The Death of Enthusiasm

Has this ever happened to you?:

You walk into a house or apartment of a friend and upon entering you smell an odor that seems to be soup of some kind, possibly Campbell's vegetable beef. "Mmmmmm, that smells good," you think to yourself. But on further observation, you realize that there is no soup being cooked at all, and you are in fact mistaking some other odor for soup. Quickly, the pleasure of smelling warm soup turns to revulsion as you realize that your friend is a pig and hasn't taken out his garbage in several weeks, and that garbage is in fact, the source of the soup-like odor.

This is what I like to call olfactory-dissonance. I first noticed this terrible phenomena when I was about 14 years old. I came into my parents house and smelled the delicious aroma of warm garlic breadsticks baking in the oven. How horrified I was when I realized that our home teacher, who was sitting in the living room, had body odor that smelled exactly like garlic breadsticks.

The terrible thing about olfactory-dissonance is that you feel completely betrayed by your body. How can your own sense of smell turn against you like that? Didn't we develop smell and our gag reflexes so we don't accidentally eat rancid meat? What if some poor caveman came across a rotting mastodon carcass and ate it because it smelled exactly like a freshly-baked cinnamon roll? That noble caveman would die, all because our noses aren't smart enough to not be fooled by things that smell like other things!

I suppose there is a flip side to this theory because sometimes foods that taste good actually smell terrible. Cheese, fish, and some kinds of Chinese food smell like death, but taste wonderful.

In conclusion, the next time you walk into your office and smell fresh donuts, don't get too excited. It could be that Jim in legal just forgot to take a shower this morning.

Labels: observational findings