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Human Sense of Smell Underestimated
Benjamin Long writes to note a study, by a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail — an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed. Furthermore, the study demonstrated for the first time that humans make use of differential information from the two nostrils. The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail. Here is the abstract of the paper in Nature Neuroscience. From the article: "The humans, however, still sniffed much more slowly than dogs, which may partially account for canines' greater efficiency at scent tracking. [A commentator] says that despite their relatively sluggish speed, the fact that subjects improved with training is noteworthy. 'I think that shows the effect of our distinctively different behavior in actually using this sense,' he says. 'The dog [has] been doing this its whole life, and humans [were] just asked to plunge in the first time they've ever done it.'"
smell my finger...
The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail. This just proves students will do anything for $10
If you can read this, it's already too late.
I was standing behind the server racks and I thought I could sqeeze off a silent fart without anyone noticing. Sadly the offending trouser bomb got caught up in the fans of a 4U Server. The cheese-scented ass gas was recirculated through every fan in the room evenly distributing its greasy essence all over the datacenter. None of my fellow technicians will speak to me since this awful and embarrassing emission.
The following replies are posted by unwashed nerds.
Most women can follow a chocolate scented trail, oddly enough the scent trail left by diamonds and currency works just as well. On the flip side most men are able to scent track women so I guess there's balance in nature.
that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail -- an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed.
Err, I recently smelled something burning. I walked through my house using my nose to follow the scent trail, and locate the single light bulb in the chandelier that had a tiny piece of plastic stuck to it that was burning (from a Christmas decoration).
How do these researchers think I performed this amazing feat? Got out my hound dog and had him sniff around?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I can sniff out a KFC five blocks away and my sniffer can lead me there.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
...no one knows you're a dog. Until you start bragging about your scent-tracking superiority, then you've given away the game.
I for one welcome our Blindfolded Crawling Chocolate-Tracking Overlords!
I, for one, can't even smell my own breath.
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say what's on your mind - online confession and send anon email at my website http://www.sayitt.com/
I've heard that a dog's sense of smell is a million times better than ours, and that they can detect a scent trail 3 weeks old. I'm pretty sure that if humans could really do that, we wouldn't need dogs to do it... not to mention that dogs don't seem to mind if they sniff something gross on the way!
stuff |
Maradona has proved it many times some years ago keeping track of some white dust...
I heard about this on NPR yesterday. The researcher said we smelled in stereo. They proved it by plugging up one nostril at a time and then attaching a device so that both nostrils could smell in mono. The test subjects took far longer to find stuff. He also said one people got attuned to smelling a trail they were limited to the speed at which they could crawl.
Richard Feynman did a number of smell experiments with his first wife, Arlene. He would leave the room and she would handle bottles and books then he'd return and see if he could determine which ones she'd touched. He was able to find them. It's detailed in Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman .
There! And I didn't make any smelling cracks about misunderestimating or Uranus or "once you get past the smell it tastes all right".
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
How do you think I find my way to the computer science classroom?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Would I rather hold a leash and follow a dog around, or put my own face in the wet muddy grass? Hmmmmmm...
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
By the end, I'm sure the participants were drooling. Did they get to eat the chocolate?
... but we're still smart enough to get out of the room when we hear, "the noise".
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
It's not evident from the slash summary - but one interesting discovery is that we actually smell in stereo - hence two nostrils.
That comes as a surprise to me - our other stereo sense organs (eyes and ears) are placed just about as far apart on our heads as is structurally possible - but our nostrils are really close together. OK - we don't have a really great sense of smell and we don't rely on it at all - but dogs clearly do - and their nostrils are also very close together.
You'd think we (or at least dogs) would have nostrils mounted just below our ears.
Weird.
www.sjbaker.org
When I was young I used to hate that stuff, especially because my mom would throw blocks of it in the curries without powdering them. One bite of that chunk, and you will curse everyone in sight. So enraged I was, that I once stole her entire stash of asafoitida. I wanted to throw it away in garbage, but I was young and scared and did not dare throw it all away. So I hid it in a trunk in the loft. And, yes as I said in the subject line, my mom sniffed it out and found the stash. So yes, humans can sniff out very aromatic substances. But faint traces like a dogs do [note the significant absence of the apostrophe after the s in dogs] ? I am not so sure.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Benjamin Long writes to note a study, by a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail
My first job after graduating from college was working as a computer programmer at a US Air Force base. I worked in the main building for our section of the base and our colonel one day was having a VIP come by to visit him. He walked out to the main area and smelled something burning. Convinced that his canine sense of smell had saved the day and wanting to show off for his visitor, he promptly called the base fire department and demanded that they send a truck out to investigate "the burning wires smoldering within one of the walls". The base fire department dispatched a truck and the firemen investigated and told the colonel that what he smelled was burnt popcorn from the break room and there was nothing smoldering within the walls. The colonel then did the only thing that a military man who has just embarassed himself could do. He promptly banned microwave popcorn.
when I fart in your general direction.
the more miserable you are now, the funnier the story will be later
Pictures pls.
In his collection of memoirs "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)", Richard Feynmann wrote of hilarious events surrounding his experiments with his own ability to track scent trails. The story is called "Testing Bloodhounds". Man, that guy was ahead of his time for *everything*...
...performed by a fraternity.
Next year's research promises refinements in the LD50 of ethanol in fully-grown mammals.
I think it's somewhere in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman where he mentions that he once got down on all fours and tried to track a scent like a bloodhound, with some success. Apparently the biggest single reason why dogs' noses work better than humans' is simpy that they are closer to the ground.
A guy is on an elevator alone.
A beautiful girl gets on.
He says "Hey, can I smell your pussy?"
She says "NO!".
He says "Oh, must be your breath."
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
when I quit smoking a few years back after having smoking since I was about 13 (and raised by two smokers) I recovered my sense of smell and taste (they are certainly intertwined)
My sense's of taste and smell are so actute now - it's amazing! I can smell people smoking a few cars in front of me - peoples aftershave and perfumes are most times extreme and putrid (I believe it must be animal urine in them)
The weirdest experience was the re-living of memories evoked through smell, that I had long forgotton. Apparently, smell is the sense most connected to memory, I literally feel younger than ever (36yrs old in reality) Now I can smell the deeper complexities within freshly cut grass that I had completely forgotton. Quit that damn cigarette - you really do get your life back (lots more money too)
The quality of scent trails depends on many factors including temperature, moisture and the terrain. Having been pig hunting with dogs, I've seen them being able to pick up a scent trail that was days old and only an hour or so later they could not track where a pig had walked only minutes ago. The first trail was in long grass and had been left in the morning with dew on the grass. The second was in the middle of the day over open ground.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In testing to see if humans smell in stereo the best experiment they could come up with is having people follow a piece of scented rope in the grass? All this experiment would prove is that people can smell. If you loose the sent you turn your head to the left or right and if the sent increases, you move in that direction. They went through the extra step of jamming things in people's noses and surprise, people didn't do so well with this teflon contraption hanging off their face.
One thing I noticed, during bootcamp was that my sense of smell became incredibly accute. While, I'll award the reader with the fact that I was a prior smoker to bootcamp, I will say that non-smokers DEFINATELY noticed the difference as well.
While it's not likely we as a society will retort back to nature in a sense, I will say, the body naturally cleans itself and the only reason a "bum" stinks as bad as he does is in relation to all the non-natural environment surrounding him. Not only that, but we are so used to the man made scents, that natural scents tend to stand out even more.
For example... while some city women will think a man from the country is being a sexist pig who treats women like objects... the fact is, men CAN smell women and from a considerable distance away.
OK. Let me stress this, becuase this is when it hit me like a brick during boot camp. It was almost a "holy shit do I have a Marvel Comic superhero nose?", no I don't and you don't either. But, when at a club, a female can be practically touching you and you might smell her perfume. In the work place, a female sitting in the next cubicle might not make her presence known until she makes sufficient noise to catch your attention....
After five weeks into boot camp, a female division walked past the barracks we were at, and walked up stairs. I would accurately judge the distance to about 50 feet away, and every single guy in the barracks literally smelled the girls. We didn't have to hear them. We didn't have to see them. We could smell them and knew they were there. The scents were distinguishable too, not just a generic feminine hormone release into the air. If two girls were in the next room, the guys three rooms down could smell two different scents.
When I was a kid, females weren't allowed to go hunting, irregardless of what time of month or whatever they washed their bodies with. Until boot camp, I always thought it was a wives tale that women gave off that much odor... but I swear to you. Yes, if I am able to smell a female just as well as see her from 50 feet away... then a deer or buck with much better noses can certainly smell a human female from 100 yards away. A man could probably smell the presence of a female much further than 50 feet away, it's just that's the distance I know for a fact and even at 50 feet, the scent was unbelievably strong. How far away before it becomes a hint? The girl might as well have showered in perfume and stood two inches behind me.
Nowadays, away from the lack of everyday luxuries and eminties, inhalation of cigarette smoke, car exhaust, overwhelming stench of plastics and asphalt... no, I couldn't tell you if a girl with no perfume is sitting five feet over in the next cubicle. It's somewhat sad. But, you are capable of doing it. Most people who go on long hunting trips in the wilderness know what I'm talking about. Without all this crap we deal with, this man made crap, nature gave us some pretty interesting abilities that have been long taken for granted or the use is nolonger really needed.
The scent of the girls is what blew me away the most. So vivid, so strong so unexpected. But, I also realized that a lot of other things that might have been overlooked or not processed certainly was while in boot camp. Such as the bed of flowers outside the barracks... yeah, you can smell those things. In modern day life, much of those scents are still hitting our nose, but if they remain being processed it's either at a subconscious level or outright ignored altogether. Anyway, it doesn't surprise me that a group of college students was able to smell a trail of chocolate in the lawn. Doesn't surprise me one bit.
As if we need another reason for women to tell us that men are dogs.
The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail.
Sure... "researchers".
This is one of those weird Japanese game shows!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Crystal Fire and they had an interesting anecdote about the beginnings of semi-conductor research. In the late 1930's early 1940s the scientists at Bell labs were experimenting with silicon to see if they could build rectifiers and other electronic components out of it. At the time there really wasn't any theory about how these things might have worked. Some silicon rods showed semi-conductive behavior, some didn't. Finally they found one rod that showed strong semi-conductive behavior. They couldn't figure out what it was that made this rod special until the scientists and machinist who worked on it said that when it was cut or ground it gave off the same smell as one of the old carbide lamps that were used on many automobiles until the late 1920s. One of the chemists realized that what they were smelling was trace amounts of phospine gas, which meant that the rod has phosphorous in it. This was a surprise as the levels of phosphorous in the sample were so small that they didn't show up in a spectrographic analysis, it was the noses of the scientists and machinist that gave them the clue that the proper trace impurities in silicon would enhance the semi-conductive behavior.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
When we talk about our sense of taste in everyday conversation, what we are really talking about is our sense of smell.
The taste buds on our tongue have only four types of receptors: salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Each has a specific region on the tongue -- for instance, bitter is on the back of the tongue.
All of the other qualities of food that we normally ascribe to taste are actually olfactory stimuli. When food is in our mouth, some of it wafts back up into our nose, where our most sensitive smelling tissue lies. This sensation is what we are referring to when we talk about the particular taste of chocolate, coffee, oranges, wine, etc. -- aside from their sweet, sour, salty or bitter qualities.
In humans, this sensitive smelling tissue lies inside the face behind the nose, in the nasal canal. In dogs, it's the wet tissue that makes up the surface of their nose. That's why dogs' sense of smell seems so much better than ours -- they are basically tasting the air and everything they get close to with their nose. You can smell about as well as a dog can, if you stick things in your mouth. But given what dogs are mostly interested in smelling, who would want to?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail.
I would have loved to see that. Its a funny mental picture.
Richard Feynman (famous caltech physicist) documented his observations of this in his autobiography too; where he demonstrated for friends that he could smell out recently handled books in a book case.
Many people who suspect their spouses of affairs also observe this ability too (knowing in which rooms a guest's been in).
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; and it's pretty sad that the obvious gets passed as new, novel research.
When the researcher is not following a trail, he spends his time sniffing butts at a local bar.
Chocolate is a relatively recent invention (bred by South/Western "Mexican" Gulf coasters in the last thousand or so years). And not essential to human survival - though some menstruating women would kill me for saying so.
I wonder what results they'd get with oils from oranges or other citrus fruits. Which humans evolved with, along with our sense of smell, and depend upon for survival (unlike most animals, we don't synthesize vitamin C).
And I'd like to see the differential results for chocolate sniffing sorted by gender, and by menstrual phase for females.
--
make install -not war
Yes, but can they smell what the Rock is cookin'?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail
This team of neuroscientists obviouly never watched my uncle navigating the house floor to unfailingly reach the turkey leftovers, or they wouldn't be losing their time doing silly experiments.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Hey furless freak
I just scent marked your pillow. Can you tell my fertility state?
to the movie, "The Animal" with Rob Schneider?
At least Colleen Haskell would be worth trying to track with your nose.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The physicist Richard Feynman described in his autobiography his own personal "human bloodhound" experiments. He found that, with little training, he could identify by smell which of a collection of objects had been recently handled. However, upon getting down on the floor and sniffing around, he determined that, unlike his dog, he couldn't follow people's tracks by their scent.
But a lot of it is subconscious.
Google "human ovulation smell" or scent or whatever. (That should be relatively worksafe, as opposed to, say "sniffing panties" which is how the original research was done, AFAIK.)
Here's a recent article about how men can tell when women are ovulating.
Here's a lit review from 2001, discussing just how good humans are at detecting pheromones, unconsciously.
(I can't help but wonder what 'subconscious' means in this sense: if you smell vomit and want desperately to leave the airplane, is that subconscious? is a dog smelling my hamburger and coming over to say hi subconscious? there are lots of areas where behavior is affected by things that a person might not be fully aware of, but if asked might be able to remember -- is that conscious? For instance, when I'm riding my bike down the path and see someone walking along talking to nobody, is it a crazy person or is it a person that's talking on a cellphone? I mostly determine that by some intuitive sense about how the person is moving: lurching around, uncoordinated movement -- but I don't *think* about it. I just know. But afterwards, I have a conscious realization: that person {is|isn't} crazy. Read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell for more about that.)
Anyway, there have been studies done since the '70's, IIRC, exploring how good humans are at smelling things: slow, but still very good.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
On the flip side most men are able to scent track women so I guess there's balance in nature.
Men can also scent track fish.... suppose those two scent tracking skills are related?
Your story is entirely made up based on your fellow techs not wanting to talk to you. If it was real, they would be saying, "Why didn't I think of that!"
I'd like to see the results sorted by gender including menstrual phase for males. I mean, based upon your post, it seems like it might just be a survival instinct for the males to find chocolate for their menstrating wives...
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I think I might agree with you. After reading your post it's obvious that the only difference between you and a dog is that a dog doesn't have the sophistication to come up with some type of argument for why it sniffs it's own ass and licks its balls. Bravo my animal friend... bravo.
Smell is swell. It's so sad that people, especially adults, don't take time to enjoy it. There is a good reason, of course. We ignore odor because we have no way to quantify or qualify it. If it represents danger (fire, etc) we respond as best we can, but there is no way to express what we experience.
When we experience colors, for instance, we reach back to a lifetime of shared experiences beginning in pre-school. In the company of others we learned and eventually agreed upon what yellow was about. And red, green, etc. There are some delicate shades of color that we haven't shared with others and we feel doubt about what they should be called. We tend to ignore those colors, particularly in conversations, for fear of ridicule. The truly techy among us may refer to them by their Pantone numbers.
We need a language for describing odors that goes beyond "oh that really stinks!". Wine sniffers have tried for generations to do so, but their effort is more about being trendy than creating a standard for comparison.
Without that language, there isn't much incentive to pick out interesting odors in the envirnment. How would you share them with other sensitive people? So, the scents drift by and something in the back of your mind says 'that's nice', but you are too busy talking on your cell phone to notice.
There are some technical and observant books on the subject, such as "The Nose: A Profile of Sex, Beauty, and Survival" by Gabrielle Glaser, but the best way to dramatize the value and potential of recognizing scent is to read the novel "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" by Patrick Suskind. Afterword, the world will never smell the same.
http://www.amazon.com/Perfume-Story-Murderer-Patr
q: If you didn't have a nose, how would you smell?
a: Terrible!
...omphaloskepsis often...
With some strong smelling agent like chocolate this not really spectacular. In fact: it's lame.
Other animals have far more sensational abilities to detect smells, dogs come to mind here but
did you know that a bear's sense of smell is an amazing ten times more acute than in a dog.
I owned a dog who was deaf but otherwise in perfect health. One day I had him off the leash and
while he was looking the other way a rabbit ran across the road and disappeared into the fields.
Had he seen it he would have given immediately given chase. A minute later he walked across the
line on the road the rabbit had run past his nose picked up one or two molecules of rabbit sense
and suddenly he yelped in surprise and gave chase. Now if humans could do _that_ then _that_
would be news.
As far as other animals sense of smell is concerned, I'll thrown in another piece of trivia while
we're at it: A Bear's sense of is ten times as acute as that of a dog. Oh and don't think there's
a tradeoff involved. They can hear far beyond the human frequency range and they have color vision
and their eyes are considered at least as good as ours.
What?
All that air feeds into plenty of real estate in the sinus passages just behind the nasal entrance. Goes on for inches and inches. Past the width of the eyes behind the cheek bones and right next to structures of the ears. As far apart inside our heads as is structurally possible. The sinuses have a complex structure and pattern of ciliary movement that has been implicated in cleaning maintenance. I wonder how much of the structural complexity may be involved in smell. In any case, the actual sensors may be spaced much wider than the entrance holes. I wonder if the sinuses create a differential gradient of stink from each nostril to act as an amplifier to this stereo sense.
I smell a slow news day...
If this is news for geeks, shouldn't that be "Sense of Human Smell Underestimated"?
Move along, nothing to see here.
Extraordinary feats of smelling (pun intended) have been performed by feral humans.
Dogs have roughly 40 times the olfactory nerves/sensory surface area as humans - they're pretty much wired for it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
... demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail -- an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed... Have these people never observed dogs? If dogs have such a great sense of smell, why do they have to hold their noses about 2mm from another dog's butt (or a pile made by another dog) for 30 seconds to form an opinion about what they're sniffing?> ...it's pretty sad that the obvious gets passed as new, novel research.
So, gravity. Pretty obvious, yes?
I won't beat around the bush; Seeing the obvious as something special is an invaluable ability for a researcher. But still studying this "obvious" discovery requires a lot more...
Not to mention the importance of getting one's research published. If one doesn't do that one gets omitted from Wikipedia due to Original Research, to exemplify.
All rites reversed 2010
it's got to be true, how else do you explain the AX affect!?
My sense of smell isn't underestimated - I have hyponosmia!
No, really, I can hardly smell anything and the things I can smell vanish quickly (well, they're "tuned out").
How do you think I find certain, unnamed, UNIX sysadmins in the office?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I thought Richard Feynman already did this study.
I don't think the average slashdotter should go around asking females if they smell!
They might not like the answer they get!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
... for the psych experiments at my school. The form we all signed said we did it of our own free will. Failing our psych class if we didn't surely didn't motivate us in any way.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
there's a german saying: "jemanden nicht riechen können" (http://dict.leo.org/ende?search=jemanden+nicht+ri echen+k%3Fnnen), which directly (word by word) translated into english would be: "not to want to smell someone". it seems there's more to phrases like that, than most people knew, even though it's quite commonly used.
next, they tell us, that everyone's "aura" is just a kind of wave pattern, that is emitted by our each one's personal quantum state, which would lead us directly to: "to be on the same weave length with someone".
But! Could they find some grass in a jar of chocolate?
I Am Not A Doctor. But I've a number of friends who are. And they're not generally the sort of people to make stuff up. One told me of a gentleman of his acquaintance who was a gynaecologist. Now, gynaecologists have famously low sex drives, for obvious reasons, but it never stopped this fella. However, his pillow talk left something to be desired. He has been known to inform a lady post-coitus that she may be infertile, purely on the basis of the scents and tastes he encountered whilst pleasuring her.
True or not, I couldn't tell you, but like I said, these fellas have enough great true stories that they've no real need to make them up.
A more interesting study, perhaps, would be the effects (positive or detrimental) on those of us who spend a LOT of their life, with little or no smelling ability.
I've had allergies since a child...and most days, nose is so plugged up, that I don't really smell much...
I like to cook...and my food is always VERY heavily seasoned...I know part of that comes from being raised in the south, but, I think a lot of it comes from my not having a very sensitive sense of smell on most days....so I have to season my food a lot to get it where I can taste it.
Anyway, I think yes...smell as a very important sense for humans is a given...but, I think a study of those with smell vs. those that lack good nasal sensitivity, would point out a lot of things.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The location of our eyes is at the front of our heads because we are predators, so perhaps this is the same for the nostrils, which many predatory animals indeed use to track their prey. As for the ears, perhaps they are positioned so that we may not be surprised by our peers or other predators?
I am referring of course to how front-mounted sensory organs are better able to detect the distance of the target that is being sensed. (As in an increased perception and evaluation of depth.)
I remember reading (somewhere) a scent-related experiment which was suggested for kids. The purpose was to demonstrate that people can differentiate the odors of other individuals even though they don't consciously smell anything at all.
The procedure went something like this:
Distribute a freshly-cleaned T-shirt in a zip-lock bag to all participants. Groups trying this experiment should be small, less than 10 people. Each person should bathe in the evening and wear the T-shirt overnight, placing it back into the zip-lock bag in the morning (no distinctive folding or rolling, just shoved in). When everyone is back together again, the bags are gathered while a non-participant draws numbers from a hat, writing the number on the bag and recording who brought it. The number correspondence is kept secret. Bags are then passed around and participants try to guess who wore each shirt.
The article I was reading said that you should expect "uncanny" accuracy, the difference in scent seeming like a "hunch" or a "feeling" rather than a conscious recognition.
Now the even weirder part. A similar experiment was done where the shirt-wearers were unknown to the sniffers. The people smelling the shirts were given a set of photographs, and asked which one the shirt seemed to belong to. Apparently, they scored correctly by a significant margin.
Now, since I'm busy I'll just leave it up to the reader (and Google, perhaps) to find the sources.
"Richard Feynman (famous caltech physicist) documented his observations of this in his autobiography too ..."
... It's a dead giveaway with 'new, novel' being so very redundant, and also following the mention of the autobiography >_>
"... it's pretty sad that the obvious gets passed as new, novel research."
Ii hope I'm not the only one who caught this guy's joke
Anonymous out
Treating someone like a dog in BD/SM games will take on a whole new meaning. Just imagine hunting parties where the trackers are humans on all fours in leather gear with collars. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The ten dollars you would have earned could be exchanged for many chocolate bars.
Explain how?
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
I wouldn't know if every person out there can easily discern other people's personal smells, or body odour (without getting into bad b.o. per se,) but at least I'm assuming that many are able to recognize a large difference between what might be named the female (category of) smell(s) and the male one(s). Meaning that if there were such a thing as a "spectrum of (individual/personal) odour/smell" then let's say that women would tend to be at one extreme, and men at the other, whereas, if you're a man and you've played some sort of sport like hockey or football where there is sweaty equipment involved and a "hitting the showers" scenario, you've already come across the unmistakable raw smell of "maleness", for example.
Now please have an open mind here while I describe something that I thought was worthy of note:
I am a bisexual male, and as such, I've had sexual intercourse with heterosexual women, homosexual men, as well as bisexual men, and I have observed that these are in three separate and distinct categories of personal odour/smell. Meaning that I've found that homosexual men did not smell like me, but thought nothing of it until the first time I had sex with a bisexual man, at which time it hit me instantly that this (bisexual) man smelled just like me, and just like any heterosexual males I'd ever known. Not that you need to get that intimate to catch a man's smell, but the context made it such that recognizing the smell (or rather that category) could not be avoided.
So, to resume, it seems that (at least as far as my experience has shown) homosexual men do not smell like heterosexual or bisexual men do. (Hope that was clearly put.)
an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed
Humans ARE animals too.
What about the ability of our sense of smell to make us remember things?
It's very strong with me, almost to a crazy point. Smelling a fragrance that I associate with someone makes me remember them (almost jolts me) much more than anything else, even seeing a picture of that person.
There's no mention of intensity of smell. It seems pretty obvious that humans could follow a smell trail if it's strong enough -- we do have the sense of smell and the ability to turn our heads in different directions. Not much of a revelation.
One of the researchers in the article says the biggest problem for humans vs. dogs is that they can's move as fast with their nose to the ground. Sure we can follow a strong scent trail through the grass, but could a human track somebody walking through the woods just by scent? I seriously doubt it. Animals seem to have the ability to track very subtle smells and easily differentiate them from many other strong smells in the same area.
While I'm not surprised that humans can track a scent, and I'm certainly not surprised that civilization may have interfered with this ability, I'm just not sure it's one of our areas of specialization. Your average garden-variety scent hound has more scent receptors, packed into a much larger area, stashed inside that world-class smeller. His entire face, including his long, floppy ears and all those wrinkles (if he has them), is intended to funnel all that scent up into his wide nostrils, where he can interpret and act on it. I've long imagined that at the dawn of time, the human/dog interaction may have gone something like this:
Dog to Human: Wanna go get some meat?
Human to Dog: Yeah. You run on ahead, don't forget to let me know where you are, and I'll follow along with this stick. I just figured out how to put some sharp flint on the end of it. Should do a good job of killing that gazelle or whatever it is.
Dog to Human: AROOO!
Later that same evening...
Human to Dog: Get away from that! Let me hack it up with this sharp piece of flint.
Dog to Human: Good job! If you don't mind, I'll just gorge myself on the leftovers so I can go home and regurgitate some for the wife and pups.
Human to Dog: Yeah, I'm taking the good parts. My wife has been gathering some kind of green stuff, and she'll put it on the meat and apply fire to it. Good eating!
No wonder humans are generally so fond of dogs. We're hunting buddies from way back.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Terrible!
Bruce
Someone had to say it :)
Mine's stuffed, has been for years.
It works but it's extremely weak compared to how it was when I was a kid.
I rarely smell perfumes of girls, even if they put their hand to my face and say sniff, most meals are scentless, I can only really smell very strong things. (Petrol fumes, coffee from a can - etc)
I smell dead people. Walking around like regural people... :p
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
> Then our brain calculates how far away objects are from us by noticing how much
> inward each eye has to rotate to hold the object in focus
Well, no. Or you would look quite funny for any non-chamaeleon-being and would be busy constantly rotating your eye to measure distances.
Your brain compares the different pictures both eyes record and finds the transformation it has to do to merge (points on) one picture into (points on) the other. This transformation matrix gives good hints about the distance for a few meters, especially for slowly moving or immobile objects.
For all the rest you use size-differences, lighting differences, size-changes of moving objects and a lot of other guesswork.
Many of people (me included:) don't have the first capability because they have (had) strabism (as a child). They still might be able to ride a motorcycle and avoid colliding with other objects (mostly capability 2) while they are fun to watch while parking a car in a small space (method 1 required, or a car of very familiar dimensions)
Eyes and ears are placed dramatically differently in predators and prey - but nostrils are pretty much always close together in all animals.
It's definitely a thought-provoking topic.
www.sjbaker.org
This reminds me of the old joke:
Q - How is being an OB/GYN and a pizza delivery boy the same?
A - They can both smell it, but can't eat it!
Libertas in infinitum
I for one am happy to serve as a snifferhuman for our new dog overlords.
Dr. Dennis McFadden from UT Austin found significant differences on hearing sensitivity between some comparisons of male/female with various sexual orientation. Last time I heard, he was trying different variation of sounds to find all variations that create significant differences on all possible comparisons. Anyway, if my memory serves me right, there was also some studies finding significant difference on smelling sensitivity. And study of length of fingers, hand/finger pattern and their correlation with sexual orientation. The length of fingers study is conducted at UT Austin.. And there is a research center for female sexuality at UT austin too. I wonder if UT Austin psychology majors are sexually more capable.. :-)
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
this is why. :)
I read that as saying that he could tell which of his books she had been handling by recognizing their scent on her hands. This didn't phase me a bit, although I was a bit surprised that bottles would have a unique enough smell. It wasn't until I read another poster's description that I realized he was recognizing the scent of his wife on the books.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
"Famous", by definition, implies that you don't have to say who he is. Or that he's famous.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
some one had to make this joke.
Eclipse PDE and Me
... humans can follow a scent trail -- an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed.
Aren't humans animals, then?
but it certainly isn't my friends and family after I've been eating burritos and drinking beer.
As a new mom I was surprised (and not especially happy) to discover that, on entering a daycare room filled with toddlers, I could right away determine that MY toddler was sporting a full diaper load. Many moms with kids that age report the same experience. There's nothing like dealing with your own babies to make you realize what an animal you REALLY are.
I think environment does make a significant difference. Yes, primates rely mostly on sight, and no ape is going to out-sniff a dog. But I'm sure other primates smell better than civilized man.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
-You have been modded appropriately-
I think something's happened to Beagles over the years. Now if they could only evolve away that obnoxious noise that they make.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Please someone tell me this was not funded with wasted taxpayer money.
Else can we do a study on the over-estimated human sense of common?
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