Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: DandyVandy on 08/09/2015 10:47:13
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When I was little I noticed that when I went to my grandmothers my blanket smelled different. As soon as I got home the scent went back to normal. why is this?
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Our senses are not "absolute" but are surprisingly relative and even interdependent - there's a classic after-dinner experiment where you wrap an ice cube in a handkerchief,take a deep drag on a cigarette, and absentmindedly "stub out" the ice cube on a friend's hand. He will swear you have burned him!
Taste and smell are very relative, and the concept of "acquired taste" suggests that there is also a learned component. The pairing of wines and cheeses is a fine example: if you want to sell a lightly flavored wine, you supply plain bread or "palate cleansing" young cheeses between tastings to heighten the flavor of the wine, but if you have a shop full of heavily oaked Riojas and Pays d'Ocs, you put out plates of salted anchovy, mature Cheddar and ripe Camembert so that the wine becomes a sweet relief after the brain-numbing savory.
We acclimatise to atmospheric odors quite quickly, and the air we have been breathing for an hour begins to smell "normal" even with near-toxic levels of mercaptans, ketones, or farts. If you had an archetypal lavender-scented granny and a neurotic mum who scrubbed the nursery with carbolic soap, your sweaty blanket would have smelled alternately sour and sweet in comparison with the background odor.
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It is quite true that things smell differently in different places.
I make little doubt that Mr. Sean Connery and others of his ilk would agree that honesty and integrity smell quite differently north of the Clyde than in Whitehall .... or Cambridge.