Olfactory Fatigue

I've mused on this before, but the sense of smell is kind of wacky. They say that smells are one of the most powerful triggers for digging up old memories, so it might not just be coincidental that the olfactory bulb (the brain part that does the smelling) is wired right up to the amygdala (one of the brain parts that does the emotion). I speak very loosely, of course, but this isn't Nature Neuroscience, so whatever. One of the funny things about your sense of smell (including the part of smell that we refer to as taste) is that it's rather gullible. Go grab yourself an orange Crush. Go on, now have a sip. Mmmmmmm, orangey. Now go dig through your rotting bin of good intentions you call a vegetable crisper, find and peel yourself an orange and try wedge. They don't taste a damn bit alike, do they?



You know what else doesn't smell like its label? Ocean Mist. On the way back from the airport, I sat in a taxi cab run by some dude who was apparently excessively conscious about maintaining a no-B-O cabbie public image. Hanging from the mirror was an Ocean Mist air freshener. On the back of the seat behind my head was another air freshener. And piped in from the front seat was some flexible hose with a plastic tube drilled with hose that seemed to deliver a fan-driven payload of Ocean Mist. I've never lived near the ocean, but I've been to Yarmouth in the fog, and I live about a 10 minute walk from one of the Great Lakes. Whatever trick they pulled to make everyone think that Dimetapp tastes like grapes, my nose is not buying it. You want ocean mist? Puree a bucket of wet seaweed and a small flounder and throw it in front of a box fan. There's your ocean mist. That air freshener? It smelled like someone stuffed a LUSH franchise up my nose. How bad was it? My shirt still smelled like air freshener at the end of the day. And I had been wearing a zipped up jacket in the cab.