Would be kind of a bad thing in the wrong hands......
Then on the radio I hear the results of a huge marketing research project on how we are manipulated to buy products through our senses.
For instance, the smell of fresh cut grass pumped into a retail outlet makes buyers yearn for the products of their youth.
I SO get this. On my daily walks that cut-grass smell always takes me back to Saturdays on Grant Avenue. Add a little sunshine and I get a craving for Lik-'m-aid and comic books bought in the Kensington drug store.
So, all these studies circumvent cognition.
Who needs to think anymore?
What me worry?
About test scores?
Oh yeah. The smell of chocolate chip cookies used to remind me of my grandma--but now they make me wonder: am I in a Doubletree hotel?
ReplyDeleteHere's another one. When, after years of teaching MS and HS, I shifted to a K-4 building, the smell of kids' heads after recess (you know that clean-sweat, slightly grubby smell) would remind me of what my own children smelled like right before their baths on summer nights. And it made me feel all warm and mom-like toward those kiddos. No joke.
BTW, Mary my perceptive friend, I think the word is Lik-'m-Aid. The way you spelled it would have been highly amusing to my 8th grade boys.
And don't forget AXE men's cologne which simulates the smell of a men's locker room without any exercise. Does anyone who has had a classroom of sixth graders straight from PE want to figure out who thinks that's a turn on?
ReplyDeleteI remember one of my English teachers pointing out that in theater comedy entertains because humans are foolish, but in tragedies we see the nobility of mankind. Just think, with this "wonder drug" that wipes out tragic memories, we could spend a life time as buffoons. This strikes me as one of the more frightening things I've read in a while. Progress? I don't think so!
Ha! No kidding! What pre-pubescent boy wouldn't like that 'alternative' spelling of Lik-'m-aid! Just goes to show you see what you wanta see when your doin' your own editing. Heading for the editing button right now!
ReplyDelete