Posts Tagged ‘smell’
“Smell was our first sense… We think because we smelled”*
Lisa Wade, in Pacific Standard:
Earlier this year I reviewed a study that found that, simply by changing the weight of an object in hand, psychologists can manipulate how seriously a person takes an issue. In other words, when holding something heavy, matters seem heavy. Or, concerns seem weightier when one is weighed down.
Thanks to an email from University of Southern California professor Norbert Schwarz, I was introduced to a whole series of studies on what psychologists call metaphorical effects. These are instances in which a metaphor commonly used to describe a psychological state or social reality can, in turn, induce that state or reality. So, for example, holding a warm cup of coffee makes people feel warmly toward each other (here), getting the cold shoulder makes people feel cold (here), people placed in a high location seem to be high in a hierarchy (here), and cleaning one’s hands makes a person feel morally clean (here).
Schwarz was the co-author, with Spike W.S. Lee, on another example of a metaphorical effect. They wanted to know if smelling something fishy made people suspicious. It did.
Read the noisome news in full at “Smelling Something Fishy Makes People More Suspicious.”
* Lyall Watson (in Jacobson’s Organ)
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As we hold our noses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music” opened in the Ctaskills in New York State. The organizers of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair– or Woodstock, as it is remembered– had hoped to sell 50,000 tickets; but by the week before the event, had moved 186,000. A last-minute change of venue presented them with a hard choice: hastily erect more/stronger fences and install additional security on the new site (the famous Yasgur’s Farm) or offer the event for free. The night before the event, with attendees already arriving in huge numbers, the promoters cut the fence. Ultimately an estimated 400,000 people enjoyed a (somewhat rainy) weekend of performances from 32 acts. It was, as Rolling Stone opined, a defining moment in Rock and Roll.
The nose knows?…
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have discovered “olfactory white,” the nasal equivalent of white noise, Live Science reports:
Almost any given smell in the real world comes from a mixture of compounds. Humans are good at telling these mixtures apart (it’s hard to mix up the smell of coffee with the smell of roses, for example), but we’re bad at picking individual components out of those mixtures…
Mixing multiple wavelegths that span the human visual range equally makes white light; mixing multiple frequencies that span the range of human hearing equally makes the whooshing hum of white noise. Neurobiologist Noam Sobel from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and his colleagues wanted to find out whether a similar phenomenon happens with smelling…
Spoiler alert: it does. Find out how– and learn more about the most mysterious of our senses at Live Science. (And download the paper from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
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As we reach for our hankies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1858 that Philadelphia tinsmith John Landis Mason received the patent for Mason Jars. With it’s threaded mouth, metal lid, rubber gasket ring– and the hermetic seal that they can form– the Mason Jar quickly became a staple for food preservation (usually, and ironically, called “canning”). While they are still used to that end, they have more lately flourished as collectables.
A Mason Jar in use
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