Rosemary, Lavender, Coffee, Cedar
I liked this article on the sense of smell. It made me think, as the saying goes.
Mine is a mediocre specimen of a post-lapsarian nose. As a fallen daughter of Eve—or, more accurately, a fallen granddaughter of a sharp-nosed chimpanzee—I am conscious of smell only a few times each day…But for most of the day, it is unusual for me to notice any particular smells. I do eat food, of course, but with the illusory impression that I am tasting rather than smelling the myriad different flavours that make up even an ordinary meal.
Yes, same here, I suppose; but I do value smells, I thought to myself. Then later in the day when I was outside, I thought of the article and began sniffing, trying to see if I could exercise my sense of smell. It was interesting – interesting to find how little I could really smell.
It was a perfect day for it. It’s officially the wettest November on record in Seattle, and the month only half over; it rained heavily and non-stop all day Wednesday and it was also very windy, then it cleared overnight, so yesterday the air was as clean as it can possibly get, plus the ground is saturated, so you would think one would be able to smell it. But I couldn’t, really. I tried, but I couldn’t. Sniff sniff sniff – what am I smelling? Nothing, really – very clean damp air; it’s lovely, it’s a joy to sniff, but it doesn’t really have any specific content that I could name. That seemed odd. I looked around (I was walking) – there was, not surprisingly, wet fallen vegetation everywhere, gently decaying; wouldn’t you think we’d be able to smell that? But I couldn’t. Once or twice I thought I perhaps got a faint hint of wet earth and leaves, but I wasn’t at all sure. Maybe I could have in a forest; maybe the ratio of concrete to earth and grass and leaves in an urban neighborhood makes the organic segment more difficult to smell. I thought about farms, the ocean, eucalyptus groves, other smelly places. Gorillas – gorillas have a very strong, pungent smell; orang utans don’t. That’s interesting. Dogs smell bad; cats smell good; why is that?
It has also been chucking it down in not so sunny London.
Doing a bit of a hand-waving/making it up argument, trust me I did a science degree :-). Smell sensations are triggered by molecules hitting your nose. Most of such molecules are generally volatile organic compounds, and typically water soluble. Also, volatile compounds tend to be less so the colder it is.
So on a cold wet rainy day the smell of decaying leaves and earth will tend to be suppressed because the things that you smell will be less volatile and/or dissolved in all that extra water.
But I could be talking out my rear end.
As for the primate pong issue. I have no idea.
Dogs may smell, but cats make me sneeze.
(semi-informed handwaving comment from Merlijn)
I once read that a number of psychopath serial killers had brain damage inhibiting their sense of smell. This includes a guy who passed a toll booth with the chopped-off head of a girl on the seat next to him. He never noticed the smell. The toll booth officer immediately did.
Which made me think that a sense of smell might be connected to our capabilities for empathy on some very deep levels. Think about how scent, perfume, pheromones and all that affect our choice of partner.
I think our sense of smell continues to work even if we may not notice it. Kind of like the music of the spheres – once we would lose it, we would start missing something.
My sense of smell is quite weak, probably due to a chronic cold. Yet memories are connected to smells to me in a very strong fashion. Smells can get me back into the past in the way that visual and auditory memories cannot.
Smells can get me back into the past in the way that visual and auditory memories cannot.
Agreed, there are certain smells that can transport me instantly to being a 5 year old again, or put me in specific locations.
I vaguely remember reading a science article about this somewhere, giving reasons for the strong smell/memory like. Can’t remember the reasons or where I read the article.
The ecologist Aldo Leopold is good on smells. In ‘A Sand County Almanac’ he writes:
‘We sally forth, the dog and I, at random. He has paid scant respect to all these vocal goings on, for to him the evidence of tenantry is not song, but scent. Any illiterate bundle of feathers, he says, can make a noise in a tree. Now he is going to translate for me the olfactory poems that who-knows-what silent creatures have written in the summer night. At the end of each poem sits the author – if we can find him….’
‘The dog, when he approaches the briars, looks around to make sure I am within gunshot. Reassured, he advances with stealthy caution, his wet nose screening a hundred scents for that one scent, the potential presence of which gives life and meaning to the whole landscape. He is the prospector of the air, perpetually searching its strata for olfactory gold. Partridge scent is the gold standard that relates his world to mine.’
‘My dog … persists in tutoring me, with the calm patience of a professor of logic, in the art of drawing deductions from an educated nose. I delight in seeing him deduce a conclusion, in the form of a point, from data that are obvious to him, but speculative to my unaided eye. Perhaps he hopes his dull pupil will one day learn to smell.’
I only have to go near a preserved railway for the mixture of oil, coal and steam to tke me 40 years back into the past.
Someone was telling me about the smell of a new-born baby – very earthy, she said, totally unsynthetic, no soap, no chemicals, as if it had been totally untouched by the world.
Merlijn,
The toughts are not entirely implausible, and indeed quite interesting. I can however imagine some rather ballistic responses from the “spiritual camp”, who would probably brand this as pernicious “biologism”. I have the impression that they regard “feelings” completely belonging to the “spiritual realm”, (-and therefore virtuous). Any suggestion that thoughts and feelings with some bearing on morality can have a biological base, would be fiercely rejected as heresey :-).
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
“there are certain smells that can transport me instantly to being a 5 year old again”
Proust, dallings.
Great comments; all v interesting and suggestive.
It’s interesting watching a dog really thoroughly sniff a scent. I always wonder if he (it is a he when I’m watching) is reading it or just sniffing it. Is he just sniffing the same thing for a long time, or is something sequential going on. It sort of looks like the latter; as if he’s reading a string of code, and that’s why he’s so obstinate about staying until he’s finished. (Walking a dog is an incredibly tedious experience. It’s like dragging a gun carriage around.)
“Any suggestion that thoughts and feelings with some bearing on morality can have a biological base, would be fiercely rejected as heresey :-).”
I just listened to part of a Radio Lab yesterday on which the philosopher-neuroscientist Josh Green did suggest just that, via scanning the brains of people who were doing the trolley-fat man thought experiment. Completely different parts are active for each question (lever? push fat man onto tracks?). He thinks the part that says no to pushing the man is biological.