Would you rather smell rotten eggs or roses while sleeping?

William Atkins
Saturday, 11 October 2008 21:01

Science - Biology

They were then exposed to either a control smell (a chemical with no odor), a rose smell (phenyl-ethyl alcohol), or a rotten-egg smell (hydrogen sulfide).

Afterwards, they were awakened from their sleep and asked to describe their dreams. The women never acknowledged that they smelled anything out of the ordinary.

Forty of forty-five times in which the subjects were awakened, they reported dreams.

In these forty times, the subjects rated their dreams on an emotional “coloration” scale. A zero rating meant no odor (no coloration), while “3” meant strong odor (coloration), either positive (+3) or negative (-3).

The control subjects reported an average of 0.5 in the rating. The rotten-egg group reported, on average, a score of 00.4, while the rose group reported +1.2.

Stuck commented, “When stimulating the subject with a positive smell, the emotional coloration was positive in nearly every case, while with negative stimulation, the emotional tone was shifted to negative.”

The Wired article “To Smell, Perchance to Dream,” reports this interesting facet of the experiment.
It states, “This [study] suggests that ‘olfactory stimuli are processed differently than other sensory modalities on higher brain levels,’ a fancy way of saying that brains handle smells differently than sound or touch. Several dreams did involve smell-associated activities -- cleaning a toilet, eating a kiwi or parsley-stuffed potatoes, being stuck in a stuffy room -- but in only one case did a test subject report smelling something: "a grinning Chinese woman [who] also looked disgusted because they (dreamer and Chinese woman) smelled something rotten.’ This dream, however, was prompted by the odorless control substance."

The conclusions of the study was presented on September 21, 2008 at the American Academy of Otolaryngology’s Head and Neck Surgery Foundation annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

According to the Health article, an expert in sensory perception commented that such studies could “… change people’s perceptions of emotionally disturbing places, such as hospitals or nursing homes. But, … it’s also possible that a reverse association could occur, and people might simply begin linking the good smell with the bad place.”