Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 17, 1995 TAG: 9508170060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: It is perhaps the best smell on the planet. Better than honeysuckle on the vine, better than bread baking in the oven, better than bucketloads of Velveeta melted on chips at a matinee of a Stallone movie.
But does Play-Doh have an objectively pleasant scent, or do we merely like it because it reminds us of childhood? (This is presuming that as an adult you have found other things to keep you occupied, like medical bills and Mylanta.)
The probable reason that Play-Doh smells really great is because the odor is associated with happy memories. It reminds us of the carefree time of youth when no one was giving us a test or making us play the violin in front of strangers.
We like childhood smells in general. Smells that remind us of Mom's cooking are great, even if Mom's cooking was objectively terrible. We like the smell of Band-Aids because it reminds us of someone taking care of us. We like the smell that comes from a pencil sharpener, though perhaps we are less crazy about a newly rubbed pencil eraser, with its suggestion of miscalculation and error.
Marcia Levin Pelchat, an experimental psychologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says a survey of older Americans found many who did not like the smell of oil of clove (eugenol), even though most people would agree that cloves smell good. The reason: Before World War II, it was commonly used as an anesthetic by dentists.
The bigger question is: Do we have any innate preference for certain smells? That's a controversial area. The orthodoxy has been that we learn to like or dislike specific odors. Preferred tastes, on the other hand - such as the love of sweets - are thought to be with us from day one.
But there are those who say there's a genetic component to smell preferences. Pelchat's colleague, Charles Wysocki, thinks that if smell preferences aren't genetically encoded, at the least they are established much earlier in infancy than had previously been supposed. ``If there is a tabula rasa, it is dirtied very very quickly. The boxes are filled in at a very very young age,'' he says.
What is amazing about Play-Doh is the intensity, the vividness, of the smell. Yet, paradoxically, you might not be able to name the source of the smell if you were blindfolded and someone waved Play-Doh under your nose. You would instantly register the familiarity of the smell, but you might struggle to put a name to it.
This is the tip-of-the-nose phenomenon, Pelchat says. It's not that we have poor odor memory - clearly we have excellent memory of the odor itself - but rather the part of the brain that remembers smells is completely different from the part of the brain that names smells.
Odor memory ``seems to be hooked up to the rest of the brain differently than, say, visual memory is ... the olfactory system is hooked up to the primitive, emotional part of the brain, where visual input is linked to the more highly evolved language circuits of the brain.''
Most people can't summon odor images the way they can summon visual images. You can easily conjure up the image of a red or green blob of Play-Doh, but the odor is more elusive. Most people remember childhood smells only when they smell them anew. (It's the secret reason people have kids - to play with their old toys again.)
Q: Why are typhoons bigger than hurricanes?
A: They are, of course, the same thing. Generically they are called tropical cyclones. They are dubbed hurricanes in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Pacific, the word being of Carib Indian origin. They are called typhoons in the Western Pacific, the word being of Chinese etymology. In the Indian Ocean they are called cyclones.
Typhoons are generally bigger for one simple reason: They grow in a bigger ocean. They have more elbow room during their formative period.
Typhoons form way out in the vast Pacific Ocean. They reach hurricane strength somewhere around the edge of Micronesia, among the island groups that are a couple of thousand miles from the mainland. There's lots of hot, open ocean waiting to contribute energy to the storm as it cruises west on trade winds.
Atlantic tropical storms form off the coast of Africa and usually don't reach hurricane strength until they've hit the Caribbean, within 1,000 miles or so of the United States. So there's less opportunity for the hurricanes to strengthen.
They don't necessarily need lots of time and room to get deadly, however. Hurricane Andrew went from a tropical storm to nearly a Category 5 hurricane virtually overnight.
Why do so many hurricanes form in August and September? Partly it's because the water has had all summer to warm up and pump energy into the storms.
But mostly it's the wind. Wind is caused, typically, by cold air rushing to replace rising warm air. But in late summer, it's hot just about everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus there's less wind racing to and fro. And that means there's less wind shear on a forming storm. The storm can stay organized rather than get ripped apart, says Jerry Jarrell, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center.
In other words, wind can be the hurricane's enemy. Wind can mess it up. It's kind of ironic if you think about it, so we advise you not to.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB