Multimodal Crosstalk

Make it stop.

Got an article here in Wired where we learn about how we taste, and about how we sense everything, really. The brain doesn’t see sensory information as sense-specific, it processes everything together. In the article, psychologist Charles Spence relates it to signal processing – the brain has to process all the signals to figure out what’s good and what’s not. And what we get back is not raw sensory input; instead all the signals interfere with each other, distorting and reshaping each other. Changing the color of white wine to red makes people “taste” red wine. Changing the lights in a room makes you “hear” differently. Senses even distort themselves. White noise makes other noises seem further away; it distorts the aural space of the listener (see Beckerman below).

I bring up all of this because, why, our sense of smell is the most obvious candidate for proving the multi-modal sensory processing of our brains. Smells can be Sharp, Sour, or Green. In fact, smell is one sense that we do not experience as its own. All of the words we use to describe smells come from other senses; and it can be argued that we only experience smell by proxy of the other senses. Perhaps it is too primitive of a phenomenon to translate to the cognizant, self-reflective human – it is the first sense, after all, and made its appearance on the Tree of Life with the Vertebrates, and hence with brains (the two go together).

Lost in Translation

Notes:

Your Senses Are Talking Behind Your Back

Brendan Cole, Wired, July 2016

Professor Charles Spence, at Oxford, studies applied cognitive psychology, consumer psychology, sensory marketing, and multisensory perception. And that would make him a man of interest here at Limbic Signal. He also deals a lot with the future of food.

The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. Joel Beckerman. 2014.

Old Folks Jokes

It’s not news exactly, we’ve known this for some time. Your sense of smell can measure the health of your brain. It makes sense becaus smell is so deeply embedded in the most primitive parts of your mind, that for something to go wrong there, shows there is something wrong in those most basic parts, which especially includes the memory.

Whereas other senses do most of their activity in their respective cortices, or info-processing areas of the brain, like the visual cortex, smell has no cortex. It is “processed” by the limbic system itself, and the limbic system, named for its control of the limbs and thus motility, is really at the base of our neural schematic. You could lose your Broca or Wernicke areas of your brain, the parts that deal with speaking and decoding language, and your life would take a hit, sure – but if you lost a part of your limbic system, you probably wouldn’t have much of a life at all. (Although there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.)

My friend’s mom recently told me about how she’s getting phantom smells – smelling stuff when it’s not there. This could be caused by all kinds of things, really, but as she is approaching 70 years old, I told her to take that as a reminder to check her mental health. I think her olfactory phantoms (Ren and Stimpy called them “nose goblins,” just kidding) have since subsided, but it’s a story of caution to anyone getting to that age, or those with parents etc. who are.

Let’s make sure not to confuse this: people with anosmia, or the inability to smell, do not automatically have mental illness. It’s when people with functioning olfactory systems suddenly get changes to them that there should be concern (and especially when they’re 60 or older).

And finally, I always thought, what does this mean for me, a guy self-diagnosed with pseudo hyperosmia? I think I have a strong sense of smell, although it’s measurably the same as other people, I pay attention to it more, and it does weird things to my brain, not gonna lie. For example, freshly baked bread, spoiled mushrooms, and rotten fish are all related as smells, they really are, says science, but also my nose-brain told me. Problem is, sometimes I can’t tell if I’m really smelling something, or if I’m just going crazy (because I often smell things others can’t, which is sometimes called hallucinating, and which is a prime ingredient for feeling crazy). You better believe I’m getting one of these tests in 20 years.

Notes:

Smell test may be effective in early detection of Alzheimer's

CTV News, July 2016