Burn it up
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2009
- Messages
- 119
I have experienced on a couple of occasions a heightened sense of smell while under the effects of amphetamine. I was reading about it and there are anecdotal reports of this happening with some frequency (I think Oliver Sacks was one of the first ones to write about it).
From my personal observations, the impression that I got was not that I experienced a false sense of heightened smell (as one could, for instance, with LSD and an apparent heightened sense of vision), but a real physical ability to perceive smells that I could not normally identify. Examples range from subtleties in the odour of people, a plastic after-taste in a cheap cologne, or a rancid smell inside the fridge. As far as I read, this happens because of low levels of dopamine in the olfactory bulbs (Atianjoh et al. (2008). "Amphetamine causes dopamine depletion and cell death in the mouse olfactory bulb”).
My question here is not actually regarding the mechanisms of this hyperosmia, but about the evolutionary implications. How come are we physically capable of detecting much more smells than we are actually perceiving and processing? It seems like a waste of resources. What is the evolutionary advantage of our brains filtering and ignoring these little subtleties?
Does it have to do maybe with a learning process by which we push the sense of smell to a secondary level of importance just because we don’t use it very often? Kind of like blind people do with the brain areas related to sight?
I just found this topic really interesting. If anybody has some insights, please chime in!
From my personal observations, the impression that I got was not that I experienced a false sense of heightened smell (as one could, for instance, with LSD and an apparent heightened sense of vision), but a real physical ability to perceive smells that I could not normally identify. Examples range from subtleties in the odour of people, a plastic after-taste in a cheap cologne, or a rancid smell inside the fridge. As far as I read, this happens because of low levels of dopamine in the olfactory bulbs (Atianjoh et al. (2008). "Amphetamine causes dopamine depletion and cell death in the mouse olfactory bulb”).
My question here is not actually regarding the mechanisms of this hyperosmia, but about the evolutionary implications. How come are we physically capable of detecting much more smells than we are actually perceiving and processing? It seems like a waste of resources. What is the evolutionary advantage of our brains filtering and ignoring these little subtleties?
Does it have to do maybe with a learning process by which we push the sense of smell to a secondary level of importance just because we don’t use it very often? Kind of like blind people do with the brain areas related to sight?
I just found this topic really interesting. If anybody has some insights, please chime in!