Week4

I am a sucker for good smells. I almost instinctively smell things in a store, and if smells good, it definitely makes me more inclined to buy it. Popcorn at the movies, deodorants/shampoos/soaps in the store, and fries at a fast food restaurant are all examples of products whose smells definitely affect my willingness to purchase them. I enjoy a good scent–it pleases me and even comforts me at times. Certain scents evoke some of my fondest memories; for example, without smelling it, I can envision the smell of my grandma’s house and remember all of the great times my sister and I had there. I think that the subconscious connection between the olfactory system and the limbic system is stronger for me than a lot of people, and I consider myself lucky for this. I do have seasonal allergies–mainly pollen–so I have been trained by my body to not smell flowers, because although they may smell great, they make me sneeze without fail. For this reason, I can hardly ever walk through the department store perfume section, because the way they waft the scents out into the aisles makes it impossible for me to walk through them. Other stores’ smells, however, are very pleasing to me. There is a store in our nearby mall called Wilson’s Leather, and not everything they sell is leather, but the majority of it is. Anyway, you can be walking on the other side of the mall aisle and smell the leather that they waft out into the mall, and even though I have never bought anything from there, I still love to go in and smell around.

I used to work at an amusement park, at the carnival games, and right across the walkway from our games was a Subway store, and every morning, before the park was even open, they would make their bread, wafting the scent of that fresh-baked bread out into the park, and it drove me crazy because I could never leave my post to go get something, although I always wanted to.

I find one of the most peculiar things about smell to be that things that smell good in small or moderate quantities smell absolutely awful when you inhale them deeply. Gas and paint are two examples of these objects that affect me like that. I love the mild aroma of gas in the air at a gas station or the smell of paint in a room when the window is open, but if you get too close to the gas pump or you forget to open a window in the room you painted, the smell can completely overpower you and your body repulses it. It seems peculiar to me that your body would learn not to let so many receptors bind odorant molecules, and thereby limit the intensity of the odor.