What's in a name for a rose that smells so sweet

Discovered just yesterday that there are several people who cannot recall or relive a familiar smell. Olfactory memory, if you like, is not as common as i imagined it to be. well not really olfactory memory per se. these people do remember the smell in the sense that if they close their eyes and a smell is presented to them, they can recall what it is of. eg. that of a rose, or a mint leaf. they also know that these things have a characteristics smell and that they are different from certain other closely related smells (example the smell of damp clothes vs that of first shower of rain on dry grounds; smell of socks vs smell of a decaying animal). they know that each of these have a characteristics smell and if the stimuli are presented to them they can identify them by the smell alone.... but in absence of the stimuli they are unable to remember/recall/relive the smell. This of course is confounded by the problem of Qualia ( as explained to me by a lab mate) where what I perceive and how I perceive it to be may not be the same as what someone else does but we agree to give that stimulus a certain name. It may actually mean (in terms of perception) very different things to us.
Read more on Qualia, it seems to me as a very interesting topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia ( for the start). This is indepdent of the problem of Qualia I feel. The point here is: I sense it, do you sense it at all. The problem of Qualia will arise if only the answer to the question is yes. If the answer is No then we are probably not into this mess of Qualia. However, one may argue what is 'No' to me is not the no to the other person. As in the threshold that my brain has to cross to send signals that it is feeling/experiencing something will vary from person to person.

None-the-less.. the olfactory reliving of memory was something I had so taken for granted but it seems it is not a common thing at all. If yo think of it, both auditory and visual stimulus are so strong in us humans that reliving a auditory memory (remembering voices of people you know) and 'remembering' the face of people you know, of landscape, objects etc is not hard at all (auditor stimuli being harder to relive as compared to visual in humans). Close you eyes and think of a rose you can get the picture of a rose. But can you recall its smell? looks like many cant!! Close your eyes and think of a writing on a board with chalk. The high freq noise.. can you 'remember'/ relive it? It will not be too hard but can you remember the smell of chalk....

I am so excited that I want to do my post-doc in Olfaction. Years back I spoke to a prof about how visual communication and acoustic sommunication have advanced so much but why not olfactory.. as in, if i open a page in the book that has a picture of the rose.. i can see it.. i should also be able to smell it.. so to communicate the smell.. he said tht it was a young field of research and people are looking at it. But this memory this is cool stuff! So what if a nobel has already been given on olfaction in 2004! big deal! By that argument we should have stopped doing behavior many many years back!

some stuff on olfactory memory can be found in the links given below these do not necessarily discuss reliving olfactory memory ( like you can see familiar faces in your dream or familiar voices in your dream... similarly recreating in a vague sense the smells in your mind) but are interesting independently..

http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/ubnrp/smell/memory.html
WIKI of course
http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/30/suppl_1/i236

 Being from a neurobio lab, rather inspite of being from a neurobio lab I somehow took reliving olfactory memories for granted (as in case of visual or auditory stimulus) but it is obviously not the case. I caught Rohini yesterday after coffeee and asked her if she could relive smells and she said she cant either(as many of my lab mates) then she said...." but it seems some people claim that they can... we dont know!... but there is some research going in this field" and i could see all eyes directed at me...
meekly I said..... mmm...... I Can.