Recently, I was delighted to lure sensory psychologist Avery Gilbert into my padded cell to mine some of the pop-sci nuggets explored in his funk-filled book, What the Nose Knows.
Avery and I covered a lot of ground in our discussion, but we didn’t manage to get around to some of other highlights from his book:
Former Playboy Bunny Izabella St. James gags whenever she smells baby oil because she developed a learned odor aversion to it during her stint at the Playboy Mansion. Apparently, Hef’s idea of foreplay (and “during-play”, I assume) is to grease up like a pig on a spit in Johnson & Johnson’s finest.
Studies prove that mothers really do believe that their own babies’ poop smells less bad than other tykes’ doodie.
The all-too-visceral chronology of bodily decay: fresh, bloat, active decay, advanced decay, dry decay, and remains. Apparently dry decay, which begins about a week postmortem, smells like “wet fur and old leather”. (Insert Etat Libre d’Orange joke here.)
Smells. They’re not all “unicorn underbelly fluff”, you know.
"What the Nose Knows" is available from Amazon
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