Olfaction is the sense of smell. This sense is mediated by specialized sensory cells of the nasal cavity of vertebrates, and by sensory cells of the antennae of invertebrates.

The importance and sensitivity of smell varies among different organisms. Most mammals have a good sense of smell, whereas most birds do not. Among mammals, it is well-developed in the carnivores and ungulates, who must always be aware of each other, and in those that smell for their food, like moles.

It is estimated that dogs have an olfactory sense approximately a hundred thousand to a million times more acute than a human’s. This does not mean they are overwhelmed by smells our noses can detect, rather, it means they can discern a molecular presence when it is in much greater dilution in the air. 

Bears, such as the Silvertip Grizzly found in parts of North America, have a sense of smell seven times stronger than a dog, essential for locating food underground. Using their elongated claws, bears dig deep trenches in search of burrowing animals and nests as well as roots, bulbs, and insects. Bears can detect the scent of food from up to 18 miles away.

Fish also have a well-developed sense of smell, even though they inhabit an aquatic environment. Salmon utilize their sense of smell to identify and return to their home stream waters. Catfish use their sense of smell to identify other individual catfish and to maintain a social hierarchy.

Insects use their antennae for olfaction. Sensory neurons in the antenna generate electrical signals called spikes in response to odor. The antennae have sensory neurons in the sensilla with axons terminating in the antennal lobes where they synapse with other neurons in semidelineations called glomeruli.

Cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, is a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else. In these cases, the person is not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but is rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

Self-plagiarism is not as costly as plagiarizing the work of others. In a famous case, George Harrison was sued over royalties for his first solo song “My Sweet Lord”, a song that sounded too similar to the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”. Harrison lost the case when a judge said he “subconsciously plagiarized”, and was ordered to pay $587,000 to Bright Tunes Music, who owned the copyright. Plagiarism of this sort is a kind of sleeper effect whereby old ideas come to feel new.

As explained by Carl Jung in Man and His Symbols, “An author may be writing steadily to a preconceived plan, working out an argument or developing the line of a story, when he suddenly runs off at a tangent. Perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to him, or a different image, or a whole new sub-plot. If you ask him what prompted the digression, he will not be able to tell you. He may not even have noticed the change, though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown to him before. Yet it can sometimes be shown convincingly that what he has written bears a striking similarity to the work of another author, a work that he believes he has never seen.”

Helen Keller seriously compromised her and her teacher’s credibility with an incident of cryptomnesia which was misapprehended as plagiarism. The Frost King, which Keller wrote out of buried memories of a fairytale read to her four years previously, left Keller a nervous wreck, and unable to write fiction for the rest of her life.

Cryptomnesia may be the result of some memories becoming forcibly unconscious, due to lack of reinforcement through use. There may be enough of the memory left to recall it but not its origin. Therefore it does not always take the shape of plagiarism, as it would in writing, as well as musical compositions, but can also be the basis of philosophy.

Contentment is the experience of satisfaction and being at ease in one’s situation. The source of all mentally created dissatisfaction appears to stem from the ability to compare and contrast experience and find reality as one is living it to be less than ideal. The solution is to seek out ways to either make experienced reality conform to the ideal or to lower expectations to the level of the experience. When one can live in the moment with expectations in harmony with experience, one has achieved the greatest mental contentment possible.

In a Buddhist sense, contentment is the freedom from anxiety, want or need. Buddha’s task was to find the solution to this never ending descent into dissatisfaction or Dukkha. The Buddhist faith is based on the belief that he succeeded. In yoga practice, movement or positions, breathing practices, and concentration can contribute to a physical state of contentment.

Contentment is the goal behind all goals, because once achieved there is nothing to seek until it is lost. A living system cannot maintain contentment for very long as complete balance and harmony of forces means death. Living systems are a complex dance of forces which find a stability far from balance. Any attainment of balance is quickly met by rising pain which ends the momentary experience of satisfaction or contentment achieved.

The American philosopher, Robert Bruce Raup wrote a book Complacency: The Foundation of Human Behavior in which he claimed that the human need for inner tranquility was the hidden spring of human behavior. Dr. Raup made this the basis of his pedagogical theory, which he later used in his severe criticisms of the American Education system of the 1930s.

Furoshiki are a type of square Japanese wrapping cloth that were traditionally used to transport clothes, gifts, or other goods. Although possibly dating back as far as the Nara period, the name, meaning bath spread, derives from the Edo period practice of using them to bundle clothes while at the public baths. Before becoming associated with public baths, furoshiki were known as hirazutsumi, or flat folded bundle.

Eventually, the furoshiki’s usage extended to serve as a means for merchants to transport their wares or to protect and decorate a gift. Although there are still furoshiki users in Japan, their numbers declined in the post-war period, in large part due to the proliferation of the plastic shopping bag. In recent years, furoshiki has seen a renewed interest as environmental protection became a concern. They are still commonly used to wrap and transport bento lunch boxes and often double as a table mat for the lunch.

Modern furoshiki can be made of a variety of cloths, including silk, cotton, rayon, and nylon. Furoshiki are often decorated with traditional designs or by shibori, a method of dyeing cloth with a pattern by binding, stitching, folding, twisting, or compressing it, known in the West as tie-dye. There is no one set size for furoshiki, they can range from hand sized to larger than bed-sheets.

Each year billions of plastic bags end up as litter; reusable bags, such as furoshiki can help reduce the impact to our environment. Its versatility allows you to wrap almost anything regardless of its shape or size. In March 2006, the Japanese Minister of the Environment, Yuriko Koike, created a furoshiki cloth to promote its use in the modern world.

Love bombing is the deliberate show of affection or friendship by an individual or a group of people toward another individual. Some have asserted that this action may be motivated in part by the desire to recruit, convert or otherwise influence others.

Critics of cults often cite love bombing as one of the features that may identify an organization as a cult. When used by critics, the phrase is defined to mean affection that is feigned or with an ulterior motive that is used to reduce the subject’s resistance to recruitment.

The term was popularized by psychology professor Margaret Singer. In her 1996 book, Cults in Our Midst, she describes the technique as a coordinated effort, usually under the direction of leadership, that involves long-term members’ flooding recruits and newer members with flattery, verbal seduction, affection, and lots of attention to their every remark. Love bombing, or the offer of instant companionship, is a deceptive ploy accounting for many successful recruitment drives.

Members of some groups use the phrase themselves to mean a genuine expression of friendship, fellowship, interest, or concern.

The endless knot is an ancient symbol representing the interweaving of the spiritual path, the flowing of time, and movement within that which is eternal. All existence, it says, is bound by time and change, yet ultimately rests serenely within the divine and the eternal.

It is a symbolic knot and an important cultural marker in places significantly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism such as Tibet, Mongolia, Tuva, Kalmykia, and Buryatia. It is also sometimes found in Chinese art and used in Chinese knots. The endless knot is known as one of the Eight Auspicious Symbols.

Various interpretations of the symbol include the endless cycle of suffering or birth, death and rebirth within Tibetan Buddhism, the inter-twining of wisdom and compassion, and the interplay and interaction of the opposing forces in the dualistic world of manifestation, leading to their union, and ultimately to harmony in the universe.

It represents the union of wisdom and method, the inseparability of emptiness and the underlying reality of existence, and is also symbolic of the linking of ancestors and omnipresence in the magical ritual and meta-process of binding.

Since the knot has no beginning or end it also symbolizes the infinite wisdom of the Buddha. Endless knots appearing as mystic and mythological symbols have developed independently in various cultures. A well-known example is the various Celtic knots.

The cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations. This effect reveals one of the surprising abilities of our auditory system, which enables us to talk in a noisy place.

The effect can occur both when we are paying attention to one of the sounds around us and when it is invoked by a stimulus which grabs our attention suddenly. For example, when we are talking with our friend in a crowded party, we still can listen and understand what our friend says even if the place is very noisy, and can simultaneously ignore what another nearby person is saying. Then if someone over the other side of the party room calls out our name suddenly, we also notice that sound and respond to it immediately.

It was first described and named by Colin Cherry in 1953. Much of the early work in this area can be traced to problems faced by air traffic controllers in the early 1950s. At that time, controllers received messages from pilots over loudspeakers in the control tower. Hearing the intermixed voices of many pilots over a single loudspeaker made the controller’s task very difficult.

Cherry conducted attention experiments in which subjects were asked to listen to two different messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time and try to separate them. His work reveals that our ability to separate sounds from background noise is based on the characteristics of the sounds, such as the gender of the speaker, the direction from which the sound is coming, the pitch, or the speaking speed.

This phenomenon is still very much a subject of research, in humans as well as in computer implementations, where it is typically referred to as source separation or blind source separation. The neural mechanism in human brains is not yet fully clear.

Eternity often means existence for a limitless amount of time, and may be used to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside of time. There are a number of arguments for eternity, by which proponents of the concept, principally Aristotle, purported to prove that matter, motion, and time must have existed eternally.

The metaphysics of eternity might be summarized by asking if anything can be said to exist outside of or independent of time, and if so how and why? Some consequential metaphysical questions of some importance relate to whether information can be said to exist independently of the human mind, and if so, what would be the content and purpose of such information?

It is an understatement to say that humans cannot fully understand eternity, since it is either an infinite amount of time as we know it or something other than the time and space we know. For the infinite definition, there are parallels that give some notion of a potential infinity, or a series that begins and has not ended. A series of moments that has begun and not ended is, however, not potentially eternal by that definition. A series of moments that has begun and not ended cannot be eternal, because even if it were to continue for the rest of infinite time, there would still be time prior to the initial moment in the series.

Augustine of Hippo wrote that time exists only within the created universe, so that God exists outside of time. For God there is no past or future, but only an eternal present. One need not believe in God in order to hold this concept of eternity. For example, an atheist mathematician can maintain the philosophical tenet that numbers and the relationships among them exist outside of time, and so are in that sense eternal.