Olfactory Quotes

He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.

Are You Ready for New Urban Fragrances? Yeah, I guess I'm ready, but listen: Perfume is a disguise. Since the middle ages, we have worn masks of fruit and flowers in order to conceal from ourselves the meaty essence of our humanity. We appreciate the sexual attractant of the rose, the ripeness of the orange, more than we honor our own ripe carnality. Now today we want to perfume our cities, as well; to replace their stinging fumes of disturbed fossils' sleep with the scent of gardens and orchards. Yet, humans are not bees any more than they are blossoms. If we must pull an olfactory hood over our urban environment, let it be of a different nature. I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes. I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets. Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace. I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve. I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain. I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods. And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.

It was the dandelion principle! To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

The fragrance of white tea is the feeling of existing in the mists that float over waters; the scent of peony is the scent of the absence of negativity: a lack of confusion, doubt, and darkness; to smell a rose is to teach your soul to skip; a nut and a wood together is a walk over fallen Autumn leaves; the touch of jasmine is a night's dream under the nomad's moon.

Sometimes a scent is more evocative than a photo or an image. It is a primer for the deflagration of sensation, emotions, desires, uncontrollable atmospheres, dejavus that flood and wrap us like honey, until they make us drown in an unrepeatable moment of wellbeing... olfactory hallucinations that lead us anywhere: to the North of any South, to the East of any West...

When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

this fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants.

Legend claimed Berserkers could move with such speed that they seemed invisible to the human eye until the moment they attacked. They possessed unnatural senses: the olfactory acuity of a wolf, the auditory sensitivity of a bat, the strength of twenty men, the penetrating eyesight of an eagle. The Berserkers had once been the most fearless and feared warriors ever to walk Scotland nearly seven hundred years ago. They had been Odin's elite Viking army. Legend claimed they could assume the shape of a wolf or a bear as easily as the shape of a man. And they were marked by a common feature-unholy blue eyes that glowed like banked coals.

You see, nothing is more immediate, more complete than the sense of smell. In an instant, it has the power to transport you. Your olfactory sense connects not to the memory itself, but to the emotion you felt when that memory was made. To recreate a scent memory is one of the most challenging, eloquent pursuits possible. It’s poetry, in its most immediate form.

Don’t think of it as urine,” Pawn Odgers advised her. “Try to think of it as an olfactory disguise.” Felicity tried and was not measurably comforted. “But

Fungi are equipped with different kinds of bodies. They don’t have noses or brains. Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium. A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane: A molecule can bind to a receptor anywhere on its surface and trigger a signaling cascade that alters fungal behavior.

...bright, flowery plants... were busy committing the olfactory equivalent of aggravated assault.

There is no reason for verbosity in the olfactory world. Less is more.

He is the prospector of the air, perpetually searching its strata for olfactory gold.

I want to mass produce wretchedness. An unsatisfactory factory. Then I want to produce cologne and stench—at different ends of the production line. So it would be an olfactory factory.

I watched Daryl swirl, sniff, sip, swish, chew, swallow, and sometimes spit his way through countless glasses of Bordeaux and all I could think was that someone who spent so much time and care on all the oral and olfactory acrobatics involved in wine tasting should really be more adept at oral sex

The olfactory sensors of dogs, he said, had evolved over millions of years to be able to detect a handful of molecules, and that kind of sensitivity is extremely difficult to match, even with our most finely tuned sensors. It’s likely that we will continue to rely on dogs at airports for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, everyday language soon would prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple wood, oak wood, pinewood, elm wood, pearwood, old, young, rotting, moldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips, and splinters.

Nostalgia is where the past blurs into the present. That’s where all the best scents are to be found.

Smell was our first sense, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from our olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.

Aromatherapy is more thoroughly defined as the skilled and controlled use of essential oils for physical and emotional health and well-being. Science is now confirming what has been known for centuries: essential oils have healing properties on both physical and emotional levels. Absorbed through the skin and via the olfactory-brain connection through inhalation, they have been considered among the most therapeutic and rejuvenating of all botanical extracts throughout the ages.

You are the only member of this Sleepwalker team with formal medical training, Specialist Yorrik. "Wry self-deprecation: I am a pediatric allergist. Auditory, olfactory, esophageal." Anax Therion and Senna stared at him. "In sheepish explanation: Ear, nose, and throat. I do sniffles.

I’d loved women who were old and who were young; those extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these: where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.

The cent you desire is hidden in the scent of a flower.

It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors.

Something smells off in the barns. Even in this city of olfactory tragedy, this scent’s more pungent and desperate than anything I’ve encountered before.

olfactory

Tropical trees had been planted throughout the room, along with bright flowering plants that were busy committing the olfactory floral equivalent of aggravated assault.

Humans are better equipped for sight than for smell. We process visual input ten times faster than olfactory.

The human olfactory system is atrophied; roughly 40 percent of a rat’s brain is devoted to olfactory processing, versus 3 percent in us.

primordial olfactory nerve

The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things. Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us. On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena. But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs -- at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber -- would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?

There are some who believe that perfume is magic. The fragrance of a thing is its purest essence. And certain scents can awaken phantoms of past love, of sweetest reminiscence." "Phantoms?" Daisy repeated, intrigued, and the other girl replied impatiently. "He doesn't mean it literally, dear. Perfume can't summon a ghost. And it's not really magic. It's only a mixture of scent particles that travel to the olfactory receptors in your nose.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

Every person, old or young, male or female, automatically slows down as if the air had become thick and difficult to penetrate. Do you know at what building?—a bakery! That powerful olfactory stimulus slows you automatically.

Possibly the most compelling reason for use of the expressive arts in trauma work is the sensory nature of the arts themselves; their qualities involve visual, tactile, olfactory, auditory, vestibular, and proprioceptive experiences.

The ocean, just outside, seeped into everything. An olfactory reminder to everyone passing through the Ellis Island of the space age that Earth was absolutely unique to the human race. The birthplace of everything. The salt water flowing in everyone’s veins first pulled from the same oceans right outside the building. The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it’d take their water back without a thought.

Human sexual and social behavior shares some similaries with that of rodents, but has some important differences as well. It shows much greater variability and individuality, for example, and is less closely tied to the olfactory system. At present, it is tempting to speculate that those of us with cheatin' hearts might have differences in brain dopamine, vasopressin, or oxytocin signaling when compared to our more faithful friends who have adopted the prairie vole lifestyle.

Characterizing and understanding dogs’ olfactory and cognitive skills isn’t best done in a lab with limited and usually untrained dog subjects. If working dogs are overrated in the popular imagination, they have been mostly underrated in science,

Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed ‘not to forget’.

Seeing them again in mufti, a year later, confirmed the verdict of defeat and showed these men now to be guilty of numerous sartorial misdemeanors. They squeaked around the store in bargain-basement penny loafers and creased budget khakis, or in ill-fitting suits advertised by wholesalers for the price of buy-one-get-one-free. Ties, handkerchiefs, and socks were thrown in, though what was really needed was cologne, even of the gigolo kind, anything to mask the olfactory evidence of their having been gleefully skunked by history.

There's not much to say about loneliness, for it's not a broad subject. Any child, alone in her room, can journey across its entire breadth, from border to border, in an hour. Though not broad, our subject is deep. Loneliness is deeper than the ocean. But here, too, there is no mystery. Our intrepid child is liable to fall quickly to the very bottom without even trying. And since the depths of loneliness cannot sustain human life, the child will swim to the surface again in short order, no worse for wear. Some of us, though, can bring breathing aids down with us for longer stays: imaginary friends, drugs and alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, hobbies, ironclad routine, and pets. (Pets are some of the best enablers of loneliness, your own cuddlesome Murphy notwithstanding.) With the help of these aids, a poor sap can survive the airless depths of loneliness long enough to experience its true horror -- duration. Did you know, Myren Vole, that when presented with the same odor (even my own) for a duration of only several minutes, the olfactory nerves become habituated -- as my daughter used to say -- to it and cease transmitting its signal to the brain? Likewise, most pain loses its edge in time. Time heals all -- as they say. Even the loss of a loved one, perhaps life's most wrenching pain, is blunted in time. It recedes into the background where it can be borne with lesser pains. Not so our friend loneliness, which grows only more keen and insistent with each passing hour. Loneliness is as needle sharp now as it was an hour ago, or last week. But if loneliness is the wound, what's so secret about it? I submit to you, Myren Vole, that the most painful death of all is suffocation by loneliness. And by the time I started on my portrait of Jean, I was ten years into it (with another five to go). It is from that vantage point that I tell you that loneliness itself is the secret. It's a secret you cannot tell anyone. Why? Because to confess your loneliness is to confess your failure as a human being. To confess would only cause others to pity and avoid you, afraid that what you have is catching. Your condition is caused by a lack of human relationship, and yet to admit to it only drives your possible rescuers farther away (while attracting cats). So you attempt to hide your loneliness in public, to behave, in fact, as though you have too many friends already, and thus you hope to attract people who will unwittingly save you. But it never works that way. Your condition is written all over your face, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the hollowness of your laugh. You fool no one. Believe me in this; I've tried all the tricks of the lonely man.

The result was eerie; right under Grenouille's nose, the sackmaker rose olfactorily from the dead, ascending from the alcohol solution, hovering there - the phantom slightly distorted by the peculiar methods of reproduction and the constant miasmas of his disease - but perfectly recognizable in space as olfactory personage,

Masters: Situation appears dire. Look around. Do you see any adults? Me: My ball size indicates I’m the adultest thing here. Me: I haven’t been rejected this hard since I tried to block the punt in that game against OSU last semester. Masters: My wife says rejection is good for you. Makes you mentally tough. Me: You love saying that phrase “my wife.” Masters: You bet your fat ass I do. Me: You don’t think it’s completely strange that you’re 21 and acting like a Taylor Swift song? Masters: Bro, sorry you feel left out. Stop by later and I’ll give you a hug. Me: Fuck off. Masters: I have MY WIFE to do that for me. Thanks, though. Hug still stands. I’ll even let you smell me. MY WIFE says I smell delicious. Me: I’ve smelled you before, which is why I’m not sure how you convinced Ellie to marry you. She must have defective olfactory senses. Masters: Me and MY defective WIFE will be getting it on tonight. While u have only Rosie Palm. Me: Don’t worry. I get plenty of variety. Left-hand Laura sometimes steps in. Masters: Heard you were out with Josie Weeks. Be careful. She eats little linebackers like you for breakfast. And the fact that I don’t even want to make a sexually charged comeback tells me exactly how I feel about Josie. Hope she doesn’t mind being just study partners.

An infant’s scent seems to flip certain neural switches in the parents. The mother’s sense of smell gets completely rewired during pregnancy, so that the scent of her own infant becomes incredibly alluring. In the meantime, though, because the olfactory infrastructure is being overhauled, other wonderful aromas may smell disgusting. When

That hateful staircase, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and fixed the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.

Scientists still know very little about how the olfactory cortex in the brain converts impulses from receptors into conscious senses of smell. But Harry wasn’t thinking so much about the hows, he just knew that when he smelled her, all sorts of things started happening in his head and body. Like his eyelids closing halfway, like his mouth spreading into a broad grin and his mood soaring.

It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors. As James Le Fanu has put it, “While we have the overwhelming impression that the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming through our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting on the eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter travelling through space.” All the richness of life is created inside your head. What you see is not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and that’s not the same thing at all. Consider a bar of soap. Has it ever struck you that soap lather is always white no matter what color the soap is? That isn’t because the soap somehow changes color when it is moistened and rubbed. Molecularly, it’s exactly as it was before. It’s just that the foam reflects light in a different way. You get the same effect with crashing waves on a beach—greeny-blue water, white foam—and lots of other phenomena. That is because color isn’t a fixed reality but a perception.

The sight of my mother's handwriting on the slips of paper and in the margins of the book causes me to inhale sharply, and for a moment I smell licorice, as if the mere sight of her heavily styled penmanship has produced an olfactory hallucination. It's a delicate smell, more like anise or fresh tarragon than the sugary smell of a licorice pastille. Smell, I remember my mother once telling me, is the most powerful of the senses. Without it, there is no taste. Long ago I lost the memory of her face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers. But I can still remember her smell, in the aroma of a sherry reduction, the perfume, delicate and faint, that lingers on your hands after you've run them through a hedge of rosemary, the pungent assault of a Gauloises cigarette. Any of a thousand smells are enough to conjure her memory.

As soon as I stepped onto the train, I knew why Shifters and Weres shunned the contraptions like E.coli avoided antibacterial agents on a petri dish. It smelled. Badly. A putrid mix of old man, sweaty socks, and cigarettes. My nose hairs didn't shrivel; they curled into the fetal position before they withered and died, leaving my nasal passage a dry, barren wasteland no longer capable of being harmed by the olfactory assault.

smell is the only sense that goes straight to the brain’s cortex—the olfactory nerve is close to the part of the brain that deals with emotions and memory, which is why the smell of food evokes nostalgia and memories, and also why no Michelin star chef can compete with your grandmother’s dal. After all, it is not objective taste and aroma that matters but the fond memories associated with it that come rushing back when you eat a good home-cooked dal.

What may be featureless to us, a waste of undifferentiated ocean, is for them rich with distinction and variety, a fissured and wrinkled landscape, dense in patches, thin in others, a rolling olfactory prairie of the desired and the desirable, mottled and unreliable, speckled with life, streaky with pleasures and dangers, marbled and flecked, its riches often hidden and always mobile, but filled with places that are pregnant with life and possibility.

The faded scent of stale smoke had cured into the gray wood over the years, but it suddenly seems more potent. As are distinct notes of ass and sweat and some combination of the two, drifting up to your newly sensitive sloth nostrils. Did you really smell this bad? Was it noticeable to others? Why the hell do you give a shit about it right now? You’re a fucking sloth. Shouldn’t you be worrying about that rather than whose olfactory sensibilities you might offend?

smell is often referred to as the invisible sense: we regularly experience it without consciously registering it. A smell enters our nose, travels to our olfactory bulb, and makes its way directly to our hippocampus, our amygdala (an emotionprocessing center), and our olfactory cortex (which not only deals with smells but is involved in complex memory, learning, and decision-making tasks), triggering a host of thoughts, feelings, and recollections—yet more likely than not, we note neither smell nor memory.

She led me into the salon, where buckets of mostly white flowers bloomed in every corner of the room like fluffy clouds, making it a magical olfactory experience for my nose and my spirit, the sweet aromas potent. There were roses, tulips, and peonies, as well as a few containers bursting with blood-orange flowers with saffron-colored filaments, similar in form to an amaryllis. "I mostly ordered white flowers," said Jane, pointing to an arrangement. "The clivias offer a dash of color- my concept for the exciting change to come.

It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors. As James Le Fanu has put it, “While we have the overwhelming impression that the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming through our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting on the eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter travelling through space.

At supper—the thirty piratical Digams sitting at a long and spotty table, devouring clam chowder and beans and codfish balls and banana layer-cake—the Freshmen earnestly repeated after a senior: On old Olympus' topmost top A fat-eared German viewed a hop. Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered the twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, and the rest. To the Digams it was the world's noblest poem, and they remembered it for years after they had become practicing physicians and altogether forgotten the names of the nerves themselves.

Grenouille sat on the logs, his legs outstretched and his back leaned against the wall of the shed. He had closed his eyes and did not stir. He saw nothing, he heard nothing, he felt nothing. He only smelt the aroma of the wood rising up around him to be captured under the bonnet of the eaves. He drank in the aroma, he drowned in it, impregnating himself through his innermost pores, until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet, like Pinocchio, as if dead, until after a long while, perhaps a half-hour or more, he gagged up the word ‘wood’. He vomited the word up, as if he were filled with wood to his ears, as if buried in wood to his neck, as if his stomach, his gorge, his nose were spilling over with wood. And that brought him to himself, rescued him only moments before the overpowering presence of the wood, its aroma, was about to suffocate him. He shook himself, slid down off the logs, and tottered away as if on wooden legs. Days later he was still completely fuddled by the intense olfactory experience, and whenever the memory of it rose up too powerfully within him he would mutter imploringly, over and over, ‘Wood, wood.

This system can indicate that this mouse is John Smith. How does it also tell that he’s your never-before-encountered brother? The closer the relative, the more similar their cluster of MHC genes and the more similar their olfactory signature. Olfactory neurons in a mouse contain receptors that respond most strongly to the mouse’s own MHC protein. Thus, if the receptor is maximally stimulated, it means the mouse is sniffing its armpit. If near maximally stimulated, it’s a close relative. Moderately, a distant relative. Not at all (though the MHC protein is being detected by other olfactory receptors), it’s a hippo’s

The savor of preparation which had been noticed by Captain Lawton began to increase within the walls of the cottage; certain sweet-smelling odors, that arose from the subterranean territories of Cæsar, gave to the trooper the most pleasing assurances that his olfactory nerves, which on such occasions were as acute as his eyes on others, had faithfully performed their duty; and for the benefit of enjoying the passing sweets as they arose, the dragoon so placed himself at a window of the building, that not a vapor charged with the spices of the East could exhale on its passage to the clouds, without first giving its incense to his nose. Lawton, however, by no means indulged himself in this comfortable arrangement, without first making such preparations to do meet honor to the feast, as his scanty wardrobe would allow. The uniform of his corps was always a passport to the best tables, and this, though somewhat tarnished by faithful service and unceremonious usage, was properly brushed and decked out for the occasion. His head, which nature had ornamented with the blackness of a crow, now shone with the whiteness of snow; and his bony hand, that so well became the saber, peered from beneath a ruffle with something like maiden coyness. The improvements of the dragoon went no further, excepting that his boots shone with more than holiday splendor, and his spurs glittered in the rays of the sun, as became the pure ore of which they were composed.

… if she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give sensations clear outlines. A tactile emotion would melt into a visual one, a visual one would melt emotion into an olfactory one, ah, what is the real world, Lenù, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively: it’s like that. And so if she didn’t stay alert, if she didn’t pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fibre.

Moving on, while he wondered, the dark through which Mr. Lecky's light cut grew more beautiful with scents. Particles of solid matter so minute, gases so subtle, that they filtered through stopping and sealing, hung on the unstirred air. Drawn in with Mr. Lecky's breath came impalpable dews cooked out of disintegrating coal. Distilled, chemically split and reformed, they ended in flawless simulation of the aromas of gums, the scent of woods and the world's flowers. The chemists who made them could do more than that. Loose on the gloom were perfumes of flowers which might possibly have bloomed but never had, and the strong-smelling saps of trees either lost or not yet evolved. Mixed in the mucus of the pituitary membrane, these volatile essences meant more than synthetic chemistry to Mr. Lecky. Their microscopic slime coated the bushed-out ends of the olfactory nerve; their presence was signaled to the anterior of the brain's temporal lobe. At once, thought waited on them, tossing down from the great storehouse of old images, neglected ideas - sandalwood and roses, musk and lavender. Mr. Lecky stood still, wrung by pangs as insistent and unanswerable as hunger. He was prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired. More than anything he could see, or words, or sounds, these odors made him stupidly aware of the past. Unable to remember it, whence he was, or where he had previously been, all that was sweet, impermanent and gone came back not spoiled by too much truth or exact memory. Volatile as the perfumes, the past stirred him with longing for what was not - the only beloved beauty which you will have to see but which you may not keep. Mr. Lecky's beam of light went through glass top and side of a counter, displayed bottles of colored liquid - straw, amber, topaz - threw shadows behind their diverse shapes. He had no use for perfume. All the distraction, all the sense of loss and implausible sweetness which he felt was in memory of women. Behind the counter, Mr. Lecky, curious, took out bottles, sniffed them, examined their elaborately varied forms - transparent squares, triangles, cones, flattened ovals. Some were opaque, jet or blue, rough with embedded metals in intricate design. This great and needless decoration of the flasks which contained it was one strange way to express the inexpressible. Another way was tried in the names put on the bottles. Here words ran the suggestive or symbolic gamut of idealized passion, or festive night, of desired caresses, or of abstractions of the painful allure yet farther fetched. Not even in the hopeful, miracle-raving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help. Women, young, but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfume. But they were not. Mr. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while, aware of the tenth woman.

Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of raeding: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.

Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable. Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow. And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness. The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.

Where are you taking me?” Andrew demanded, whirling on the Ferryman. His muscles tensed, hands curling in and out of fists. “To my master.” The voice was ghostly, whispers of black ash and death, words cold and detached. He had an idea who that was but asked anyway: “And who is your master?” No answer came. Andrew’s insatiable rage rose up and swallowed his grief like a yawning ocean mouth, the darkest depths surging to the surface to form a mighty tidal wave. He closed the distance and seized the Ferryman’s gaunt wrist. There was no substance, no life beneath the cloak. The Ferryman slowly turned his hooded head, and Andrew found himself looking into the black hole of a self-contained night. The olfactory of decay was a punch in the face. Andrew released the Ferryman’s wrist and hastily stepped back, rocking the boat as he put distance between him and the unnatural wind spilling from the gaping orifice. Andrew shivered, the tiny hairs on his neck saluting. The cloaked head faced forward again, and the wind died away.

He had long since observed that Elizabeth had superfluous IQ for her line of work, and inside all that free space in her brain she was completing a philosophy of the world wove together out of all the smells she had ever smelled. Maybe her memory was not the longest. Every day she had to go over every line of it again from top to bottom, just like the day before. She was history-minded: she wanted a piece of ever dog who had come before her to every landmark, the whole roll call, every tuft of grass at the foot of the loading platform by the old natrium plant, every pile of boards or lost truck part in the fringe of weeds along the shore at the four-car ferry, every corner stump or clump of pee-bleached iris on the shaggy line where front yards ended in pavement. The one-time ice house. The Wheeling & Lake Erie water tower. Every boundary stone still standing, however crookedly, in front of the town cemetery. Where putting her own bit into this olfactory model of the world was concerned, Elizabeth was not demure but lifted her leg like any male dog, a little decrepitly now that she was old. Come outa there, Elizabeth. He didn’t want her pissing on the gravestones.

Maggie swung her head from side to side, checking the high scents first, then dipped her head to taste the smells close to the ground. The humans behind her might be able to identify five or six distinct smells if they concentrated, but Maggie’s long shepherd’s nose gave her an olfactory picture of the world no human could comprehend: She smelled the dust beneath her feet and the goats that had been herded along the road a few hours earlier and the two young male goatherds who led them. Maggie smelled the infection that one of the goats carried, and knew that two of the female goats were in heat. She smelled Pete’s fresh new sweat and the older sweat dried into his gear, his breath, the perfumed letter he kept in his trousers, and the green ball hidden beneath his flak. She smelled the CLP he used to clean his rifle, and the residual gunpowder that clung to his weapon like a fine dust of death. She smelled the small grove of palms not far from the road, and the trace scents of the wild dogs that had slept beneath the palms during the night and defecated and urinated before moving on. Maggie hated the wild dogs. She spent a moment testing the air to see if they were still in the area, decided they were gone, then ignored their scent and concentrated on searching for the scents Pete wanted her to find. Smells

So trees communicate by means of olfactory, visual, and electrical signals. (The electrical signals travel via a from of nerve cell at the tips of the roots.) What about sounds? Let's get back to hearing and speech. When I said at the beginning of this chapter that trees are definitely silent, the latest scientific research casts doubt even on this statement. Along with colleagues from Bristol and Florence, Dr. Monica Gagliano from the University of Western Australia has, quite literally, had her ear to the ground. It's not practical to study trees in the laboratory; therefore, researchers substitute grain seedlings because they are easier to handle. They started listening, and it didn't take them long to discover that their measuring apparatus was registering roots crackling quietly at a frequency of 220 hertz. Crackling roots? That doesn't necessarily mean anything. After all, even dead wood crackles when it's burned in a stove. But the noised discovered in the laboratory caused the researchers to sit up and pay attention. For the roots of seedlings not directly involved in the experiment reacted. Whenever the seedlings' roots were exposed to a cracking at 220 hertz, they oriented their tips in that direction. That means the grasses were registering this frequency, so it makes sense to say they "heard" it.

On the other hand, everyday language would soon prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple-wood, oak-wood, pine-wood, elm-wood, pear-wood, old, young, rotting, mouldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips and splinters – and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight. It was the same with other things. For instance, the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards each day, why should it be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouille’s senses it smelled and tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which cow it had come from, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been left in it and so on … Or why should smoke possess only the name ‘smoke’, when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odours mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire … or why should earth, landscape, air – each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odour and thus animated with another identity – still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.

The only point that everyone I spoke with in Rome agrees upon is that Armando al Pantheon is one of the city's last true trattorie. Given the location, Claudio and his family could have gone the way of the rest of the neighborhood a long time ago and mailed it in with a handful of fresh mozzarella and prosciutto. But he's chosen the opposite path, an unwavering dedication to the details- the extra steps that make the oxtail more succulent, the pasta more perfectly toothsome, the artichokes and favas and squash blossoms more poetic in their expression of the Roman seasons. "I experiment in my own small ways. I want to make something new, but I also want my guests to think of their mothers and grandmothers. I want them to taste their infancy, to taste their memories. Like that great scene in Ratatouille." I didn't grow up on amatriciana and offal, but when I eat them here, they taste like a memory I never knew I had. I keep coming back. For the cacio e pepe, which sings that salty-spicy duet with unrivaled clarity, thanks to the depth charge of toasted Malaysian peppercorns Claudio employs. For his coda alla vaccinara, as Roman as the Colosseum, a masterpiece of quinto quarto cookery: the oxtail cooked to the point of collapse, bathed in a tomato sauce with a gentle green undertow of celery, one of Rome's unsung heroes. For the vegetables: one day a crostini of stewed favas and pork cheek, the next a tumble of bitter puntarelle greens bound in a bracing anchovy vinaigrette. And always the artichokes. If Roman artichokes are drugs, Claudio's are pure poppy, a vegetable so deeply addictive that I find myself thinking about it at the most inappropriate times. Whether fried into a crisp, juicy flower or braised into tender, melting submission, it makes you wonder what the rest of the world is doing with their thistles.

Humans are better equipped for sight than for smell. We process visual input ten times faster than olfactory. Visual and cognitive cues handily trump olfactory ones, a fact famously demonstrated in a 2001 collaboration between a sensory scientist and a team of oenologists (wine scientists) at the University of Bordeaux in Talence, France.

Our hundreds of useless olfactory genes are left over from mammal ancestors who relied more heavily on the sense of smell to survive ... Our genes are similar to primates’, less similar to other mammals’, less similar still to reptiles’, amphibians’, fishes’, and so on.

tactile than olfactory—but I could discern nothing else about it.

A brick could be analyzed in the lab, broken down into olfactory components, and repackaged as an air freshener that promises that “new home” smell.


Multimodal neurons connect to sensations, perceptions, emotions, memories, and auditory, olfactory, and visual stimuli. And so it is theorized that mirror neurons not only reflect the visible action of another person, they also reflect that which is not visible--the unconscious intentions and feelings of you and another person in a meaningful relationship.

I think I had overheard one of the students bitching about having to run a mile. If you mix teenagers who somehow still don’t all understand the concept of body odor or the blessing that is deodorant with the salty, humid air that Florida is famous for, you get an olfactory nightmare.

If culture is to change, it will be because some new tangible (or audible or visible or olfactory) thing is presented to a wide enough public that it begins to reshape their world.

You can smell?” “I have olfactory sensors equivalent to a Labrador retriever.

At Stone’s direction, Harry removed ovaries, blinded the female rats, and removed their olfactory bulbs. Sightless, hormone-deprived—it didn’t matter. The mother rats crawled determinedly toward the baby rats. They were slower, maybe, but the homing instinct was magnetic, needle to the north.

nerve cells within the olfactory bulb and hippocampus of a human brain are continuously regenerated. This means that when a whiff of something sparks a memory, be it a smoky campfire or a familiar perfume, the neurons that originally encoded those sensations may no longer be with you, and the memories may now be preserved by cells that never experienced them.

Communication between trees and insects doesn't have to be all about defense and illness. Thanks to your sense of smell, you've probably picked up on many feel-good messages exchanged between these distinctly different life-forms. I am referring to the pleasantly perfumed invitations sent out by tree blossoms. Blossoms do not release scent at random or to please us. Fruit trees, willows, and chestnuts use their olfactory missives to draw attention to themselves and invite passing bees to sate themselves. Sweet nectar, a sugar-rich liquid, is the reward the insects get in exchange for the incidental dusting they receive while they visit. The form and color of blossoms are signals, as well. They act somewhat like a billboard that stands out against the general green of the tree canopy and points the way to a snack.

It may seem like I’m exaggerating, but I assure you, sensory influences— especially olfactory ones—are a powerful lot. And if we aren’t aware of them altogether, as so often happens, they can threaten to take over the carefully cultivated goals and objectivity that we’ve been working on.

Scent Rolling in Eau de Sex I like to roll around in the skin of my unwashed conquest, not to share her scent with the pack of wolves I hang with at the bar, but for my own olfactory rapture. There's a captivating perfume in this blend of sweat, body secretions and seduction. I resist the habit of showering or using deodorant. I head straight back to the bar, ripe, camouflaged in her splash of eau de sex, and draw closer to my next prey, wearing the pearl earrings, a too tight skirt, and the scent of Chanel.

Human beings are “so egocentric they won’t change otherwise. They haven’t. They’ve got this ego thing that they like to hold on to and they get really threatened . . .” At the same time there are “precious” things about human beings. “They can smell flowers, for instance. And that’s like so incredible, and they get to feel the sun on their skin.” As an alien being “I was operating out of less physicality, so you’re lighter at one level . . . There are certain advantages. One is you don’t get into these things like depression. But on the other hand it’s a little disjointed and a little bit removed . . . The olfactory sense is not there the same way. You don’t get the depth of smell, for instance,” she observed. At the same time the aliens have seen “a bigger picture,” and have more insight and patience. Also, “You have this thing in your head that [enables you] to access any kind of information telepathically. So you have this kind of informational pliability. I mean, you can get any information you need.” Sara felt that the

olfactory senses,

The long, thin olfactory bulb connects directly to the amygdala and the septum, which are parts of the limbic system, the structure that controls our most emotional and instinctive behaviors. Many physicians consider the organ for smell part for the limbic system, and not just because the two are located close to each other. Unlike images and sounds, one pathway for odors goes directly to the brain's emotion and memory centers without being filtered by the circuits involved in higher intelligence.

Roger Peters told me once that wolves in the Superior National Forest defecate sometimes on beer cans. Like any scent mark, these scats give off both visual and olfactory signals. We should see more here than what the wolf might be telling us about our littering habits. The animals may be marking things they consider dangerous to other wolves, especially pups, for wolves also mark traps and poisoned baits by defecating on them. If Peters is correct in thinking that the olfactory information in a scat is intended for other pack members, the idea makes even better sense.

Registering different flavours is one of the main ways that our bodies interact with the world around us. Amazingly enough, the human olfactory bulb is the only part of the central nervous system that is directly exposed to our environment, through the nasal cavity. Our other senses - sight, sound and touch - need to travel on a complicated journey via nerves along the spinal cord up to the brain. Smell and flavour, by contrast, surge direct from plate to nose.

Again Polly remembered all the notes in this perfume from the event earlier, and enjoyed waiting for each one to register in the olfactory bulb in the front of her brain, while her imagination did its own thing. The neroli, jasmine and sandalwood transported her to a summer night in the south of France, wearing a crisp white shirt- this was a much fresher chypre than the first one. Then she remembered she'd sprayed this one on her wrist during the event earlier and lifted it to her nose to see how it developed since then. Suddenly, out of nowhere: David. Her eyes snapped open. Coal tar? "Has this got guaiac wood in it?" she asked Lucien, not caring if it interfered with his testing of Guy. Lucien smiled broadly. "Yes," he said, "but very, very deep inside, it's a base note, as you would know. Your nose is very good, Polly." Guy grasped her wrist and brought it to his nose. "It's just under the bergamot and before the honeysuckle," he said, opening his eyes.

And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like suspicion of a scent—a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic, synthetic and all-embracing—an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase—I hope it means something), and scents need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes and days gone by.

In the humanities and social sciences, any research on odours comes up against four preconceived notions, all the more robust as they are considered interdependent: that Homo sapiens is, from a functional perspective, a microsmatic species; that we make little use of our sense of smell, considered the lowliest of the senses; that the consequence of this is that we live in societies evolving towards “olfactory silence”, and, lastly, that a defining characteristic of natural language on odours is its paucity." - Foreword by JOËL CANDAU

Your olfactory sense can split complex mixtures into their constituent chemicals, just as a prism can split white light into its constituent colors. To do this, it must detect the precise arrangement of atoms within a molecule.

But far from a disorder, specific anosmia may be “the rule rather than the exception of olfactory processing,” writes Ilona and her coauthors. And it appears to be something we can change.

A simple character people are like a fragrant rose: they smell from far. One does not need, to test them, but can perceive them by the olfactory sense

Most cognitive neuroscientists are looking for a level at which consciousness, conceived as a psycho-biological phenomenon, turns out to be like digestion, where at some level of grain a type neurophysicalist account can be given. Better, across different kinds of consciousness (visual, olfactory, emotional, and so on) such scientists seek unified features that bind that type of consciousness.