Dr Norman Swan

speaker

26,995 appearances 288 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2006 last heard 15 Sep

Dr Norman Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

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What's That Rash? · What has your nose got to do with sleep? · 18 Aug 2026 podcast

And I don't know whether Yannick Sinner when he can't sleep at night 'cause he's worried about his next event, you know, sniffs pickle juice, but mostly

Snort

Yeah, and this direct line that you've got to the brain makes sense because, for example, with fire, you don't want any delay to your response to a sm an odor that might actually preserve your life, might actually save your life.

But hang on.

Exactly, but if you're roaming through the savannah grassland with your family group and you sniff in the air and you smell smoke, that uh presents an alert.

You might actually have a sense you in the olden days you might have had a heightened sense of smell of animals in the environment and just the way animals can smell danger.

we might be able to smell it too.

We might have lost the awareness of that.

And then there's much more positive things where you

smell just gets into your memory where a certain food smell, certain smell of cooking, reminds you of your grandparents, reminds you of a time when you were a child.

So with dreams, mixed picture, some odors do affect, you know, REM sleep, but remarkably little, even intense orders d d do not seem to affect uh dreaming.

But a very hard thing to study.

Yes, this is more psychological conditioning where you associate an awful smell with a behavior you're trying to break.

Uh and

What's been shown in some psychological research is that the emotion you want to associate with the habit you want to break or not start is disgust.

Disgust is actually much more profoundly effective than fear.

They've shown, for example, with kids, this is West Australian research actually, which looked at what it takes to put kids off smoking.

And it's not fear.

Fear of lung cancer or things like that.

So they developed ads, which by the way got banned because they were so effective.

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