j'aime le parfum d'odeur, j'aime l'odeur de parfum

• Air, effluvium, efflux, essence, flavor, graveolent, musk, noctuolent, osmagogue, perfume, redolence, scenting, scenty, snuff, stink, tincture...


• Space smells funny. Astronauts have struggled to describe the smell of space: "burnt gunpowder or the ozone smell of electrical equipment." This I find far from satisfying. So I'm trying to imagine what it might smell like based on, well, what it's made of. Which brings happy strings of thought and consequent anticipation of proper, lovely fluffy blanketed & pajama'd sleep.


• No one else smells like you.


• I love a good underarm as much as the next gal, but perhaps not piped through a monstrous dental apparatus. An exhibit I'd travel to see, nonetheless.


• Schizophrenic sense of smell. There did seem to be a smells-are-weird theme among the late night schizophrenic hotline callers. Unrelated or not, people with certain flavors of schizophrenia may have deficits in smell identification.


• My cat's breath smells like cat food. We demonstrate for the first time that most women, and some men, deliberately smell their partners' clothing when they are apart. [McBurney, M.L., Shoup, S.A. & Streeter, D.H. (2006). Olfactory Comfort and Attachment Within Relationships. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 2954-2963. doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00420.x]


• More interesting (and not so patent that one wonders why bother collect data at all), though no one could successfully feign surprise here: The ladies possess superior sniffers. Furthermore (despite suspicion about methodology & interpretation), who could deny the chin-stroking "hmmmm" factor of a positive correlation between emotional sensitivity and sense of smell?


• If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all.

baryshnikov / cage

much less creepy than slim goodbody...

...and i get to see them perform next month.

Wait

by Galway Kinnell


Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

dope!

Sweet, sweet dopamine. It's what makes new love feel so intense, so important, sometimes even plunging new lovers into pseudo-psychosis. It's why cocaine feels good. It's the big cheese in addiction [some would say one could develop an addiction to cheese via the dopamine/reward system]. It's also involved with motor control pathologies such as Parkinson's disease, but that's a topic for some other blog. For your reading pleasure, a selection of dopaminergic gems:

• Dude! It's a freaking visible synaptic vesicle! The report (with images and a cool, techie video), and a lay friendly-ish play-by-play.


• Smartass protazoans and horny, suicidal rats.


• Finally giving attention to a book I purchased five years ago. Patience, please with the long turns: Dopamine is involved in the impact of early social interaction on the brain structures associated with emotion regulation (of course there are other factors, but this post is dopamine-centric).

  
  The author (Schore) suggests that early maternal deprivation shapes the development of actual brain structures. You know, the brains we'll have for the rest of our lives. [Maternal deprivation = Infant stress that goes unregulated by the mother/primary caregiver - which doesn't have to look like an emaciated orphan rocking back and forth in his lonely crib, but any significant lack of attunement and responsiveness to an infant's emotional cues. The implications of some common parenting practices should thus be of concern.]

  Implications for later functioning may include impairments in attention and focus, hyperaggression, and other emotional dysregulation (possibly including depressive and/or manic states, anxiety, substance abuse - which is, after all, exogenous emotional regulation -- "self-medication" if you like).

  Even interpretations of later social interaction can be impaired: 1) failing to perceive the salience of social interactions, or 2) misinterpreting them. I'll explain: 1) Your friend's face bears markers of sadness, but you are unable to perceive them and thus cannot respond to his/her sadness, and are baffled as to why s/he is upset with you. 2) You tell your spouse/girlfriend/lover that you are angry with her. She asks for clarification. She may well want to understand you with the loveliest of intentions (or may simply be clueless and need some assistance), but the warped "lenses" through which you view certain interpersonal interactions leads you to believe she is attacking you, and, if you are dating a shrink, that she must be using her voodoo shrink powers to psychoanalyze you, inaccurately, and without your consent. [Don't get any ideas; this is a hypothetical situation used here for elaborative purposes.]



• A peculiar feeling: Mussels and their dopamine glue?

take the stairs

thanks, r.t.

disorientation tastes like spinach

...and it could make you smarter.

...the same results were evident among people who were led to feel alienated about themselves as they considered how their past actions were often contradictory. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," Proulx explained. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns.