Scents, Smells, video games

It's tearing up my heart...

 

Watch the movie Perfume, it happens to everybody (sans the killing virgin girls part...)

 

http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nose-throat/smell3.htm

 

Interesting thread. I've been looking into preconditioned and conditioned responses as of late, and here are the best sources I've found:

http://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100725191231AAH09Mj

http://nosmokeknowhow.com/Post-hypnotic-suggestion.html

So we know that sights (Ex. Boobs, seeing someone who resembles a person who did you wrong, which brings negative feelings, etc.), smells (Ex. Perfume, the curry sent that reminds you of your old apartment, etc.), words (Ex. Hate), and even colors (Ex. A bull getting angry once he sees the red sheet.) can all have the preconditioned responses --good or bad-- that we attach to them.

What I find particularly interesting about the second article is the writer implies that we can, with practice, eventually replace all our bad emotional responses for good ones.

This means I can be my own therapist now! No wasted moneez! Yay! (Not to mention it's fun and rewarding.)

 

I remember all sorts of stuff while playing video games. From smells to tastes to sounds, etc..

I think it's part of the whole nostalgia that keeps you so attached to old video games.

I remember playing the N64 at 6 A.M. while eating cornflakes as a child. I also remember playing Ninja Turtles on my Gameboy up in my treehouse

 

It's called an olfactory hallucination for those interested. It's pretty much a fake scent or smell that your nose thinks is real. When I get very strong migraines (usually starting out with scintillating scotoma), this can happen to me. When I get these things, it can smell like anything from shampoo to strong chemicals to rotting flesh. It sucks. :/

I never received them from video games, but impacting events in life can be captured almost in their entirety by the brain. You can know exactly what you were thinking, what you were wearing, what the weather was like, what the atmosphere of the area was like, and you can even take very minor and obscure things (i.e. a crumpled up 5th Avenue wrapper on the ground) into account.