Editing?
I’m in the mood to edit “Odor,” that short story I wrote about the anosmic dude who got an implant in his brain in order to be able to smell. When I wrote it back in 2013 I really just wrote it to write it, if that makes any sense. I’d been wanting to write about anosmia for a long time, but I had always approached it from a non-fiction standpoint and could never get anything written. But once I made it a fictional account, writing about it became ridiculously easy and free-flowing. I think I wrote the original story in about two hours, then edited only a few things afterward.
Thus, it’s not perfect. Far from it. But I want to edit it so that it can get closer to perfect, because it’s a very personal story and I just want it to be told right.
Anyway. I didn’t have anything else to blog about today, so you get that little snippet of thought.
Turnip
For our second long story in Fiction, we had the options of either writing something new or revising one of our old draft stories we did earlier in the semester. After screwing around with a nonsense cliché story, I made the decision to revise my “Odor” story (first draft posted here). There are actually two reasons I wanted to do so:
1. For a long while, I’ve wanted to write about my experience with anosmia. Apart from a blog about it every now and again, I’ve never been able to really formally write about it. I’m not sure why—it’s kind of a difficult thing to write about in a formal setting, I guess. But trying to make a fictional story that involved a character who had anosmia really made it easy to express a lot of the things I wanted to express about anosmia without having it be about me. So that meant a lot.
2. When we workshopped my draft of “Odor” way back at the beginning of the semester, someone asked, “being born without a sense of smell is a thing?” I think that’s all I need as my second reason.
This Week’s Science Blog: Good (and Smelly) Vibrations
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/02/do-vibrating-molecules-give-us-o.html
Smell has long been explained by the “lock and key” hypothesis, which holds that we smell when odor molecules—each with a particular shape—“lock” into matching smell receptors in the nose. What’s the problem with this hypothesis? The fact that there are only a few hundred of these receptors in the human nose, yet humans are able to detect thousands and thousands of different odors.
So how exactly do we smell, then?
Researchers at MIT are looking now at the role vibration plays in our ability to sniff stuff out. They believe that the reason certain odor molecules can have similar structures (like vodka and rotten egg odors, apparently), they have radically different vibration properties, which may be the key to our being able to differentiate between so many different odors with so few receptors.
The MIT scientists performed experiments with fruit flies in which the flies were placed into a maze into which two nearly identical odor molecules were pumped. Despite the molecular similarities, the flies showed preference to one odor over the other, indicating that they could tell a difference between the odors—a difference the scientists say is due to different vibration patterns.
While this study doesn’t apply to humans necessarily (obviously), the scientists are looking to extend its results to tests with mammals.
Because I’m me, I wonder how figuring out how smell really works would play into treatment for anosmia and parosmia. If at all. You never know, biology is weird.
Eigenblogger 