Comment by bwyazel on 15/03/2023 at 20:13 UTC*

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View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology

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.

**Fun fact:*** *Olfaction is thought to be one of the most ancient sensory systems, with its roots tracing back to classic "chemoreception" found in the earliest forms of life to evolve on Earth. It is theorized to be older than all other sensory modalities, evidenced by the fact that, in most animals, our sensory systems first must pass through a part of the midbrain called the Thalamus (the brains router) before being sent to their final destination to be processed, but olfaction bipasses this requirement and has a direct line straight into your cortex, memory centers, emotional centers, etc. It means that the sense of smell is extremely potent, quick acting, and can drive some wild emotional and behavioral responses.*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation[1][2]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938416307272?via%3Dihub[3][4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory%5C_system[5][6]
https://elifesciences.org/articles/85537[7][8]

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