Smells and Bells

Why do some people prefer to have something sweat, some salty, and some sour? We talked about how people can perceive taste differently after reading the Taste chapter in The Natural History of the Senses. I wanted to know more about why that is. Genes play a big role in an individuals preferences of taste. If an individuals parents do not have a high sensitivity for lets say sweetness it will take a larger quantity of that type of molecule to sense or experience that taste. On the psychology side children can develop preferences based off what they are exposed to yearly in their life. Let’s say a child is exposed to really spicy food when he or she is really young. They will most likely continue to eat it as an adult. People can also learn to associate a flavor or even a specific food to how they were feeling when they ate it at one point in their life. Lets say I ate a entire bag of potato chips one day and then got immediately sick. Subconsciously I would associate me...

Would rabbis and priests associate the same thing to the same smell? This question got me thinking. Got me thinking about how people form different associations to different things, whether it's objects, certain types of people, or smells. Associations come from people's experiences and everyone has different experiences. Children who have gone through traumatic experiences will have very  different associations than children who live a sheltered life. An example might be a child who was abused by a man who smelled like pine trees will create a negative connection with that smell. However, a child who was taken on happy family camping trips might create a more positive association with that same smell. To answer the question, I don't think they would. I don't think that rabbis and priests, generally speaking, would associate smells in the same way. They grow up associating the world around them to the religion they practice and making sense of their world through...

The sixth sense, or as some call it, psychic ability, is our ability to perceive the subtle-dimension or the unseen world of angels, ghosts, Heaven, fairies, astral projection, etc. It also includes our ability to understand the subtle cause and effect relationship behind many events, which is beyond the regular comprehension of the “normal” human brain. This idea is brought up by Jeffrey Kripal in, “ Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred ”. In a society today that taps into our fears of our sixth sense and the paranormal, from horror movies, to haunted houses, paranormal investigator TV shows, the whole thing seems more like a marketing gimmick than a real thing. As a person heavily driven by neuroscience and psychology, sometimes I catch myself trying to biologically reason away experiences of the paranormal, but in the end I come back to my gut feeling that they cannot be rationally explained. As a very spiritual person I tend to lean away from science in these...

Touch is often thought of as one of the lower senses, but I think that's because people take it for granted. Unique in its reciprocity, we are touching everything all the time, and it touches us back. While strange to think about at first, we are really experiencing touch every second of our lives. I found it the most interesting that we need touch to live and thrive, and without it, babies can be susceptible to developmental risks or even death. We had touched on this before in psychology classes I've taken- the importance of a nurturing mother's touch for her babies. Harry Harlow's famous experiments on baby monkeys illustrated how integral the sensation of touch was to the babies. Given either a surrogate mother made of wire or a more comfortable one made of cloth, the baby monkeys chose to spend more time with the cloth one, even when the wire one was their source of nourishment. We tend to think of animals (and even humans, sometimes) as only requiring nourishme...