Orchids with a strong scent

[katsucats]

I'm going to have to disagree that scent is deeply personal. There are undoubtedly people who could not smell certain scents like there are people who are color-blind. But the molecules that cause the scents are there regardless. If there are molecules in similar constitution to the molecule emitted by chocolate, and two people have experienced both chocolate and the orchid, then they could make that connection in the same way it would be if two people saw the same landmark or tasted the same dish.

There's a chance that one person is blind and didn't see the landmark, but get enough people together and there will be corroboration.

I think we can all agree that perception is subjective, but there's nothing special about scent that doesn't apply to every other sense.

[SouthPark]

A Rlc. Memoria Crispin Rosales 'No. 2' (I'm growing here) that is currently in-flower at my places ------ it has a scent that really packs a punch. Quite strong. Fortunately a nice scent - but somewhat over-powering ...... unlike some subtle and more elegant perfume cattleya. Although ----- the fragrance is not a turn-off ----- so it's ok! Also ----- if the air-flow happens to be going in the growing area, and somebody is down-stream of the flow ..... then they'll certainly smell that scent from quite a distance away. Can be surprising just what a single flower is capable of heheheh.

[DirtyCoconuts]

The Organization of the Olfactory System - Neuroscience - NCBI Bookshelf

I do not claim to have mastery of this but I am very confident that it IS unique among the sensory systems both in mechanics and neural pathway. A
Discussion for another place

Originally Posted by katsucats

I'm going to have to disagree that scent is deeply personal. There are undoubtedly people who could not smell certain scents like there are people who are color-blind. But the molecules that cause the scents are there regardless. If there are molecules in similar constitution to the molecule emitted by chocolate, and two people have experienced both chocolate and the orchid, then they could make that connection in the same way it would be if two people saw the same landmark or tasted the same dish.

There's a chance that one person is blind and didn't see the landmark, but get enough people together and there will be corroboration.

I think we can all agree that perception is subjective, but there's nothing special about scent that doesn't apply to every other sense.

[katsucats]

I'm not sure what you're getting at in that article, but we can agree to disagree.

[Shadeflower]

Originally Posted by katsucats

I'm going to have to disagree that scent is deeply personal. There are undoubtedly people who could not smell certain scents like there are people who are color-blind. But the molecules that cause the scents are there regardless. If there are molecules in similar constitution to the molecule emitted by chocolate, and two people have experienced both chocolate and the orchid, then they could make that connection in the same way it would be if two people saw the same landmark or tasted the same dish.

You are going to ruffle some feathers with that statement. I understand it is what you believe just like a child might believe the earth is flat but as we become older we tend to change our once naive assumptions.
I want to help enlighten you so I will use your example of chocolate. You say everyone will smell it and taste it the same and even though I know that is not true just like a colorblind person might see red when I see green, even if we were to assume this to always be the case you have overlooked one important aspect.
Some people might not like chocolate!
That is deeply personal and if someone does not like chocolate they might be able to smell it just like you and then be sick. According to you that is impossible because you would not feel sick and no experience can be personally different to yours...

Do you see where I am going with this?

Someone who grew up on a farm will like farm smells, they will bring back childhood memories whereas a city person might smell exactly the same thing and go urgh, manure.

Personal experiences form our likes and dislikes and those are personal and different from person to person so not everyone will enjoy the same smells.

But it is more complex than that too. Apart from some people possibly smelling something different to another person, the same orchid might be able to produce lots of different smells. Like P. Violacea, I have smellt a handful of different violacea's and hybrids and there are subtle differences in all. None were identically the same.

So one person growing a variety might have one that has gone into a more stnky direction whereas someone else's plant someone else might smell amazing. Same with the intensity!

The Bellina is a strong and beautiful scent but it is a tricky plant to grow, Violacea is far easier and thus produces more flowers and smells stronger I have found but I think a really strong Bellina should be able to overpower a violacea, one day hopefully I will get there. I managed to get a Bellina to produce 2 flowers before but not consistently. To get a Bellina to flower is worth the trickyness to keep it happy.

[katsucats]

Originally Posted by Shadeflower

You are going to ruffle some feathers with that statement. I understand it is what you believe just like a child might believe the earth is flat but as we become older we tend to change our once naive assumptions.
I want to help enlighten you so I will use your example of chocolate. You say everyone will smell it and taste it the same and even though I know that is not true just like a colorblind person might see red when I see green, even if we were to assume this to always be the case you have overlooked one important aspect.
Some people might not like chocolate!
That is deeply personal and if someone does not like chocolate they might be able to smell it just like you and then be sick. According to you that is impossible because you would not feel sick and no experience can be personally different to yours...

Do you see where I am going with this?

Absolutely not. Never once did value judgments enter any part of my post. Whether you like chocolate or not, chocolate still smells like chocolate.

[DirtyCoconuts]

But it is about how one PERCEIVES the scent

The same input is not received the same in each person due to the difference in their neural pathways based on their introduction to the scent.

[katsucats]

Originally Posted by DirtyCoconuts

But it is about how one PERCEIVES the scent

The same input is not received the same in each person due to the difference in their neural pathways based on their introduction to the scent.

Sorry, but I don't see the relevance. For example, how I perceive a brick in a metaphysical sense is irrelevant, in my view, when we're talking about corroborating views of a brick. There exists a common intersubjective/objective universe, I'm sure we could all agree. If I say something is red, you'd understand what I mean and agree that it's red, even if we might perceive 'red' differently.

If you're saying I might see a brick and identify it as an elephant, and you might ass a brick and identify it as a boat, in a way that it's impossible to corroborate scents, I disagree.

That fact that we could connect food ingredients is proof. I could taste or smell bacon, and identify bacon. It doesn't matter how I perceive the smell of bacon, the fact that I understand that it's bacon is enough.

If you mean that we use different analogies as reference when identifying scents, I don't see what the problem would be. It takes a little imagination to recognize similar components between smells, since often times something would have multiple odorants anyways. But it would be odd to say that one could not corroborate a single odorant.

We might have different analogies when we describe the scent of 1,8-cineole or geraniol, but when we smell 1,8-cineole again in a different context, it would elicit the same description. There is corroboration. It's not random.

[Roberta]

Taste is actually mostly scent... and there are some definite, and documented, genetic differences - one that comes to mind is cilantro (the leaves of the coriander plant) To most people, it has a flavor that is close to parsley (but a bit more interesting... it's an important ingredient in various cuisines,such as Mexican and Chinese.) But there are some people - and it's genetic, runs in families, for whom it tastes like soap. Really unpleasant. The molecules may be the same, but the receptors are not.

[katsucats]

So Roberta, are you saying that if someone describes cilantro as soap, that wouldn't provide any value if they then go on to describe something else as soap, because this deeply personal aspect makes relating to other people's description of scents impossible?

The vast majority of people describe Sharry Baby as chocolate, and even the people that don't, when we drill down, we realize that they are talking about purer chocolate and not chocolate candy bars.

In my own experience, I've been able to corroborate nearly 100% of the orchid scents I've come across with descriptions I've run across on the internet. Where I describe Enc. cordigera as matcha, I could easily envision a chocolate component that it's commonly associated with. There is rarely a time, if at all, where I couldn't see where a person is coming from at all.

Even when it comes to cilantro, it's easy to imagine components of parsley and soap in the mix, even if one doesn't taste it that way. These tastes are not a categorical set. There is a metric space that could be used to establish a distance between them. We know that certain things taste like other things without them being exactly the same. When I hear other people describe the taste of a pasta, it is not a foreign alien language.