Why You Can’t Smell Your Own Home
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2024
- Have you ever come home after a long day, realized your house smells bad, but it goes away after a few minutes? Why can’t we smell our own home? Tara is here to explain a phenomenon known as “sensory adaptation.”
Read More:
Why Can’t You Smell Your Own Home?
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“Everyone’s place has a smell. Some homes smell like fancy perfume or Anthropologie candles; others smell like cats.”
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What Makes The Perfect Belly Button?
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I want them to do one about "why do we look different in pictures than we do in a mirror"
a similar effect with vision is that you ignore your nose almost all of the time.
And glasses, if you wear glasses.
I've been in my house so long that I can't even see it.
Even more amazing is that all of those eye floater things you've ever seen ARE STILL THERE!
Mantikore420 it IS in your field of vision so you were wrong and cubedude76 was right. Just close one eye and you will clearly see your nose. But when you open both eyes your brain receives overlapped images, one eye sees your nose while the other eye sees in the distance for the same quadrant of view. your brain knows that your nose is always there so it ignores that and concentrates on the distance.
Also, persistence of vision is exactly the same as what Tara is describing with the olfactory system. The reason if you stare at a red dot for a few seconds and then look away you will see a green dot that isn't actually there is because your brain has turned down the red cones in that part of your retina leaving the green and blue more predominant. Exactly the same as the brain turning down specific odor receptors when consistently exposed.
"Why we can't smell our own home" "Because our brains are wired to begin to ignore constant stimuli after a little bit."
Slow news day?
I figured this out when I was a toddler..
Yay for being smart!!!
Explains why people never notice if they smell bad
For the same reason that you cant smell what your house smells like.
not true.
lol awesome attack on titans avatar!
munem939
Let out some smelly farts.
Is this why Women can't smell when they are wearing a Half a Bottle of Perfume when it's making the rest of us Gag when we are 4 blocks away Upwind? Or make us Gag when we are trying to eat but all we taste is the Bitch's Perfume?
You mean Gag?
> Gage
Are you describing 'gagging'? Or am I missing a reference?
Nurdoidz Yea Gagging. Gage is a name.
I'm assuming you're a guy so while we're talking about whole genders, guys do the same thing with axe. I know some girls do that but I swear guys in the locker room think that stuff is like shower in a can
Jeremy Smith Though I agree that it's stupid to only talk about women when it comes to overpowering body fragrance, I don't agree with your second point. It's purely anecdotal and, judging by how you phrased your first part, probably biased. I take the ground that both genders do it equally unless anyone can provide some evidence that points to one gender specifically.
This is also the reason some people can't smell their own bodily stench, right? How horrible.
Actually, the reason some people cannot feel their own bodily stenches is because stenches are smelled, rather than felt. It does not have anything to do with sensory adaptation.
Nurdoidz HAHAHA You're right and I'm so sorry! Fixing it right now. Thanks!
Ralphatality
It is good to joke around, even when discussing meaningful topics. :-P
Nurdoidz Truly! xD
Tomorrow on DNews: "Breathing in and out is good for you" A study has been done.
satay71 no der😂😂
indian people's homes usually smell weird o_O
Pinkerton97 true
Its so bad not only weird
Not really
It works the same way with cologne. If you use the same fragrance everyday you can't notice it after awhile . The way to fix that is to stop using fragrance for a few days or rotate your collection
This is an article on this topic from my blog. If you want to look at other articles, I will be looking forward to your comments. Love.
thysparky.blogspot.com/2020/12/examples-of-sensory-adaptation-which-is.html
I thought this was common knowledge :/
I've been told my apartment smells like Bacon.
I can't smell it.
That's so sad
alliseeisgoldxo sad? Bacon is amazing.
Stephen Bagnell And .. you're the only one who can't smell that. That's why it's "sad". ;D
xDresultsAMV
Bacon is still amazing regardless.
my house smells good when i come back from vacation
i live next to a highway, you sorta tune it out even if you are talking to someone. people who live next to the highway with me don't talk any louder when we are near the highway or away from it, the noise of the cars is just filtered out in our heads so there is no reason to speak loud even though the highway once focused on is extremely loud. so yeah, happens with other senses too.
IS THAT SO? Sorry, it's too loud out there... YOU HEARD ME RIGHT?
Griffith ROGER THAT TANGO. LOUD AND CLEAR.
I always have this, as I have a guinea pig. She has a large cage in my room, and even though it's well ventilated with a fan going on to circulate all day and the door open, most people feel like I should be able to smell something, yet I never smell a thing! My aunt does not like my piggy, so she always tells me it smells horrible and she never seems to get used to it - which fits well with this video (bad = not adapting). But my mom likes my guinea pig and she sometimes smells it, but it never really bothers her.
And then my mom hates farm smells, but I go horseback riding a lot and my dad grew up on one, so we never smell that either. Both my dad and I, have come to the point where we don't smell manure and dirt or whatever, so it never bothers us. The only thing I smell on my horse is a sweet hay smell which I actually like.
Uhh... of course all the other senses do this. I bet 9 out of 10 people reading this weren't aware their butts are sitting on a couch or if they're standing, their feet are touching the floor. When you chew gum for several hours, the flavor may diminish after a while but you're also getting used to the flavor at the same time. Spit your gum out, eat something else, and re-chew the gum and you'll start tasting the original flavor again. As for eyesight, if our brains gathered every piece of information we saw, we wouldn't be functional. We are literally blind to most of what we see, and magicians use this fact to their advantage. There's also our sense of temperature - you can comfortably ease yourself into a jacuzzi but you can't just jump right into one.
Peter Schmidt
> Uhh... of course all the other senses do this.
She meant it in the way that you cannot pick up on the scent you have adapted to _on command,_ which you can do with taste, sight, etc. The sense of temperature and touch, however, probably count towards sensory adaptation at times.
Nurdoidz Yes, I suppose that's a valid point.
Hold on a sec.
Sight works the same way. The most common things you can't see unless you're aware of them are your nose, glasses, and eye floaters.
Funny, but I smell CLEAVAGE when I watch this video. Yes. I can smell with my eyes.
Sight does this at times. You get acclimated to dark and light situations. After spinning your brain makes you dizzy because it's still trying to cope with the motion. And tons of visual tricks are based on adjusting eyesight, then tricking it!
It's called sensory habituation, all of your senses have it, and it's an idea that has been around for some time. It's like how you don't feel your clothing on your body after a time, unless I remind you that you're wearing clothing. Or how white noise eventually fades into the background. Neurons get bored of sending messages and stop if nothing new or interesting happens. Your eyes would do this except that they take part in microsaccades, a slight unnoticeable movement of the eye, which keeps the neurons in the eyes constantly functioning. If you didn't have these and attempted to focus on an object, everything in the world not in motion would disappear.
The interesting part is the study about people habituating more slowly if they thought it was toxic than if they thought it was natural. This adds to the current literature on sensory habituation.
Either Tara is following me around during the day and noticing what I notice, and then making a video in 5 minutes before I get to the computer, or she is psychic.
Persistence of vision is exactly the same as what Tara is describing with the olfactory system. The reason if you stare at a red dot for a few seconds and then look away you will see a green dot that isn't actually there is because your brain has turned down the red cones in that part of your retina leaving the green and blue more predominant. Exactly the same as the brain turning down specific odor receptors when consistently exposed.
1:37 Yeah... You can become blind to certain things when you stare. Everything you are not staring at fade away and you don't process them after awhile a staring.
You definitely have the same adaptive instincts with touch. When I started to wear contacts for a while, I'd still push on the bridge of my nose, or put my fingers the exact width of my frames where my frames are despite not actually wearing my glasses, but it still felt like they were slipping down or falling off.
The smell of my house is still the best memory of my childhood. :3 I used to spend summers away from home with my relatives and when I got home the smell of my house seemed like the best thing in the world. ^_^
I'm pretty sure those are glasses you are wearing there and those are the perfect example for the same thing happening with your visual field. So don't tell the world that "this only happens with your olfactory system" please.
In the military I used my eyes for extended amounts of time to look in the exact same direction with my eyes (because that's the way you scan a battlefield, with everything fixed and your shoulders doing the movement). After a whole day of that I would take off my glasses and see their negative imprint for about half an hour. Wearing my glasses during that time normalized my visual field, making them invisible again.
An even easier example is dirt: glasses are always dirty somewhere, but even if they are covered in dried sweat droplets and dust you can see through them perfectly fine, without anything blocking your vision. it just takes a bit for your brain to adapt to them.
*****
> I'm pretty sure those are glasses you are wearing there and those are the perfect example for the same thing happening with your visual field. So don't tell the world that "this only happens with your olfactory system" please.
She stated that it only happens with the olfactory system on the conditions of the sense being able to re-sense the sensory agent in question. Taking your glasses example, it is the difference between your eyes being able to see your glasses on command and your nose not being able to smell the odor of the room you are in _on command._
Yeah went to my friends house i was like "Dude it smells like shit in here" he was like "What the fuck are you talking about". The brain, a wonderful thing
I would just say, we do adapt with our eyes.
Take for example lightbulbs, most are tungsten. So they give off a strong orange warm light. But if we are reading a white sheet of paper, the paper doesn't appear the shade of a tangerine!
Same for fluorescent bulbs, they are green. But we don't see the world in green.
And the initial contact the the light is often very strong in my case. But we don't notice it after a few minutes. Because if we didn't differentiating between other colours would be super difficult!
Died of laughter when she came to the temporarily blind part xD
actually it smells good when im back from vacation! i just thought about the same thing right just in 1 second after the begin of the video. We also smell (the human body). And i think that is the same reason why we can't smell our selves all the time. Because we are used to it
I not only smell the common smells in my home better after returning from being away for hours, I also can smell everything right after a shower.
I don't have pets but people seem to be immune to how badly pets tend to stink up their homes unless they clean/vacuum daily.
Just keep your house clean and no funk! Please no over sensitive comments! If it stinks clean it if it does not then yeah nuff said! :)
she looks like the redhead from that 70's show!!!!
Donna
I must be one of the strange humans. My sense of smell is so sensitive that when I'm in my house for long periods, I can detect a new smell right away while still smelling the house normally. When my elder mother sprays the air freshener in the bathroom, my nose goes into over drive of knowing how nasty the bathroom now is or was so to stay out of said area for ten minutes. I don't adapt to such scent because I've had to learn how to stay on the defense cause of the type of life I've had. I keep my instincts and senses going at all times. I'll only adapt if the threats are gone for good and that can take years.
It's like when you're having a nasty turd, the smell builds up but you become accustomed to it. Then when you leave the room for a while and re-enter, you can smell the nasty turd again lol
Thank you Tara and Dnews team for this video and so many others that help me to understand more about science
Actually Tara when I read sometimes i'll zone out and once I snap back into it Im half way down the page and so confused, and the part I remember and started on is a full page above where i ended, lol. Maybe i just day dream
Interesting, now explain why we're not disgusted by our own poop smell.
What a beauty Tara is :-) pretty eyes and hair.
I opened a box of baking soda once when I had my room closed off and air conditioned. Smelled weird when I stepped out of my room the next morning.
Looking at the same time for the long time WILL make you have tunnel version because of the same reason.
same thing happens when you walk into a toilet after someone has taken a huge smelly dump, you smell it at first for a little while then you just get used to it and smell it no more
Keep up the good work, love D news, and my favorite host is tara hands down :)
Actually after staring at something for a long time your brain tunes it out and you cant see it. Thats why you cants see the "eye floatys" most of the time.
Eye floatys??!
Love that
When I was a kid, and I look up into a blue sky and saw "eye floaties" I thought they where angels!
so if you stare at someone the whole time they become invisable to you???
TheDesius Well, if you stare in a direction without moving your eyes, after some time you realize that everything has blurred out, so that's somehow the same thing the nose does. But of course, you had no idea what happened in front of you in that time because you were thinking about something else for a long time.
lisa3535 I think I am going to cry lol xD =')
Well I'm gonna light up some scentsies. It probably smells in here and I don't even know.
Finally a video about this
If you stare at something for a while you do temporary go blind...
Your vision gets blurry and everything goes black
It only works if you don't move your eyes at all though
I used to not care about smells until I had an ex who is obsessed with scents, now my nose is so sensitive I react to all sorts of weird smells.
When I start thinking about something I somehow stop listening to people O_o It's kinda useful to block out annoying people.
I'd argue with the notion that after a while we don't stop seeing things. I have glasses and it's almost like they're not there for some reason sometimes.
So that's why I don't like using the same perfumes over and over again. I have a new favourite perfume every month or so. xD
Get your facts straight DNews. Sensory adaptation doesn't just exist in smell. I'm pretty sure we are more sensitive to sound in the morning when everything is quiet than later when there is louder things going on around us. Eating a lot of chili adapts my taste so that my mouth doesn't get as hot when I eat more. Touch pretty much explains itself, and Optical Illusions explain how our eyes work to adapt the lighting, repetition, and colors on everything we see.
sometimes if the night before i have been cooking something like roasting meat or baking a chicken in the oven then the following day when i get home from work then that is what i can smell in the house but no i can never smell my own home
I use carpet freshener... but theres like 1/2 inch of crud on my stove.
Everytime I clean it it just comes back, so I just leave it.
Sometimes though if theres lots, I'll let my dog up on it for a snack!
+1
I've always wondered this!!!!
While i was preparing to watch this video I was microwaving some soup that I made yesterday.
I came up with a question:
Why do some things (like this soup) taste horrible when it's cold, but awesome when it's warm?
Djezus. The benefits of exercise are endless. Oo Been learning so much about health and nutrition this past year and it's astonishing :-D
I clicked this vid cause I ate beans at a Mexican place today and now I'm farting in my living room and there's people coming over tomorrow😵😂
This is an article on this topic from my blog. If you want to look at other articles, I will be looking forward to your comments. Love.
thysparky.blogspot.com/2020/12/examples-of-sensory-adaptation-which-is.html
I smell my house every time I enter. It doesn't smell bad. It smells like my house. So, i didn't know this was a thing :x
Friends that visit me allways complain that my Gaming PC is loud as fuck , but i cant her a thing when im sittion on my Pc so i guess i got so used to it that i don´t hear the fans inside anymore :D
Sensory adaptation also works with the sense of touch and taste… You can't taste your own saliva and you stop "feeling" your underwear after a couple of minutes.
Actually attention blindness to things that change very little or aren't important is kind of a thing. But yeah, you can just snap your attention back to whatever it is, so it's not quite the same thing.
holy crap it all makes sense!
I notice that whenever I go away on a holiday and come back a week or two later I smell my house.
I literally googled this question the day before this appeared in my subscriptions xDD I don't know why I find that strange it's just a coincidence of course xD
your blouse made me love science, thank you 🌹😍
Some of the firstest!
Where's Laci!!??!!
Ohh Tara I see on ign!!!! Lol I knew you looked familiar
I love Tara Long! I love watching any video you host.
Tara,
I love you.
LOL!!!
You seem mathematically perfect to me.
you said air fresheners pose no threat: THEY DO. studies show a smoking room has better quality air than a home or office with air fresheners or incense. it comes with thousands of sintetic chemicals known to cause illnesses and also many which haven't even been studied regarding human health. PLEASE INFORM PROPPERLY ABOUT IT.
I'm filing this one under: Duh, I thought this was obvious. The belly button story at the end is way more interesting.
Nothing worst than visiting someones house and it smells like cigarettes and cat pee. How do they not know? Now we know...
Actually, this happens with sight also. The eye floaters u see today will disappear after a while.
A lot of scents for me tend to stay with me like really strong perfume or scented hand sanitizers and then I can get bad migraines from them. Do you know why this happens?
I don't need a study to know this. My room stinks (my fault, I really need to get on top of it) but I don't smell it myself.
staring at exactly the same spot for like 5 minutes make me go blind... i thought that was normal. 0.o
Is this similar to when someone says a word so many times that it stops sounding like a word? And have you done a video on that?
hey, can sight be adapted too ? I have noticed that when I am outside the house at work, coffees shops or malls, I have to wear glasses in order to see properly but once i enter the house I take the glasses off , and I can see clearer ! I never wear them at home but outside, I have to wear otherwise its very hazy ! any idea why?
Actually you would go blind if you quit moving your eyes... kind of. Your eyes have to constantly be moving to continue to see things. If your eyes stopped their nearly undetectable shaking and the exact same areas continued to be stimulated by the same input the receptors would burn out and you wouldn't see anything. As soon as your eye moves a different set of receptors catch the input and you see it for just a fraction of a second. The first set have a moment to rest or refresh with new input. If the same input hits the same area continuously you stop seeing anything.
So that's why i can always smell cigarette smoke, but wait i don't get used to incense either.
I don't stay at home much, so I always notice.
that adaptation is not unique to smell.. we do the same thing with sound and vision as well. we tune out background noise and stop seeing things that remain still.
Staring at something long enough DOES make you go blind actually. Sort of, anyway: if you can keep your vision very still, your ability to perceive patterns fades away as your brain just goes into auto-pilot and fills in the color. If the receptor cells in your eyes keep firing in exactly the same way, they'll eventually stop and let your brain take over to assume what's there. The problem with this is that your eyes make small movements very frequently, so this effect is almost never noticed.
But, yeah, kind of a science fail there. I am disappoint.
My house just smells like dog and air fresheners trying to mask the smell of dogs
the sense of smell is one of 2 senses that is chemical. i wonder if the acquired taste is the same
I don't think I'm the only one going "Duhh!"
This theory can be tested (and has been) by merely using the restroom, and then walking out of the restroom, and then walking back into the restroom to realize your shit really does stink.
so literally ,we can only smell the differences.
My house smells bad because of my disabled dad. I hate it when people come over because it smells like doodoo and pee 🤦🏾♀️☹️😭 I know it's not his fault but still!
This is an article on this topic from my blog. If you want to look at other articles, I will be looking forward to your comments. Love.
thysparky.blogspot.com/2020/12/examples-of-sensory-adaptation-which-is.html
I can smell my house just fine, its called using your sniffer.
it's called not maintaining daily cleaning.thats why things will have an order.
I thought more people have already known this....
That's not exclusive to smell, it happens with touch, temperature and pain too.
For me I only need couple of seconds outside to notice that my brain had blocked the smell.
1 time i whad in camp whit my school and there came 1 guy that sleep in the same room whit NASTY SHOES but like 30mim-45min whe didnt smell anything but if we go to a other room you can tell the different
This is the problem I am having with my dorm. I don't know why it smells so weird and it bothers me
"A chemical air freshener" are there non-chemical air fresheners? Are they made of pure energy? I mean they can be matter as that would make them chemical air fresheners as all matter is chemicals.