I notice people’s home smells! People who live together have similar smells, though it’s still a bit different from person to person. It passes onto their rooms, their cars, and their clothes. And it changes with the introduction of a new pet or new person, or when the people move houses. I have memories attached to specific home smells, because I spent so much time with those people and in those houses. But I wouldn’t say home smells are inherently good or bad smells, they’re just kind of indescribably complex.
i know what you mean i spent so much time with a friend from university and got pretty used to his smell now recently he moved into a new home with his girlfriend and when we met again for the first time in months i immediately noticed how his smell had slightly but distinctly changed not that he stinks or anything, but its definitely different human sense of smell is underrated
Yeah I noticed it too in my childhood, every home have different smell, some homes more resemble lemons like fairy dishwashing liquid, some have wood oriented smells, some have mix of plastic and rubbery kinds of smell and so on
Yes! It's hard to explain but people smell a lot like their houses! Whenever I comeback home after being away for several weeks, I identify my house's smell. Even though I don't notice it when I'm home.
I'm a dad who helped raise three boys (all grown adults now). I love baby smell, but I remember it lasting a lot longer than 6 weeks. I would huff my kids' scalp well into toddlerhood.
I think it also exists in reverse, I remember sniffing at my mother’s bedside and it was very calming as a toddler, lol. But this effect also faded away as I became older...
What if the chemical helps create the link in memory, that helps us believe we are getting the same reward every time. Pavlovian response mechanism, to a welcome stimuli, tends to be faster and stronger that rote alone. Could explain.
When I gave birth to my daughter I was amazed by how wonderful she smelled! And my sensitivity to her smell was so strong that I could find her with my eyes closed. I also could tell which of the babies in the room was mine! It was like being inside of some " the nature of mammals" documentary 😄
That’s my favourite smell. There is a name for it but I can’t remember what. Rain is my favourite…and we are in a horrible drought here in western Canada.
And as a daughter, I miss my dad's BO. It goes both ways if your relationship is positive. Dad's gone so I no longer get to smell it. So hug yours even if they complain that you smell gross or something.
"You can tell right away if food goes bad" That's true, except for milk. I like milk, I enjoy milk, I drink it a fair amount but good or bad, milk stinks to me. I've never been able to really tell if milk has gone bad or not cause it smells just as bad the day I buy it as the day it expires. Though maybe I'd find it even more sickening if it was old and moldy.
@@michaeljackson8390 Wow he was correct! It did blow my mind! Never in my life did I think that someone could try a super obvious conspiracy theory link on a scishow video about baby smells! This man sees a triangle play button like ANY OTHER PLAY BUTTON and sees Satan. He sees a patent number of 060606 and instantly thinks that person who holds it is the devil (I think he forgot how counting works). He sees the apple logo.... and instantly thinks its the garden of Eden apple. My absolute favourite is how he thinks that WALMART refers to martial law, and not..... a wall market
I can only speak for myself, of course. I was handed my first-born about a minute after he was born while the midwife/doctor sewed up my wife's bits as forceps had been required. There was a distinct smell that now I might describe as 'buttery' but also 'musky'. It was a real 'hind-brain' thing and a completely animal moment; if anyone had tried to take him away from me until I had finished getting to know him, I would have killed them. Stupidly powerful feeling.
As someone who watched a Ceasarian while chatting with the OB/Gyn (those are your wife's ovaries. Oh really, cool. No problem) I can attest it is the smell. When that hit I almost fainted (and would have were it not for a nurse who offered a stool saying "dad really needs to sit down now') No, not the dopamine joy of mothers ('baby showers' aka 'pass the crack'. Funny as hell when you see what's happening biochemially). No. Total Brain Reboot. Party boy to provider in a matter of seconds. I don't give a rat's ass what researchers find, I KNOW this to be true.
I don't know anyone who thinks old people smell smells pleasurable. Quite the contrary. It really stinks. Sorry this study must have been made with people with no nose.
@@EbonyPope huh? I think the exact opposite. I think you are the first person I see that thinks like that. People take for granted that when you say "smells like grandpa" it is a very good smell (very commonly founs in books). Maybe it varies by genetics
The smell of celery, onion, garlic and ground beef cooking instantly brings up an emotional response for me. It is the scent of one of my favorite meals as a kid - goulash. It's like the one smell that reminds me of home.
Oh, I can understand exactly. My Omi came over from Austria after WW2, and her cooking was incredible. One of the best was her goulash. I haven't attempted cooking it yet, but I will one day.
I would take the new baby smell one step farther and say that that scent is addictive. I couldn't be away from my children for more than a few hours because I craved their smell. That stopped somewhere around 5 years old
My husband smells like babies idk why, he smells like a small child. He doesn't look like a baby at all but he smells like a couple years old kid. I KNOW because I've worked as a nanny for a long time
Long after amniotic fluid and vernix are gone, baby scalp (top of head where lots of folks automatically rest their noses) has a pleasant scent of its own
You can kinda discern from the duration of the video! I usually use it and most of them, I got it right. But yeah, it doesn't hurt adding a tag to the title
The diet of adults do contribute to their smell. You can smell a drinker or smoker from a mile even if they used mouthwash and bathed in perfume. Likewise, you can smell when people are sick, irrelevant of if they are even aware that they are sick.
When I was young I loved stealing bf’s coats and such, they had a special smell, I would make me feel really comfortable. Laying down on his bed was really nice too. There’s def something there.
It's prob not pheromones, but definitely something relating to memory and scents. Since you usually think positively of your mate/spouse, you begin to consider almost every aspect of them, to be positive, like their scent and such.
Honestly sounds like a hidden desire to return to the safety of parents, during early childhood. Maybe that is part of the drive to reproduce. Whatever it is, enjoy! 😉
My father had these strong memories when smelling old fashioned classrooms. He suffered from migraines as a child, and attacks always started with a heightened sense of smell.
Running through a field after chocolate smell. Well, Hank, chocolate smell is pretty ******* important, especially to Yours Truly. Whenever one of us 4 women in my family was grumpy, angry, or crying, Dad would direct us to the chocolate before he would listen to us. Smart man.
I feel like in some form or capacity humns do produce pheromones because there is a specific scent in male body odor which is just so unreasonably attractive to me
I'd say if there are any human pheromones it's in the urine. Just ask young men how powerful a girl's bathroom smells and young woman how much a boys bathroom smells. Smells the girls don't notice in their own bathroom, nor the boys.. I think we are "tuned" to be able to tell when we are in an area frequented by the opposite sex. I notice it for my wife and daughter, but not myself or son at home.
The janitors orange saw dust stuff that he put on vomit in grade school… I got a migraine in the 4th grade and puked everywhere…I get a headache every time I catch that smell.
In terms of memories, I always have a vivid recollection of a particular scenario, instance or timeline whenever I hear a song that I heard back then. It's like my mind is reminiscing the scenario respective of when I originally first heard the song.
Idk I met my best friend at a rave because I was rolling on ecstasy and I could smell him from halfway across the room. He had on a cologne w pheromones in it! I could smell him before I saw him...
Some people must really think they stink, judging from the amount of (cheap) scent they cover themselves in. I hate the stink of cheap perfumes and aftershaves, especially since I can detect them with my tastebuds as well.
After being married for several years (and becoming aware of my wife's monthly cycle, I realized that I could tell if any woman I was following, smelled fertile, even though I kept this knowledge to myself. At age 50 I while riding my motorcycle, I realized that sycamore trees give off a somewhat similar smell. Riding past a tree, caused this smell to be more noticable by changing the concentration of this chemical, more suddenly. It is a very distracting smell.
I was smelling my baby girl's hair as she's waking up from her nap when I saw this notification... yep, baby odor effect is real, it's the best thing ever!
I've mentioned this before I do smell like my dad after a workout. It's true about the smell of childhood things and sounds also I noticed something when I was taking care of my sisters' kids they knew when I was near them, and their mom too when they were babies. I've heard of scientists saying something about that I already, but had known this by my observation. They knew everyone there before they could even see correctly.
fortunately I smell like my maternal family - my dad is Danish and smells, well.. white my mom was inuit - I get asked what perfume I use frequently. I don't use perfumes or perfumed products, nor do I use deodorant
My husband can smell very little, and his father even less. There are some smells that my husband can smell, even though they are not as strong as other smells that he can't smell. It's weird.
Can't imagine being like that! My nose is so sensitive, i can even smell sick people. I had anosmia for over a week from covid a few months ago, and it was the worst and best days.
@@alexwang982 you never heard of that, molecules land on little receptors in your nose and depending on how they vibrate determines what they smell like, thats why sionide smells like almonds because the molecules are similar. Blew my mind when I first learned it
My theory is that our apocrine glands sweat glands, which are found in our armpits and groin & become active during puberty, release substances that serve as pheromones. 🤔
And I think we develop hair growth in those regions to retain those chemicals longer. We don’t need that hair to signal sexual maturity, as some “experts” think, because breasts and a larger male organ are a dead giveaway for that.
No doubt, certain smells trigger old memories and can become imprinted for life. I'll never forget the smell of skunk. Not because it's bad (I've smelled much worse) but because it triggers a whole memory of a summer camp encounter. No, I wasn't sprayed. Another kid was. Served him right for throwing rocks at it. And yes, babies and puppies both smell nice. I suspect, for similar reasons.
My dad doing dude ish. That orange cleaning stuff, I always thought it smelled good. But that strong glue stuff, I don't remember what it's called, I still hate it. But working somewhere & smelling the construction going on, it brought me way back. Like how I nailed his finger instead of a nail & he gave up on teaching me how to construct anything 🥴 right then. & How I thought Dr Seuss was the most pointless thing ever bc I had to all of sudden go find something else to get into.& I was just that young. Maybe its called rubber glue, rubber cement, idk
It was part of a scishow news where they do two stories. The first video was related to smelling so the added it to the compilation. If I remember right, the stick bugs are critically endangered, and that half of the video talked about a new population of them getting found or something like that.
3 years ago I removed my body’s ability to produce testosterone and replaced it with estrogen. My body smells completely changed. Skin, hair, and - most strikingly - ears. My old clothes smell so weird and foreign, almost sour. Just more evidence of body chemistry dramatically shifting smells, in addition to age.
Everyone who's ever had a kid knows that babies smell wonderful. And it's not just women who are "susceptible" or sensitive to this. I'm an old guy who had 4 baby girls and now, years later, a grandson. Believe, every parent has always known this. I love science, but I don't need a study to confirm this.
@@TheIcenero dude I'm not talking about M.A.P. crap, or sacrificing them to Moloch. And if a woman said it, then you would have kept driving. Babies do smell fresh, and it is a unique scent. When our son was a baby I thought he smelled so good. But not in a creeper way. It's similar to how sun dried towels smell fresh.
You have to retrain your scent sense. Buy lemon,rose, eucalyptus, and clove oil and practice smelling each one for about ten seconds through each nostril, twice a day. I doubled it with drinking lion's mane mushroom coffee beforehand. This isn't crackpot pseudoscience, I ran it by my doctor after I had covid last year and recovered my sense of smell pretty quickly. Ask your doctor. The mushroom coffee helps regenerate neurons.
I got covid and I couldnt smell or taste for a while. They both have returned, but are different. Garlic, wine, onions, different meats, they all smell and taste different to me now. I like wine a lot more than I used too, but I dont like garlic or chicken thighs nearly as much. Our senses are really curious things
@@mal9369 you have parosmia! It's a smell distortion. I see a lot more people getting it after their smell starts to return after getting covid, myself included!
I def. think that looking into how newborn babies react to certain scents/how humans react to the smell of babies would be a good way of detecting any pheromones we might have, because we're such an absurdly parental and social species that it would be advantageous for our children (who are a drag to care for, to put it mildly) to have pheromone cues that elicit that reaction in other humans even if they're not related to them. Also, while it's likely not a pheromone cue at all, that distinct smell of sickness that people get regardless of what illness they have might be interesting to do further research on in the future
according to my mom, i smelled really weird . not normal baby smell but she described it along the lines of vinegar mixed with garlic feet and something vaguely metalic as a baby. she said no matter how much she bathed me , i always had a weird smell. even as an adult my sweat smells stroooong by nature , even freshly showered , it still has a metalic smell to it and acidy smell
My sense of smell is absolutely off the chain, it is crazy sensitive. When my son was very very fresh born (the first days) he smelled so offensive - so metallic.
Me and my family noticed my brother's body odor changed since he had chickenpox when he was 18 years old... we are both vaccinated, but I had it when I was 7 and he didn't get it from me, only got it much older. He was miserable for days... and then we all noticed his own smell changed (more than a decade later, he still has this odor), and I have no idea how the disease affected it.
Maybe it reset his immune system somewhat. It wasn't that big of a change and might just coincide with the end of puberty and stopping smoking, but when my brother had cancer as a young man, I think his smell changed after chemo therapy and healing.
My dog loves the baby smell. We had a baby at the house and I put my dog in another room. After the baby was gone my dog could not stop smelling everything the baby was in contact with.
17:53 was that a dos equis commercial reference? -edit- yo how the hell did they know which part of the brain was responsible for smelling in the 1800s before MRIs?
I remember hearing about a man who went through a complete personality change after a train spike went through his forehead. Accidents like those and picking apart the brain by dissection perhaps?
My husband can smell when a woman is pregnant! It’s super-weird but he has never been wrong. He knew that I was pregnant before I did, and would always tell me when he knew any of my friends were pregnant. He has never been wrong!
Unfortunately for me, I rarely find something that smells good to me... I have very sensitive senses because of Autism, and I swear I hate smells. Too many times I had to stop breathing just to stop smelling. I do like some of them, but few, very few...
@@pheart2381 I can taste cheap perfumes. Why do people douse themselves in huge quantities of it? Maybe they don’t wash, like people in the past who thought washing is unhealthy, and like the French kings, try to hide the fact they stink.
For the "baby smells" does it really mean they react to the scent stronger because they are new born mothers, or just because they smelled it for the last 6 weeks and associate it with their baby? If you 2 people smell a foods scent, but it's the favorite food of person A and person B doesn't know it at all, surely person A would react stronger.
I've always said babies smell wonderful, yet had moms tell me it was just spoiled milk!?!? It's their heads. Their heads smell like some sort of flower. I'm an uncle and great uncle a dozen times over. I know I'm not smelling spoiled milk. Their smell makes me want to cuddle them, and protect them, and wistfully wish I had been a father. For childhood memories, I recall Georgia pines, and some sort of odor that was in the fog of Warner Robbins, GA, early 1970s, that reminded me of ham. No idea what that was. Old books smell a bit like vanilla, which is a component of all of my favourite colognes, including Coty's "Raw Vanilla," and Polo "Green," which also has two of my other favourite scents, lime oil, and cedar oil. Genuine rose oil is also a favourite. Meanwhile, I can't smell musk. Musk colognes, along with carnations, just smell like plastic to me. Strangely, because of a vinyl-coated crib bumper pad, the smell of vinyl relaxes me, making me want to sleep. As for the smell of sweat, women's sweat makes me want to vomit, and my dad's was just gross, but other men's is extremely attracting. I'm not talking like unwashed homeless cumin sweat. That's gross. I'm talking gym workout with having showered that morning sweat. Men who wash that off or cover that up are less attractive. It's best when mixed with some of the other favourite odors. Work sweat with cedar, lime, and vanilla, is perfect. Meanwhile, thankfully, as someone getting older, I have an Asian allele that cause my sebaceous secretions to have less oil, so I should have less Nonenal. Yay? Meanwhile again, can someone do something about Cystic Fibrosis carrier breath?
So the amygdala is the source of my lack of motivation, and why i know i should feel satisfied after completing tasks especially difficult but I do not.
One thing about our "lack of smell ability" could also be we don't "train" it as often as our other senses , if you think about it we mostly try to visually ID things or register them audibly , we more often hear or see something wrong first , unless the smell is something we immediately ID as dangerous or simply FOUL like smoke or something rotting or egg farts . As an example, I've worked security for years , mostly in nightclubs, and despite likely having hearing damage from the loud music I will catch someone talking and immediately react to the "tone of voice" over any words I actually decipher or I'll scan a crowd and spot one guy in a particular "body stance" and begin preparing myself to act , but unless someone has some really strong odor either from cologne perfume or BO I don't notice it
The main reason for not having analized pheromones is because their "aromatic-off gassing" time-period is kinda short, it's meant for a response from the sniffer to the sender. There are scents that do entice a specific response, w/o it being tied to a specific type of memory, it's just a reaction. Like a 20° temperature drop and the human-thermometer area of the chest shows it 😁, reactional type of response, so there are pheromones within humans that work based on primal instincts.
Myself and a new man I met at work literally could not stay away from each other (no... We never got serious)... Our smell of one another was addicting to both of us. Seriously. It was insane. I was actually angry when I had to be in the same room with him because it activated my hind brain. The same reaction was for him too. Thank goodness we only worked together for a year because, even 12 years later I can remember his smell and I would totally like to bottle it and smell it again. ... I have thought about this many times over the years. I wish we could have both participated in a smell study.
I used to be able to tell if a man had intercourse in the morning before coming to work or if they were really aroused before intercourse. I picked men by my ability to tolerate their smell. As my allergies and sinus problems increased, my capacity to smell "sex" decreased, it became harder to reach arousal because I no longer had the trigger smell of my partner's arousal. I'm still affected by odors more than those I know. At 69 I'm finding the odors I produce more unsettling. I always found my body odors more offensive to me than it did to those around me. I still have the ability to smell things others can't detect or they are desensitized to them. My continued allergy and sinus problems have decreased my sense of smell but still find my own body odors offensive to me.
The fact that newborns have the passages that fade with time would indicate that maybe it's used in bonding with the parent through smell (as it passes through the amygdala, the motivational hub that can help motivate a child to remain with the mother. The mother on the otherhand, is already queued to like the child as stated in the section about "baby smell". All women being positively affected by women makes a successful survival trait for the entire species, where bonding with the mom by specific smells introduced at a critical time in their childhood may introduce a physical basis for a child's bond with their mother.
If i remember feelings, what i felt by smell? And then something i did in my childhood past, can't actions skills like fighting just be triggered if i fill that *smell* that triggers what i've done, trained before, say gunpowder is the smell.
As a single guy that was never a dad I can tell you that "new baby" smell is not universally appreciated. And yes I know the difference between "new baby" and "loaded diaper". One is bad, the other toxic.
Love SciShow, yaller awesome. Y’all had me laughing pretty good talkin about the leather smell. I’m from Texas and there ain’t nothing quite like walking into a saddlery or boot store. Or just a guy selling real handmade leather belts out of his truck or flea market. It’s a wonderful smell that I grew up with and experience daily.
I have a theory that babies have a Smell to help parents tell their babies apart from someone else's babies. this is due to the fact that I was switched at birth with another baby and my mom told the doctor that the baby she'd been given didn't smell quite right... she was right
More common than is thought of as normal - it's quite natural, tho - and if you can enjoy the smell of yourself instead of just feeling a need to get rid if it you should only be very relieved! Do enjoy!
the smell of fresh-cut wood or firewood reminds me of my mommom (and her home) because she does carpentry and has a wood burning stove, the smell of whatever very specific kind of mildew is in my parents' basement reminds me of my childhood home (specifically sitting down there on the shitty broken elliptical bike using a staple gun on an old wooden work bench we have) and the smell of onions cooking in butter just makes me happy because yummy the mildew thing is so strange i know but i honestly love the smell so much, but ONLY the specific smell from my parents' basement. I've never been anywhere that it smelled exactly like that, but if I could somehow bottle it up so I could smell it whenever I wanted, good god would I. It's comforting and refreshing to me
I don't know if it's related but I like smelling my girlfriend's t-shirt as it made me feel like she was closer to me when I couldn't see her due to covid
I would like to see a video about the connection between taste and smell. I am considered a 'supertaster' because of my many tastebuds and I am highly sensitive to spicy foods. I also have a super sensitive nose. I can smell dead animals and natural gas way before my family. It can come in handy for safety reasons, but also very distracting at other times.
Hank! Can you do an episode on parosmia and covid? I've had this for over 5 months. Some people have had parosmia for over 15 months. A lot more people are getting it after having covid. It would be awesome if you did an episode on it!
There have been a lot of these composite shows lately. I would be curious to to see an episode that asks what if humans were herbivores or carnivore instead of omnivore. It would try to see how much influence being an omnivore had on our development. Would society be the same as it is today?
Last time i remember someone telling me they sniffed me was highschool and college girlfriends, but i've been stinky for years since. Maybe apathy smells bad
