Word: smell
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...most primal of those desires is that a possible partner smells right. Good smells and bad smells are fundamentally no different from each other; both are merely volatile molecules wafting off an object and providing some clue as to the thing that emitted them. Humans, like all animals, quickly learn to assign values to those scents, recognizing that, say, putrefying flesh can carry disease and thus recoiling from its smell and that warm cookies carry the promise of vanilla, sugar and butter and thus being drawn to them. Other humans carry telltale smells of their own, and those can affect...
...professor of human behavior at the Santa Fe Institute, describes research in which an unfair business deal produced a response in the same region. How did disgust get involved in the belief-and-disbelief business? Some think it started as a fairly straightforward adaptation to enable a suspicious taste, smell or appearance--like that of vermin--to trigger the impulse to eliminate the source. We may have then generalized that reaction to ideas. "When someone says something you disbelieve," Harris says, "it has a kind of emotional tone. Rejecting someone's statement as illogical or incompatible feels like something...
...mangroves. Sprigs of jatropha - a tropical shrub that can be harvested to produce clean biodiesel - are already growing on the slopes of garbage. "We're going to green this landfill," says Bakken. "One day this is going to be a park." Squint enough - and hold your nose against the smell - and you can just...
...from Prof. George: Nava had been assaulted and was at the University Medical Center. At the hospital, Nava explained his story. "He described to us, in really creepy detail in retrospect, how it supposedly happened," Gergis recalled. "He said, 'Their breath was so distinctive; if I could only smell everybody's breath, I would be able to pick them out.'" George added that they had no reason to doubt Nava's story. Nava, he said, was a residential college adviser, Religious Life Council member and a good student who seemed to be "a person of good character...
...called "higher" areas of the brain, all seem to get their final stamp of "belief" or disbelief in "primitive" locales traditionally associated with emotions or taste and odor. Even "2 + 2 = 4," on some level, is a question of taste. Thus, the statement "that just doesn't smell right to me" may be more literal than we thought...