Sev Obzen

One of the most fascinating things about human learning is how we can learn certain lessons ONCE and remember them for the rest of our lives. I will NEVER eat canned tuna again. Why? Because over a year ago, I experienced half a day of projectile vomiting after eating it. One experience. One lesson. Permanently etched into my brain. You probably know someone who won’t touch tequila because of one disastrous night. Or someone who became violently ill after eating seafood and hasn’t gone near it in decades. Psychologists call this conditioned taste aversion. It’s an extraordinary form of learning that can occur after a SINGLE experience, even when hours separate ingestion from illness. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense. Eat something. Get sick. Remember it. Avoid it. Survive. Now think about COVID. You can enter a room, inhale infectious aerosols, become infected, and have absolutely no sensory warning. No rotten smell. No foul taste. No immediate indication that anything is wrong. Symptoms may not appear for days. Some infections produce no noticeable symptoms at all. And longer-term consequences can be even harder to connect to the original exposure. Our brains are remarkably good at learning from certain sensory experiences. They’re much less reliable at recognizing invisible, delayed threats. And that’s what fascinates me. If COVID smelled like rotten eggs or seafood, I suspect our collective behavior around indoor air would look VERY different. People would open windows. Demand better ventilation. Wear respirators. Leave rooms. Instead, we repeatedly expose ourselves to a virus we cannot smell, taste, or see. And the cruelest irony of all… COVID doesn’t have a smell. But it can take away yours. I learned to avoid canned tuna after ONE afternoon. Imagine how differently we’d treat the air we share if our brains received the same unmistakable warning.