olfaction

Isn't it funny how you can be somewhere and smell something, and suddenly you remember something you haven't thought of in forever?

I've actually been thinking about this on and off since we went to see Perfume back at the beginning of February, since that movie was all about smell and memory.

Lots and lots and lots of space on the interwebnet (and, I assume, other places too) has been taken up with trying to explain the link between smell and memory (to see just how much google "smell memory" some time), but no matter how much they talk about "Proustian Memory", "olfactory bulbs" and "axons of neurons", it always trips me out a little bit when it happens.

What's worse is when you smell something and it only trips off half a memory... you know you know the smell but you can't remember either what it is, or where you know it from...

I'm like that at the moment with the For Men Face Scrub from The Body Shop... I know I've used it before (because I recently finished off a really old tube of it which was why I wanted more), but every time I go to use it and get a good whiff, there's that sense of it being really familiar, but from a long time ago... but I can't place any one specific memory with it. It's odd, and actually quite frustrating...

The other thing I wonder about when it comes to smell is, well, men...

I like the smell of men... well, when they smell good (in that whole freshly bathed and appropriately fragranced thing, as opposed to the whole bad body odour thing)... but it does make me wonder sometimes... is it a case of the chicken and the egg...

Do I find the smell of men's fragrances (on other men) pleasing and attractive because I like men and therefore that's the way my brain is hardwired... or, did I "teach myself" to find those smells attractive because the people that I find attractive smell like that... but I guess you could ask that about almost anything really.

And interestingly there doesn't seem to be a scientific answer for it... I just had a little dig around and couldn't come up with a definite answer.

One thing I did find interesting was this little nugget...

Gay men preferred odours from gay men and straight women, whereas odours from gay men were the least preferred by straight men and women and by lesbian women.

I would have thought that we would have liked the smell of straight men too... maybe that came in third...

What I do like is that whole scent-wake... when you walk past someone and in the next step or so you get that rush of their smell... it actually happens sometimes when I'm on my walk, although mostly from men on their way to work rather than the other people walking or running. Although sometimes that does happen, which always makes me wonder what the point of that is, especially at that time in the morning... why bother making yourself smell nice and then going out to exercise... seems silly to me.

But the thing I don't like is the scent-wake that's enough to kill a bear. Getting the smell one or two steps past somebody is fine... when you can still smell them at ten or so steps, they've just gone too far.

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