Hello all,
I had a colleague reach out to me recently in the field of psychology. She has a research project idea that broadly pertains to the psychology of olfaction, and she asked for recommendations on aromachemical(s) she could feature in this study.
We discussed a bit on what the ideal AC for her experiment would be. It turned out to be not as straightforward as we first imagined.
Ideally, her test subjects would smell a test strip dipped in an AC that has the following characteristics:
-something powerful enough to last for at least a few hours on strip (so nothing with limonene)
-something with a good shelf life (so nothing with limonene)
-something that's single-molecule (so no bases or captives or EOs)
-something that people aren't commonly anosmic to (so no sandalwood synthetics)
-and this is the tricky one, ideally something that isn't broadly recognizable, as that can carry personal connotations/invoke memory retrieval, which can generate artifacts in an EEG.
That last criterion makes it tricky. My first hunch was ambroxan. It might be weakly familiar to most, but nobody outside this subreddit likely knows it by name. But I think people can be commonly anosmic to it. And as I'm typing this I'm remembering that M02 is a thing.
My next thought was ambrettolide? And after that I've got nothing.
So I'm very curious to know what your favorite, weird, strong, unrecognizable ACs are.
Thanks!