OT: Those who live to eat.
"Emerging evidence suggests that core metabolic pathways that modulate lifespan in worms also modulate lifespan in vertebrates such as mice and perhaps humans," Kornfeld says. "Sensory pathways (ie., olfaction) might also be fairly universal. In an ancient common ancestor, these pathways might have caused metabolic adjustments that affect lifespan. That could be reflected in our own biology."
DT, the sense of smell itself is a most fascinating sensory input. It is the only sensory modality that bypasses the thalamus and connects directly with the frontal lobes via the olfactory bulbs. It's role in frontal lobe functioning remains a mystery for the most part, but I have always suspected that it is a powerful one, a direct counterpoint to most of my teachers' generation who largely dismissed olfaction as an evolutionary "vestigial" sense much more important to our ancestors than to modern humans. The party line was that olfaction was a waning sense, much less important than vision.
We could easily test some hypotheses about olfaction and longevity by engaging our seniors in a smell test paradigm with very low concentrations of odors to see whether or not when our cohorts get older, their collective olfactory registration gets worse (although the confound would be that the "conventional wisdom" is that olfaction is like vision in the elderly; doomed to get worse as we get older).
As for living a shorter life because I enjoy the sense of smell more than the average Joe or Jane, so be it. The scent of a woman is a wonderful and powerful unconditional stimulus for me, and the aromas of food make the experience something to relish. The opposite is also true as I experience disgust via olfaction quite easily.
Thanks for the stimulating OT thought.
aj
