RE: Odor Basics, Understanding and Using Odor

[Guest guest]

Hi folks,

Henry thanks for the heads up on The Scent of Desire. I’ll

check it out. And trade you ”Natural History of the Senses”

by Diane Ackerman (anything by Diane Ackerman is good by me).

I’ve found odors to be very interesting. Over the

years I have:

·

Had many cases where people are far more upset about a nuisance

odor than something they can’t smell with a pretty high risk level (and

far more likely to spend the money and effort to fix the odor than to fix

something like 200 pCi/l radon levels))

·

come to believe this is because radon does not exist for the

limbic system, but odors do here I’m prone to mumble something about

trigeminal nerve and blood-brain barrier)

·

had cases with folks who can’t detect odors that 30 other

people find really annoying (no not their own farts)

·

seen and experienced the connection between odors and memories

stored in the limbic system

In addition to the McGuinley paper several years ago and like

ita lot. They have published a number of other papers I like. In

addition I recommend papers by:

Pawel

Wargocki at LBL

Bill

Cain at UC San Diego

Anton

Ph. Van Harreveld Barcelona

Prof.

Dr.-Ing. Franz-Bernd Frechen, U Kassel

And

there are standards that relate to odors:

An

EU standard method 13725

The

62 panel method

A

few ASTM standards

·

Determination of Odor and Taste Thresholds By a Forced-Choice

Ascending Concentration Series Method of Limits

·

Sensory Evaluation of Beverages Containing Alcohol

(my own favorite and it requires designated drivers for

panelists)

Terry

Brennan

Intellect

is a flyspeck on the sea of emotion – attributed to Carl Jung

From: iequality

[mailto:iequality ] On Behalf Of slack.henry@...

Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 3:44 PM

To: iequality

Subject: RE: “Odor Basics”, Understanding and

Using Odor

FYI - I just found a book by Herz at my local library, " The Scent

of Desire " . Dr. Herz has researched odors since the early 1990's and

written 50 original papers, so she knows the subject as well as anyone.

News to me: odors usually have a strong emotional component. This means

that some people like the skunk odor, becuase they first encountered it

at a good-humored moment. Or some may hate rose odors, since first

encountering that smell at a close relative's funeral.

Likewise, you can create responses in a group by telling them it's a

stimulating or depressing odor, no matter what odor is present -- or

none at all.

FYI: she does not believe in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS). I

cannot reproduce her arguments here, but you may want to read it

yourself.

Henry Slack

U.S. EPA Region 4