Hmm, why does my coffee smell like boiled water?

An actual thought I had before the penny dropped

“I’m not touching anything at the moment” you’re either a master of stating the obvious, or you’ve just made everyone in that room very fucking uncomfortable

I can’t feel anything. That’s what she said :(

thank you kind human! (actively avoiding using “good bot”)

Actual chad human volunteer 💪

Ah! You’re the first person I’ve seen doing transcriptions on Lemmy, this has made my day. Do you know if there’s a community where people who transcribe can coordinate, like there was at resist? I was hoping to get into the transcription stuff to help build community here and I know the subreddit had loads of resources and templates and the like.

People do say it, this meme is weird.

We already concluded that Lemmy will upbean anything, not surprised this meme is popular.

“I swear I left a dead body somewhere here three days ago. Why can’t I smell it?”

Also not smelling is neutral while the other two aren’t. Nobody said “there is an appropriate amount of light in here” or “there’s an expected amount of background noise”.

Dark and quiet are the extreme ends of the spectrum. I think smelling bad and good are the ends of the spectrum for smells, although smell is much more multi dimensional, but no smell is neutral.

I think it’s about how we calibrate our expectations relative to the default. I do think there is something different about smell.

For example, if I wake up one morning, my implicit expectation is for it to be reasonably light because of the morning sun, and I’d expect to hear some low level noise because I live in the city. The other day, I woke up and I noticed it was darker than usual because of terrible weather. Recently, I also noticed it’s much quieter than usual near where I live, because it’s a student town and many have gone home for Summer. I didn’t immediately notice, but I had a sense of uneasiness until I consciously registered this, because I had a subconscious sense of what’s normal.

I can’t imagine what waking up and there being less smell than usual would be like. For example, if someone came in and tidied up while I was asleep, without waking me. I’d notice it if there was a particularly strong smell when I went to sleep, because as you highlight, people do comment when an expected smell is not to be found. However, because of how we acclimatise to scents, the normal level of smelliness of an environment is often undetectable, so I don’t think people would generally notice a subtraction of a background smell.

It makes sense in the context of human perception though, our olfactory system is underdeveloped compared to many other animals because we don’t use it much, relatively

Not for an area that is getting forest fires. Walk into a space that is being properly filtered and you 100% get a breath of fresh air.

Not for an area that is getting forest fires. Walk into a space that is being properly filtered and you 100% get a breath of fresh air.

That sounds really distressing, I’m glad that you got to experience things coming back.

I struggled during COVID because of how my sense of smell changed. I could still smell stuff, but some things were different. My body odour, for example, smelled different. At first I thought that illness was causing funky swear smell, and then I thought it was poor hygiene for an extended period making me smell extra funky (my best friend died, I was a grief blob for a while), but eventually I realised that it was a perception issue, not a sweat issue (onions also smelled bad).

I hated it because for months afterwards, it felt like I was being haunted by COVID. I can also relate to what you describe, a sort of “epistemological anxiety”, where being aware that your perceptions are not to be trusted throws you off balance in many ways.

What’s your favourite smell?

After a certain point you kind of get used to the smell of fire, though, too

Source: I’m Canadian

I get your general point, especially when coming home from vacation, but where do you live that the air outside stinks? You need to move lol

I feel like this was a dog asking this

Fun fact about dog’s sense of smell!

It’s sensitive enough that when their human leaves for work at 8am, the human scent is strong and fresh, but it fades over the course of the day. A dog knows how strong the residual human smell is at 5pm, when the human usually returns from work, so can build a sense of routine from that. Especially cool though is that they can smell the difference between 4pm and 6pm, so this is why dogs are usually super excited when their humans return from routine jobs, it’s not just that they hear their friend approaching, they are functionally clock watching. They know when we’re running late.)

[Citation needed]

Edit: further reading added: non-academic article https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/22/1139781319/can-dogs-smell-time-just-ask-donut-the-dog#:~:text="So newer%2C more recent odors,is inextricably woven into space.