Other than ‘just because it smells bad’ how does a putrid smell make somebody throw up? I could understand someone tasting something that’s gone rotten, because the body’s response would be to purge. But smelling it makes no sense. Please help me to understand.
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Negative sensations is essentially your body’s defense system in a nutshell. Putrid smells indicate substances that will make us ill if consumed. For your example, it’s probably because the body knows how it will react after tasting it, so you feel the initial effects from the smell alone.
Because it’s appropriate to your question I’d do a small pedantic correction
“Nausea” is the state of feeling ill like you’re going to vomit.
A person experiencing Nausea is “nauseated” or feels nauseated.
“Nauseous” is quality of causing nausea. So a pile of stinky vomit on teh floor is nauseous, a twisty amusement park ride is nauseous, a gross heavy diarrhea smell is nauseous. *You* are not nauseous unless people are taking one look at you and running to a trash can and blowing chunks.
When have an evolutionary quality that has taught us that a lot of illness is caused by eating bad food, that it’s basically poison. So we adapted to combine poisoning/illness with the need to vomit, to remove ingested poison from the body. It’s said a smart man learns from his mistakes, a genius learns from the mistakes of others. We further adapted the ability recognize *other people being sick* or *things that might make us sick* and react sympathetically.
Meaning, seeing “Gross” things and feeling nauseated is an evolutionary benefit saying “DONT EAT THAT! AND IF YOU DID BARF IT UP NOW!” Similarly, any sort of revulsion, seeing other people getting sick, seeing body fluids, wastes, bad smells/tastes, all linked to the deeply rooting evolutionary trait of “Gross things are poison, and we handle poison by barfing”
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