Something stink!! ! Why can't YOU smell it?

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Does not smelling your own room, or smelling the stinky family dog have to do with Aspergers? How is it possible that other people can smell it and you don't?

Sometimes people just get used to smells. IF you're around it all the time, you're probably desensitized to it.

I'm always the one that smells the bad thing.

as patternist says, you can get used to it
another option is smoking, which reduces your ability to smell things

My son is always saying "What's that smell?" If we try hard enough, we can usually find it but not always.

It's interesting because my wife has a excellent sense of smell and can't always detect the smell. I on the otherhand can't smell a darn thing.

Hey I guess you know how Wolverine feels all the time!

It has nothing to do with Aspergers, although sometimes people with AS may care little about personal hygeine so they forget to bathe. What happens is that if you keep smelling something over and over again (like a pair of sneakers or a cat box that needs to be emptied), your nose assimilates it and you no longer sense it. This is called 'becoming inured' to a scent. Same thing happens with smokers. They smell burning tobacco all the time and their nose 'tunes out' the normally overpowering skunky smell of smoke. Other people are so sensitive to it they can smell it on the smoker's clothing even if the clothes have been freshly washed - there's still a faint odor that non-smokers can pick up on.

I read about a similar thing with people who deal with dead bodies (morticians, forensics technicians) who breathe in the air around the dead so often that they can't smell the scent of death - a smell that would instantly bowl the rest of us over and cause us to vomit if we happened upon it. Similar thing happens with noise - if you keep hearing a persistent sound day in and day out, eventually you can tune it out and 'hear around it' even if it's pretty loud.

I have that all the time. There is a certain classroom that everyone insists smells terrible, but I counter-inist that there is absolutely nothing wrong and that they should quit whining.

I didn't really smell it the first time I entered the room, either. Atleast not a bad smell.

I have almost no sense of smell left. Maybe it was wiped out by my junior high cafeteria.

Aspies can be both hyper- and hypo-sensitive within the same sense.

This means that you can't smell the catbox, but your friend's perfume makes you ill.

It's normal for everyone. If it's your own something, eg. your room, your smell, your home, you are not going to smell it because you are used to it.

Smokers for example, everyone can smell the smoke on them but they can't.

Once I got into my mom's car, and started coughing because I smelled cigarette smoke strongly. I asked my mom if she had smoked that day (she had quit a number of years ago).

She insisted that she hadn't, and I had no reason to not believe her, and then I asked if someone else had smoked in the car, and she said no, and finally we determined that while someone who smokes had been in the car for a couple minutes, they hadn't had a cigarette or anything.

Ironically, I have chronic sinus problems, which you'd think would interfere with this kind of thing.

Fortunately, while I can still pick it up very easily, it doesn't irritate me nearly as easily as it did when I was a kid, as there are a lot of people who smoke at my college, and while there are restricted areas for smoking, I pass by them pretty often, so I smell it a lot.

Everything stinks! At times, I am overwhelmed by different scents, and all of them are bothersome. I am always saying "what stinks". I cant ignore it till I find out what it is, then make attempts to "fix" it. Ex. cat box, ick.

From how you say it, that's totally unrelated to AS. It's normal even.

The 'normal' way of processing smells is noticing them if they're unfamiliar and then, while you grow familiar with them (in minutes or less) to not be able to detect them any more. If it's a smell you constantly are in touch it, you usually cannot detect it if you sense of smell is that of most people.

While you probably life in your room and are familiar with the scent, other people are not and thus will notice the smell.

That's how the nose 'should' work. And you described that yours does work like that too.

It would a sensory issues (and if you have AS, most likely related to it) if you would not grow familiar to a scent and if you continuously would be able to smell it.

So actually your nose seems to work fairly normal, you know.

I think it is a human trait not to be aware of the smells you live in.

My parents claim my newly-bought rabbits stink up my room, but even if I'm gone for a few days & come into my room, all I can smell is the light scent of hay.

I know what you mean, my mum was saying my room smelled but I couldnt smell a thing.