To give you a glimpse at what I do at school every day, here's the introduction to a paper I've been working on.

 Most of us have experienced the surprising evocativeness of odor. We have all been allured by a perfume or cologne, repulsed by a body odor, or like moths to a flame, drawn to a kitchen or smoking backyard grill by the mouth-watering aroma of a favorite dish. Scents, as they waft slowly past our noses, conjure long-buried memories and emotions, and they even influence our behavior. Yet, we do not typically spend large portions of our days analyzing the significance of the many odors that are the subtle subtext of our immediate environments. Why is this the case? It seems intuitively obvious that it is because we have more pressing matters at hand. When we attend dinner parties, it is not particularly important to discern whether that faint flowery smell is coming from a rose in the vase on the shelf or the carnation in that man’s lapel, but it is important to listen to his banal work-related anecdote while we, with furtive glances, assess the degree to which our children’s roughhousing is going to affect that vase. So the question for this paper is not whether our behavior is influenced by scent-related information, because it is undeniable that scent does help us navigate our social worlds and rear our children. The question is instead whether the same scent can have domain specific effects according to cues in the environment.

Throw in a bunch of emails, a scant few interpersonal interactions, and a bunch of thinking, reading, and memorizing, and there you have it.