association-list

So read­ing Karl Schroeder’s blog (one of them, at least), pointed me to Mixing Memory, which got me think­ing about cog sci stuff, which in train with read­ing about Scott Adams get­ting his voice back got me think­ing about sense per­cep­tion and pheromones. Pre­sum­ing that human have pheromones, we can’t con­sciously detect that we’re ’smelling’ them. I use the scare quotes because although the pur­ported pheromone recep­tors are in the nose, they are not the same recep­tors with which humans actu­ally process smells that we can sense. So pre­sum­ably we sense these things, but have no con­scious knowl­edge of smelling them. It is mooted that they might affect behav­ior, but that’s not really what I’m inter­ested in. So, assum­ing that these chem­i­cals arouse some response in the brain that’s uncon­sciously processed, it seems to me that one could then, in an exper­i­men­tal con­text, asso­ciate these chem­i­cals with other chem­i­cals or stim­uli that humans can con­sciously sense. Pre­sum­ably, this would then create some sort of con­di­tioned asso­ci­a­tion with the other stim­u­lus. Then, once the asso­ci­a­tion had been con­di­tioned, the observ­able stim­u­lus could be removed, and the effects of the ‘unper­cie­ve­able’ stim­u­lus could be mea­sured (e.g. the sub­ject could press a button when they thought that they ‘smelled’ the pheromone.). Obvi­ously I don’t have the knowl­edge or expe­ri­ence to design a proper exper­i­men­tal pro­to­col, and cer­tainly could not con­struc­tively inter­pret the results, but I think that it presents a unique sort of window into human sense per­cep­tion. Essen­tially, every­thing else that we have recep­tors for, we can per­ceive, although we might not do so all of the time. Pheromones seem to be unique in that we can sense them, but not per­ceive the sen­sa­tion. If it could be asso­ci­ated with some­thing that we could sense… I have no idea what it would mean, but it sounds like some­thing inter­est­ing to try.