Treat your nose to good-smelling products, including incense, air fresheners, and essential oils, all available at Mushroom New Orleans.
Have you ever smelled the ocean and become transported to your childhood? Smells profoundly affect our emotions and memories.
From incense to air fresheners from brands like Satya and Smoke Odor to essential and fragrance oils, our New Orleans smoke shop is a treasure trove of wonderful smells.
What makes our sense of smell so wonderful and complex? We did a little digging to uncover the answers.
People have great smelling ability.
According to a 2014 study, human beings can distinguish at least one trillion different odors. However, many of the changes induced by a smell are processed subconsciously.
Unlike our other senses, the olfactory nerves do not proceed directly to the brain's thalamus, a gateway to consciousness. When we smell, information is processed from the nose to cortical areas. This means that we can sometimes be affected by a smell without even realizing it.
Humans smell some scents better than animals.
Scientists long believed that human beings were inferior to many animals at detecting and identifying smells.
That's not quite true, or not always true. We detect certain smells, like those emitted by plants, better than dogs and other animals known for their acute sense of smell. Our superiority in this regard is attributable to our ancient ability to seek out fruit and vegetables as food sources. By the same token, animals aren't as good at detecting the odors that aren't really relevant to them. Humans have also detected some scents at lower concentrations than pigs and mice.
Some humans are "smell blind."
Many factors affect your sense of smell, including what the American Psychological Association calls "quirks of physiology." For example, some people are "smell blind" to certain chemicals that others have no problem detecting, like the chemicals produced by the digestion of asparagus.
Hunger can affect your perception of smells.
According to the researchers at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, we are more sensitive to smells when we're hungry, yet we are better at detecting food-specific smells just after we eat. Body mass also affects our sensitivity to smells.
Great Expectations
One study also found that suggestion alone can change whether we perceive a smell as positive or negative, and that this power of suggestion can even affect physical health. Researchers presented people with asthma with a harmless odor. They then told half of the subjects that the odor could relieve their symptoms and told the other half that it could aggravate their symptoms. Participants told that their symptoms might get worse not only reported feeling worse but actually suffered increased lung inflammation.
Our brains process body odors differently.
Then there's body odor. One study found that our brains use different regions to process body odors than are used to process other scents.
As human beings evolved, we came to rely less on body odors to find mates and to recognize people we know. Once upon a time, though, body odors played a bigger role. Researchers suggest that this is the reason our brain treated body odor as especially important and deserving its own neural networks.
Of course, although we don't rely on body odor to recognize other people as much as we did eons ago, humans haven't lost the ability either. Some people are better at it than others. One study suggested that female subjects who could correctly identify the smell of their roommates on a T-shirt (as distinguished from the smell of a T-shirt worn by a stranger) also did better on tests of emotional sensitivity. According to the researcher, people "who are more sensitive to social smells are also more sensitive to emotional signals."
Like sight and sound, our ability to smell helps us get through life.
Scientists have come to realize that olfaction works very much in conjunction with sight and sound to guide us. It's not surprising. Our senses don't exist in a vacuum, and we tend to be bombarded by visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli simultaneously.
Some research has shown that our senses influence one another. One classic study found that when French researchers colored a white wine red with an odorless dye, wine connoisseurs now tended to describe the taste of the white wine as if it were red wine, suggesting that the appearance influenced their perception of taste. We also know that food tastes different to us if we are deprived of our sense of smell.
Ready to smell something good? Head to your favorite New Orleans smoke shop.
Mushroom New Orleans stocks an extensive selection of high-quality brands, scents, and burners.
Just one example: our aroma oils like Goloka Arabian Myrrh Pure Aroma Oil is a great alternative to burning cones and stick incense. Just add two or three drops to water and light a tea candle under the container.
If you have questions about any of our products, we are here from 10 a.m. to midnight daily. See you soon.
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