Daredevil Message Board

[jumonji]

Okay, here's the next installment of this little science series. I think I'll keep it relatively light with just some random little factoids.

First of all, who else but me feels that the sense of smell is the most underused of all the senses in the book? It seems like the pre-Miller era was all about heartbeats all the time. I guess this could be because humans don't generally use their sense of smell much and have a hard time imagining what it would be like to experience the world the way dogs and other animals do. Anyway, I loved it when Bru did that little examination of the sense of smell in The Devil Takes a Ride.

Anyway, the MUH is (once again) a little off when they say that DD can pick up smells down to 20 ppm of a given substance. This would depend entirely on the substance in question and perfectly normal people can pick up lots of things down to concentrations as low as a few parts per billion.

On to some random facts! Did you know that:

The olfactory epithelium (in the back of your nose) is the only place where the brain makes direct contact with the atmoshpere? 'Cause there are those little nerve endings there that have special receptors that bind to various molecules, generating a response in the brain which we interpret as smell. (Yeah, that's pretty much how it works).

People can distinguish between 10 000 different scents? People who train their noses (such as those working in the perfume industry and the like) can learn to distinguish between many times more than that.

No two people smell exactly the same? So for a guy with a supernose that really would be an excellent way to tell people apart.

Metals have hardly any smell at all? In order to reach the receptors in the nose, a substance has to be sufficiently volatile (which metals aren't). The scent we interpret as a metal scent comes from the compound that forms when metals like iron reacts with the skin. The smell of blood is believed to stem from the same kind of reaction.

Okay, so what about the "DD science" aspect of all this? Well, I guess this is the one sense that doesn't require much in terms of an explanation since we all know that humans are notoriously bad smellers (although science is starting to tell us that we're not quite as bad as we think we are). Basically, there's a lot of room for improvement. Depending on the source (numbers vary), dogs have a sense of smell that is at least one thousand times better than that of humans. Whether we should assume that the same would be true for DD (I guess that depend's on the writer and the reader), is impossible to say. And, yeah, the fact that he's a fictional character doesn't exactly help.

Having an enhanced sense of smell does seem like a mixed blessing though. While smells can elicit very strong emotional responses, only about twenty percent of the smells humans can perceive are rated as pleasant.

So, if I were to ask any questions on this topic it might be: "What's your favorite scent?" and "Would you like to see DD use his nose more in the book?" My answers to those two would be "coffee" and "yes."
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The Other Murdock Papers

[Francesco]

My favourite generic scent is also that of coffee, though there are more specific scents that I'm particularly fond of.

Regarding the use of the sense of smell, I think that so far Brubaker has done a good work with it. Especially in the sequence of flashbacks where DD explains the importance of smells to him.

I was struck by a particular that I had never taken into consideration: with his enhanced senses, Matt would've felt the presence of Jack Murdock still lingering around after his death. Kinda like what everyone feels in those moments but more real and thus more excruciating.

I think I have heard somewhere that the sense of smell is the one more closely associated to memory. So it's no wonder that Matt still has Karen in his mind, and recognized Karen's parfume in the pheromone chemical worn by Lilly Lucca.