5 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Everyone tells me that I have really bad breath. But it seems ok to me. What could be going on here that I am missing?
Comment by aTacoParty at 15/03/2023 at 19:42 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You probably have bad breath. We adapt to smells that we smell all the time (like our own body odor, the smell of our house, and the smell of our breath) such that we don't notice it anymore. This is similar to how we stop noticing how our clothes feel on our skin after wearing them for a bit, or how we can ignore certain noises after hearing them for a while. Our brain decides these sensory inputs are noise and filters them out.
I would try some of the suggestions in the Mayo clinic link below and ask a trusted friend to assess how they work. If it doesn't improve in a week or so, I'd seek out an opinion from a dentist. Generally, regular brushing and a mouth wash can fix bad breath in just a day or two.
Evaluation of people with halitosis: https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/40/1/47/2908176[1][2]
1: https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/40/1/47/2908176
2: https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/40/1/47/2908176
Comment by bwyazel at 15/03/2023 at 20:13 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Likely the main explanation here would be a concept in Neuroscience in the field of neuroplasticity known as "habituation" (closely related to its physiological counterpart "adaptation"). In its essence, habituation is a phenomenon where your response to a stimulus decreases the longer you have repeated or prolonged exposure to that stimulus. This is a natural part of sensory systems of all kinds of animal and insect life, and is very important to avoid sensory overload.
A common example is to think of the clothes you are wearing. When you first put on your clothes, you are acutely aware of the cloth touching your skin, but after a few minutes the brain stops informing your conscious mind of this stimulus, as it's unchanging and otherwise uninteresting from a cognitive resource allocation point-of-view. In an evolutionary, fight or flight setting, unchanging stimuli are non-threatening stimuli, and you're better off paying attention to the other parts of your surroundings.
Habituation is happening constantly, from not being able to smell your own breath/body odor, the touch of your clothing, the temperature of a room, a constant hiss from a ceiling fan, etc. If you were constantly being informed of each and every possible source of information in your environment at all times, you would not have a good time. And, to bring it back to your example above, olfaction (i.e. the sense of smell) is a extremely potent sensory system with particularly robust ability to habituate. Meaning that with olfaction you have an even harder time smelling your own scent, and others have an even hard time 'not' smelling your scent, relative to your other senses.