Yixia Gu: Smell

How on earth do we smell? The process is simple but fascinating:

Suppose you opened the fridge one day and is overcome by a stinking sensation of moldy cheese. This particular smell is made up of special chemical cells (odorants) which when passing through our nostrils stimulate tiny cilia hairs which gather together in a small patch in the nose. In these hairs are contained special cells which receive the odours: Olfactory receptor cells. These cells are connected to the certain areas of the brain through a series of nerve pathways, and convert the detected smell as signals. Once the nerve signal reaches the brain, the brain processes these patterns so that we end up perceiving the signal as smell (in this case, the smell of moldy cheese).

Our sense of smell can add colour to our world, because what we sense through the olfactory receptors becomes perception. In addition smell also plays an active role in our emotions and memory depending what we associate each smell with.
Sources:
1) http://www.senseofsmell.org/feature/smell101/lesson1/01.php
2)http://www.blkbox.com/~rdevere/tsdc/howwork.html
3)http://health.howstuffworks.com/smell.htm

For Nov. 8th

Folks -- As discussed in class today,

A) You are to:

1. print out and bring to class hard copies of your two 'Sophie's World' assignments; be prepared to share your second assignment with another in the class at the start of next lesson; and
2. return the novel to me next lesson (unless you would like to buy it -- it could come in handy for your internal and/or external assessments).

B) You are also to answer the answer the following question on our class blog: How do the five senses work (i.e. sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell)?

• pick one;
• find out about it (consult 3 sources -- be sure to list the source in your post)
• blog about it using student-friendly language (200 words max.); and
• title your post -- e.g. Eric Jabal: Taste

Mr. J

WoK1: Sense perception quotations

• "There's more to seeing that meets the eye." (K. T. Cole)
• "There is no truth. There is only perception." (Gustave Flaubert)
• "Everyone hears only what he understands." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
• "True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception."(Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy)
• "We hear and apprehend only what we already half know." (Henry David Thoreau)
• "Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic." (Edward de Bono)
• "We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see." (Henry David Thoreau)
• "There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." (Aldous Huxley)
• "We sometimes get all the information, but we refuse to get the message." (Cullen Hightower)
• "The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comrehend." (Henri Bergson)
• "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is -- infinite." (William Blake)
• "It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive." (C. W. Leadbeater)
• "After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings." (Richard Dawkins)
• "Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing." (Camille Pissarro)
• "Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world." (Hans Margolius)
• "Science is nothing but perception." (Plato)