you, but many! They don't require a spectrum analysis or anything!"

That's where the tiresome bit comes in. The relief comes in because people will try to argue with me about what I can possibly smell. "You can't possibly tell that just by smelling!" No, wise guy, you can't possibly tell that by smelling; not the same thing. I bump into things a lot more when I have a cold, because I can't smell where they are. I don't know why so many people are averse to scent-data, but I wish they'd relax and stop trying to project that aversion on the rest of us, namely me.

Comments

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

I had a lousy olfactory sense before I had kids, but my sense of smell now is far more accute. While I was pregnant with my second, my sense of smell was so strong that I could not bear to go anywhere there were crowds of people, because I could smell everything about them. It had to be close to what a dog experiences, and I was actually relieved when it went down to a more tolerable level after Evan was born.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Well, actually a dog's sense of smell is 50,000 times more powerful than a human being's. Maybe 49,000 time more powerful than a pregnant human :-). (I know what you mean about pregnancy!) So we can sort of dimly imagine how a dog senses the world. In fact, I'll bet that a dog perceives the world completely differently from a human being. Dogs can't see color--so to them all cats are gray all the time. They have no concept of, say, an orange cat. I think there must be a symmetry to that, that dogs sense aspects about people and the world around them that we can never fully understad--although we do exploit it in using dogs for police work, rescue, hunting, etc.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Actually, dogs are red/green color blind but do still see color. An orange cat presumably looks dark yellow. And the distribution of rods and cones in a dogs retina is different from a human's, so color will be less significant to them than, say, motion.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool! Thanks for the nifty factoid!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This frightens me about pregnancy, because I've heard this before, and I can already smell things about people that many others can't.

One of the Nose Blind

[kendwoods.livejournal.com]

**waves**

I can't smell subtle odors to save my life. All those folks who do note descriptions of BPAL products amaze me. I'm all like, huh, whut? I don't get that at all.

My partner Chris on the other hand, is creepy with his scent identification and location abilities.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Eric Berne, whom I learned a lot from, said that a lot of what we call intuition is actually subliminal smelling. Could be.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain! Jason has almost NO sense of smell and it drives me crazy. I, on the other hand, will smell something burning, and my nose will lead me outside my CLOSED HOUSE to find the neighbor has just lit a match for his hibachi grill. Jason just looks at me like I'm a nut. I can smell sub-scents within smells, as well. Jason thinks I should consider becoming a professional Nose, though I doubt I've got that great an ability. It's frustrating with Fall coming, especially, because I can smell the different woods burning in chimneys and I can smell mold and moss and even certain bugs in the leaf litter, and I wish I could share it with someone because Fall is like a big old festival for my snoot, and it's just LOST on most folks. I get excited and bounce at Jason and say "OOOH! Smell! Smell! Can you smell the candy apple in the air? Someone's having a school fair!" and he just looks at me tolerantly, takes a whiff, which of course produces the typical "I don't smell anything special," and I just feel deflated.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

From what I know of the field, women of childbearing age are usually disqualified as professional smellers and tasters. Their senses may be more sensitive than those of men or older women, but they are less consistent. A big part of the job (training and practice) is comparison, so consistency is more important than sensitivity, once you get past a certain threshold.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I notice my sense of smell changes with the time of the month. But I also think that disqualifying women of childbearing age from this profession has more to do with discrimination and sexism than science. I'm pretty sure I could learn to compensate for the cyclic variations in sensitivity if I was interested in this. There's a lot of skill to be learned in those professions that's probably more important than raw sensitivity.

Now a professional smeller might want to take a leave of absence for her pregnancy just to save her sanity. Yuck!

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

*nod* I am with you on that one.

I once smelled smoke, searched the entire house, went outside to look, and saw that across the lake, someone was burning something. =/

And the night that the apartments by 35 caught on fire...the next morning I was like...whoa...did someone's house burn down nearby?

I also do it with sound.

Sometimes both of these things suck. I am gonna be a crazy old woman, raving about smelly, loud things. LOL

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I get the opposite reaction - people who can't believe that I really don't pick up on smells that are obvious to them. I really can't appreciate their expertise in making blends of essential oils or in the culinary arts. It's not some kind of slur against their abilities. It's like asking a blind person to rave about their skills in visual arts, or a deaf person to praise their musical ability.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But there's a big difference between, "No, I just can't smell anything" and "You can't possibly smell that! You're making that up!"

To me it's analogous to the difference between, "Wow, that's too bad you can't smell that" and "No, you have to be able to! It's like an assault on the nose or something! Don't tell me you can't smell that!" from your perspective. In both cases, people need to recognize that not everyone is like them.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's kind of insulting; like they think you are lying about your own perceptions - as if they were in a position to know better.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I keep having to tell people, "I am the world's expert on what I think and feel." It's frustrating that it has to come up so often.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Some people have a lot of trouble with the idea that not everyone is like them. Trouble in absorbing the idea, and trouble in accepting it.

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

Having lived with mrbs for the last 4 years, my nose is even more sensitive now, as he is allergic to most scented things.

I think my first sense is sound though. As my darling says...I have freaky Tell Tale Heart hearing. Scent is a close second.

So...if I ever go blind (which is apperantly a possibility), I can at least smell and hear really well. =)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I told the doctor I was really relieved that it was not an olfactory tumor, because I'd rather go blind or deaf than have my sense of smell gone. She seemed to think I was joking.

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

The things that doctors think we are joking about.

I am glad your tests all came out normal, but I wish they knew what was wrong.

*hugs*

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

You know this reminds me of something. I was sniffing my cat this morning. (Okay, I know I'm weird, but I do stuff like that.) Later, when walking my son to school, I got a whiff of...cat. Not cat poop. Just cat. There was no cat nearby. I looked at my dog to see if she smelled it, too. But chances are that if *I* can smell the cat, it was probably so strong that the dog was already smelling it before we left for our walk--that indeed, the whole neighborhood smelled of cat to her. I thought it was funny, though. :-)

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

I have a very good sense of smell and I've also often wondered if I perceive the world differently than people whose noses are not so sensitive. If I'm paying attention, I can tell what emotional state a lot of people are in just by the way they smell. I tend to identify places (and people) as much by smell as by sight and sound. My husband thinks of me as being very exotic in this regard, as his nose is not at all sensitive.

I think a lot of people's noses are overloaded with all the scent around them and become less sensitive. I have allergies and use perfume free laundry supplies. Walking down the laundry aisle in the store about kills me off, but what's realy amazing is how many people use super-perfumey laundry stuff, and then they have scented deoderant and shampoo and perfume on top of that. They're walking conflicting scent sources and I'd rather smell their own smelliness (well, except for some really awful smelling people) than 7-8 different chemical perfume scents warring.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I hate scent-clashing. I really do. It's much, much worse than people who wear clashing colors, because at least there you can look away from one part of their outfit. You can't close your nose to part of their scent constellation!

I've said before, when I say "good to see you," I am translating from my brain's actual meaning, which is more akin to, "good to smell you."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also, I think I'm less averse to sweat and other bodily smells because I can almost always smell something like that, no matter how many other scents people layer on. It's just...how people smell. If they're not healthy or haven't bathed in a very long time, it can be bothersome, but mostly it's just the way of things, much less bothersome than clashing colognes.