I have noticed a few seemingly odd occurrences that the brain seems to mix up. Please share if you have experienced the same, and any others you have had.
When any concussive force hits my head (don’t worry, not often) it is accompanied by a distinct smell. The closest I could guess the smell would be is blood. IF if I were forced to guess.
Certain smells instantly cause a headache feeling - not lasting, just the feeling as long as the smell persists. The ones I can think of off hand are; ground beef cooking, shitty diapers, bad car exhaust. It literally “smells like a headache”.
When I hear a fork scrape on a plate my teeth feel as though they will fall out. I thought this sensation would be gone when I had my teeth pulled (for obviously separate reasons) but it did not!
Not as strong as the others, but I can often smell the weather; smells like rain today!
Share, or tell me I’m crazy anyway, go on, it’s fun!
I have certainly experienced #1. Getting hit in the head hard and unexpectedly smells metallic even if you aren’t actually smelling it through your nose. It is like the smell originates in your head but it is no less real than an external smell.
I can smell it too. I’ve heard this is because the increased ozone in the air, perhaps from lightning strikes? Ozone certainly does have a distinct “rainstorm” smell. I’ve never bothered to check into the veracity of that, though.
When I take Tylenol (Acetaminophen), after 10 minutes, I can “smell” a distinct… salty/metallic(?) smell. Not coppery like blood, it’s very unique and medicinal. I’ve always just chalked that one up to some innocuous physiological interaction between the drug and my body. I’ve mentioned this before, and no one seems to ever sensed this. :shrug:
Weather “smells” are definitely not just your imagination. There are a number of olfactory and atmospheric cues that we rightly associate with certain weather conditions. The characteristic odor of ozone has already been mentioned. There are also “earthy”-smelling compounds (most notably geosmin, which can also be found in beets and raw potatoes) present in soil that are at their most easily detectable at times when the ground is moist and atmospheric humidity is high–in other words, when it has just rained.
My favorite of these what I think of as the “smell” of incipient snow. It is a crisp sensation that many people who spent their childhood in a temperate climate find quite nostalgic. Research seems to indicate that rather than being due to the presence of any particular volatilized odorants, this sensation is probably induced more by dry, cold air’s relative paucity of odorants in combination with the tendencies for low temperature and low humidity to suppress the subjective perception of any odorants that do exist (you know how farts always smell strongest during a hot bath or shower? It’s the exact oppposite of that). So although you perceive it as a smell, what you are really sensing is, at least in part, air that conspicuously lacks a smell.
I get that headache feeling when I smell black licorice. When I was a kid, I loved licorice. I was also prone to debilitating migraines. One day, I got a migraine shortly after eating a packet of Good ‘n’ Plenty, and since then my brain has linked the two.
Most of these are probably what a doctor would call a psychosomatic ailment. Unfortunately, the term has to a large extent become co-opted by douchey laymen who use it as a somewhat derogatory epithet that can (charitably) be said to connote shades of hypochondria. But it is a fact that for many people, certain perceptual experiences seem to reliably induce certain other physical complaints, despite no obvious toxological cause.
Phenomena in which individuals report suffering somatic complaints such as headaches (particularly those termed “migraines”), dizziness, and nausea brought on by the presence of particular olfactory cues are, I think, rather interesting. They have collectively recently gained fame as an “alternative medicine” clinical diagnosis (often termed Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) denoting a syndrome which supposedly renders the sufferer unusually susceptible to the detrimental effects of inhaled “environmental toxins”. Research indicates, however, that this effect is, at least for most many distinctive but generally accepted as physiologically harmless odorants, tied more to the sufferer’s perception of having inhaled a particular substance than whether or not the sufferer actually has inhaled it. (Decoupling of these two parameters is easily accomplished via smell masking techniques of which there are, not surprisingly, far too many to describe comfortably in a single sentence, many of which have proved to be rather valuable as proprietary intellectual properties.) (<----Top-secret adventure hint for self-taught aspiring professional inventors!)
I don’t know if this one belongs in this thread, but sometimes when I’m unwell with colds/flu, I experience distorted senses of scale/distance - I look at objects in the room and get the sense that they might actually be enormous and very far away.
I also get the sensation that my hands, lips, tongue and feet are absurdly huge - not swollen - just big.