Ohkay eyeballers of the List Come along with me and let's have some fun. Maybe we can look at something from another perspective in considering how we got here from where we were, way up there. Way up there is in front of your ferret's nose. Steaming coffee, bacon and scrambled eggs cooking, the buttered toast in the toaster oven bubbling, and a whiff of my own morning breath, prior to the tooth brush. Ahhh, the smells of a breakfast anticipated. Never mind that last smell.and let's ignore it if we can. As we pull up to the breakfast table, our mind's eye on the grub that's coming. we should stop for a moment and contemplate what's happening in our mouth. Something's happening because I can feel it. My mouth is a little bit more moist, like more juicy than it was before I smelled all the good breakfast food. There's no doubt about it. Even before that first sip of juice, or the coffee, yo Bro, wha zzup, man? I could spit with hardly any effort at all. As a matter of fact, I'm nearly drooling and dribbling over my lower lip. The saliva is pooling up in my mouth even before I've had anything to eat, but, my-o-my, is this going to be good, or what! Let's consider what is happening here. We have a stimulus and we have a response that is triggered by that stimulus..The stimulus is the interception of airborne molecules landing on the nasal and mouth nerves that our brain interprets as odor. We do realize that a smell is the deposit of molecules or larger chemical compounds that are actual pieces of what ever it is that we smell. It is a piece of scrambled egg, a piece of bacon, a droplet of coffee, and even the chemical decomposition swirl of alkaline substances that yield our sensation of morning breath. Our memory identifies these chemical messengers by the electrical ions travelling along the well worn pathway creases in our brain and which we have habituated to recognize as the smells of breakfast and phew. Now let's compare the ferret waking in the morning and slipping down out of his hammock or nestbox to the floor of his cage, visiting the liter pan, scoot wiping his rectum and meandering over to his food dish for that first morning sniff test to get some idea of what he has to eat this morning. When I consider the ferret, I ask myself how similar is the stimuli and the response in a ferret's brain identical to our sensations of our and his olefactory sense? Assuming in both mammals that the senses are similar if not identical, just how do they differ? And how do we find out what those differences are, if any? I should like to continue kinda wondering out loud, so to speak, and travel along down the ferret's tube and to give some little genuine thought to what we will find there, what's going on therein, and why what's happening is happening. I invite you, one and all, to contribute on a continuing basis to our thinking and wondering about the ferret's tube and just what is going on, all the way from one end to the other. Please join me and give us the benefit of your knowledge. This way we shall all be better off and certainly more informed. So until we meet again, Auf Wiedersehen Frettchenvolk (German: See you again, ferret people) Iksnipil Drawde [Posted in FML 6227]