These — and dozens of other differences in scent perception — are detailed in a new study, published this week in the journal PNAS. The work provides new evidence of how extraordinarily different one person’s “smellscape” may be from another’s. It’s not that some people are generally better smellers, like someone else may have better eyesight, it’s that any one person might experience certain scents more intensely than their peers.
— Read more at You Will Never Smell My World the Way I Do at The New York Times.
I like this. Part of what I like is that we’ve sort of always known this and had language for it; “to my nose…”; “on me…”
Yes, and add differences in skin odor and texture, humidity issues, age of the fragrance itself, etc etc, you’re really never smelling the same thing.
Thanks for this link, Robin. Very interesting.
Glad you liked it
I really enjoyed the article. My coworker heard about the research on the radio this morning. That kind of surprised me because she just listens to the local morning radio show.
Oh, interesting!
Interesting, I wonder how this worked out for that hunter-gatherer group you mentioned in another article (I think it was earlier this year?) that had an abstract vocabulary for scent. I’d be curious to ask them how they dealt with different people’s perception of smells.