I have stopped going to movie theaters because of the advertisements. I can't stand at a crosswalk without being subjected to cigarette smoke and some asshole's cell phone conversation. Look anywhere and you'll likely see an ad. Buy! BUY! BUY! We are an ignorant selfish rude thoughtless people.

geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez!

If you don't remember the DigiScents iSmell of 2001, a device which was supposed to let your PC emit different odours upon visiting different web sites, perhaps its entry in PC World's "Top 25 Worst Tech Prodcuts of All Time" will refresh your memory.

I forgot to mention the asshole who can't enter or exit his car without honking it's horn. Ohh, I've digressed into a rant. And then there is my next door neighbor who is so fat and ugly she can't get a boyfriend so makes us all listen to her yapping dog yap for hours on end. And the other neighbors who never check their car when the alarm goes off. And then there are the conservative Republicans who do not practice a single fucking thing that they preach.

And studies showed that it had a positive effect on workplaces. The US Gov't piped it into their offices. When I worked for the Dept of Labor in 1988, the wires to the sound system had been cut years ago by people fed up by the awful stuff -- the result, when there was a fire and the fire alarm went off, we didn't hear it (but someone coming in from the hall did).

The other issue is something that it pleasant at first can rapidly become obnoxious. Scent up the mall and you may just drive people out -- even if their first impression is, what a nice smell.

Further, scent molecules decay or something. Some notes evaporate faster than others. When a scent is piped in, some notes will build up and may add up to the stench of stale perfume that lingers on perfume wearers by the end of the day.

I remember before smoking was prohibited everywhere, coming home with the scent of stale smoke on my clothes and in my hair. Do that again and scents will be banned fast.

It isn't just that the researcher tricked people into perceiving it differently, the natural smell of parmesan cheese is identical to spoiled milk, i.e. baby barf.

This is so pronounced in the case of the dried & grated cheese sold to shake on pasta & pizza that I'm amazed more people don't notice without a researcher (or jerk like me) pointing it out to them.

Clearly someone doesn't think Times Square billboards are ominous. I do. New York looks more and more like the set for Blade Runner every day. If that isn't ominous, I don't know what is.

I personally hate fragrances, especially artificial ones, which usually smell really fake and nasty. I call them "frangrance" because that's a popular misspelling on cheap products. (Unless it's an actual legal ingredient, which wouldn't surprise me.) Frangrance is horrible. My mother-in-law visited once and thought our lack of dryer sheets was an oversight. I had to rewash all my clothes because I couldn't take the stink. Fabric softener? Dryer sheets? Scented candles? Deodorant soap? Cheesy parfum named after pop stars? Who needs all this junk? Can't we just let things smell the way they're supposed to?

By which I do not mean we should all stop bathing. Bathing is good. Keep that up. Just stop with the extra stuff.

I used to think chemical sensitivity was just a lame medical syndrome dreamed up by people who wanted attention or were trying to get out of doing work. That is, until it started happening to me while I was pregnant. My office mate's perfume gave me a splitting headache and I started getting rashes from my detergent and had to switch brands. Now, I'm sensitive to certain perfumes and have to be a bit careful about the products I use. Nothing that really affects my everyday life, but I try to avoid the perfume counters at department stores and stick to soaps and lotions that I know won't give me contact dermatitis. The last thing I want after forking over the skyrocketing cost of a movie ticket is to be blasted by toxic perfume in my seat.

What ever will you fragile flowers do? I recommend you stay home huddled under the covers.

Anyway, everyone in the know expects movies to start running commercials DURING the movies soon. Either with a crawl or with a flat out commercial break. Feel free to stay home at that point. Lot's of people won't though, teens for instance.

As someone with severe allergic reactions to all fragrances, perfumes, candles, cologne, household cleaning agents, hair sprays, soaps, laundry detergents, drying sheets, and other stuff I guess I will have to sue somebody to stop this invasion of my immune system by a bunchy of greedy corporate clowns.

This article seem a bit dated, as I experience real backlash against public smells here in the U.S. Co-workers are forever complaining about clients who wear perfume, or when products arrive accompanied by their natural scents. Attending a workshop requires that you remove any trace of scent from your person and belongings. I have limited my own use of scent to my days off work and feel quite self indulgent when doing so.

Movie is ok, novel is much, much better. In my mind, the importance of scent is very well represented in this work.

For me, I agree, a scent is immediately evocative of scenes and memories from my earlier life.

First, all senses except for olfaction are routed through the thalamus, not the hypothalamus as you say. That said, olfactory pathways do go through the limbic structures associated with emotion and memory (the amygdala and hippocampus, respectively). Many researchers believe that this anatomical pathway right into our brains' emotional and mnemonic processors makes the cognitive and affective influence of the sense of smell far more insidious as we are less aware of such influence than we are aware of the influence of information associated with our other senses.

So what does this mean? The larger social question seems to be: Are we okay with advertisers taking advantage of our human, animal natures? Appealing to our emotional responses bypasses our rational, cognitive capacities (which for some people seem to be highly questionable in the first place). Scent advertising is but the newest version of this, and I'm sure that Karl Rove is already looking for ways to leverage this phenomenon. What's truly insidious is the formation of new associations in our minds between pleasant-smelling, emotionally appealing fragrances and some product or idea somebody is trying to peddle.

Aren't these cognitive abilities among the very foremost traits that make us human? While some advertisers appeal to our pseudo-rational abilities (e.g., 'Buy Super-GLO - it does everything that 5 different cleaners do!') many others appeal to our emotions (I'll admit that I've gotten dewy eyed at more than one Kodak commercial). Using scents to appeal to our emotional selves is but one more way to get us to "buy shit we don't need" to quote Chuck Palahniuk's great line in Fight Club.

We are subjected to enough sensory stimulation overload on a daily basis, including our sense of smell. With pollution, car exhaust, cigarette smoke, strangers’ cologne and perfume – do we really need advertisers inundating us with smells?