“
He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.
”
”
Patrick Süskind (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer)
“
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.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
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.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Wild Ducks Flying Backward)
“
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.
”
”
Roman Payne
“
this fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants.
”
”
Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
“
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.
”
”
Kathleen Tessaro (The Perfume Collector)
“
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.
”
”
Roman Payne
“
The cent you desire is hidden in the scent of a flower.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson (Song of a Nature Lover)
“
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.
”
”
Patrick Süskind (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer)
“
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.
”
”
Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses)
“
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.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer)
“
Tropical trees had been planted throughout the room, along with bright flowering plants that were busy committing the olfactory floral equivalent of aggravated assault.
”
”
Jim Butcher (Skin Game (The Dresden Files, #15))
“
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.
”
”
T.L. Huchu (The Library of the Dead (Edinburgh Nights #1))
“
Humans are better equipped for sight than for smell. We process visual input ten times faster than olfactory.
”
”
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
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?
”
”
Paul Auster (Timbuktu)
“
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.
”
”
Meredith Mileti (Aftertaste: A Novel in Five Courses)
“
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.
”
”
Jen Frederick (Jockblocked (Gridiron, #2))
“
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
”
”
Susan Pinker (The Village Effect: Why Face-to-face Contact Matters)
“
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.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1))
“
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.
”
”
Jo Nesbø (Flaggermusmannen (Harry Hole, #1))
“
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.
”
”
Bill Bryson
“
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.
”
”
J.C. McKenzie (Beast Coast (Carus, #2))
“
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.
”
”
Krish Ashok (Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking)
“
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?
”
”
Steve Lowe (You Are Sloth!)
“
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.
”
”
James Fenimore Cooper (The Spy)
“
La cucina bears the scents of its past, and every event in its history is recorded with an olfactory memorandum. Here vanilla, coffee, nutmeg, and confidences; there the milky-sweet smell of babies, old leather, sheep's cheese, and violets. In the corner by the larder hangs the stale tobacco smell of old age and death, while the salty scent of lust and satiation clings to the air by the cellar steps along with the aroma of soap, garlic, beeswax, lavender, jealousy, and disappointment.
”
”
Lily Prior (La Cucina)
“
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.
”
”
Anonymous
“
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.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
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.
”
”
James Gould Cozzens
“
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.
”
”
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))
“
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.
”
”
Jaimy Gordon (Lord of Misrule (National Book Award))
“
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
”
”
Robert Crais (Suspect (Scott James & Maggie, #1))
“
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.
”
”
Patrick Süskind (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Penguin Essentials))
“
Human beings have one of the poorest senses of smell of all the organisms on Earth, so weak that we have only a tiny vocabulary to express it...We depend on the sophistication of trained dogs to lead us through the olfactory world, tracking individual people, detecting even the slightest trace of explosives and other dangerous chemicals.
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”
Edward O. Wilson
“
You can smell?” “I have olfactory sensors equivalent to a Labrador retriever.
”
”
Tony Bertauski (The Socket Greeny Saga (Socket Greeny, #1-3))
“
The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She remembered a college professor explaining why all the colors the human eye could see could be represented by a two-dimensional color wheel: it was because the retina had receptors for three colors. If the retina had evolved with four receptors, it would have taken a three-dimensional color sphere to represent all the ways in which one color could bleed into another. She hadn’t wanted to believe this, but the smells at Los Volcanes were convincing her. How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like in the tropics? She searched in the woods, off the trail, until she found the mushroom with a roasted-coffee smell so powerful it reminded her of skunk, which reminded her of chocolate, which reminded her of tuna; smells in the woods rang each of these notes and made her aware, for the first time, of the distinguishing receptors for them in her nose. The receptor that had fired at Californian cannabis also fired at Bolivian wild onions. Within half a mile of the compound were five different flower smells in the neighborhood of daisy, which itself was close to sun-dried goat urine. Walking the trails, Pip could imagine how it felt to be a dog, to find no smell repellent, to experience the world as a seamless many-dimensional landscape of interesting and interrelated scents. Wasn’t this a kind of heaven? Like being on Ecstasy without taking Ecstasy? She had the feeling that if she stayed at Los Volcanes long enough she would end up smelling every smell there was, the way her eyes had already seen every color on the color wheel.
”
”
Jonathan Franzen (Purity)
“
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
”
”
Melissa Barkat-Defradas (Words for Odours: Language Skills and Cultural Insights)
“
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
”
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John E. Mack (Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens)
“
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.
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”
Bonnie Blodgett (Remembering Smell)
“
To change your usual morning olfactory association—waking to the smell of freshly brewed coffee—wake up to something different—vanilla, citrus, peppermint, or rosemary. Keep an extract of your favorite aroma in an airtight container on your bedside table for a week and release it when you first awaken, and then
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Lawrence C. Katz (Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness)
“
When you inhale, you create a single airstream that allows you to both smell and breathe. But when a dog sniffs, structures within its nose split that airstream in two. Most of the air heads down into the lungs, but a smaller tributary, which is for smell and smell alone, zooms to the back of the snout. There it enters a labyrinth of thin, bony walls that are plastered with a sticky sheet called the olfactory epithelium. This is where smells are first detected.
”
”
Ed Yong (An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us)
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Receptor neurons bundle together into cables called axons, feeding up through holes in a perforated bone just behind the eyeballs called the cribriform plate. (In a serious head injury, the skull can shift, and the lateral movement of the cribriform plate shears those axons like a knife through spaghetti. Snip! No more sense of smell.) Once through the plate, the axons connect to two projections from the brain called the olfactory bulbs. There, in blobs of neurons called glomeruli, is where the bulk of the computation gets done. Mice, known for their acute sense of smell, have just about 1,800 glomeruli—but 1,000 genes that code for olfactory receptors. That’s a lot of perceivable smells. Humans have a seemingly pathetic 370 genes for receptors, but we have 5,500 glomeruli per bulb. That’s a lot of processing power. It must be doing something. The part of the brain that integrates all this information, the olfactory cortex, also gets inputs from the limbic region and other areas that deal with emotion—the amygdala and hypothalamus, among others. Processing of smells in the brain, then, is tied to not only the chemical perception of a molecule but also how we feel about it, and how we feel in general. Every other sense in the body is, in a way, indirect. In vision, light impinges on the retina, a sheet of cells at the back of the eye that makes pigments and connects to the optic nerve. In hearing, sound (which is really just waves of changing air pressure) pushes the eardrum in and out at particular frequencies, which translate via a series of tiny bones to nerves. Touch and taste are the same. Some cell, built to do the hard work of reception, gets between the stimulus and the nerves that lead to the brain for processing. Some physical effect—air pressure, reflected photons, whatever—gets between the stimulus and the perception. It’s all a first-order derivative. Not smell, though. When we smell something, we are smelling tiny pieces of that thing that have broken off, wafted through the air, and then touched actual neurons wired to actual pieces of brain. Olfaction is direct, with nothing between the thing we’re smelling, the smell it has, and how we perceive that smell. It is our most intimate sense.
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Adam Rogers (Proof: The Science of Booze)
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We humans are part of a lineage that has traded smell for sight. We now rely on vision more than on smell, and this is reflected in our genome. In this trade-off, our sense of smell was deemphasized, and many of our olfactory genes became functionless.
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Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body)
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As we sit with our drinks, if it’s hot, hold the cup in both hands, noticing the warmth. Close your eyes and pay attention to the heat as it transfers that energy to your skin and through your muscle tissue from one set of cells to another and savor the comforting sensation. Bring the cup to your nose and allow the scent to waft up and contact your olfactory nerves. Notice the smell as it begins lightly and then strengthen as the vapor intensifies. Then, place the cup close to your lips and feel the warmth there as well before taking your first sip. ‘Chew’ your sips, allowing the liquid to contact every last taste bud, noticing the way the flavor develops before you ingest it. As it travels your esophagus, notice the warmth you feel from the inside, smiling at the sensation.
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Josh Misner (Put the F**king Phone Down: Life. Can't Wait.)
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We are sensitive to the odors of others and actively try to catch a whiff. By surreptitiously filming people after a handshake, scientists discovered that the hand that has done the shaking often finds its way to the owner’s nose. They measured how many seconds the hand spent there and even assessed the nasal airflow of some subjects. They found that after interactions within their gender, people take a moment to sniff their hand. Men and women do so equally: men with men and women with women. Handshakes between the genders don’t prompt the same inspection. Automatic-looking gestures (arranging one’s hair, scratching one’s chin) bring the hand close to the face, offering traces of the other’s aroma. Olfactory sampling allows people to assess the level of self-confidence or hostility of potential rivals. Even though humans use the opportunity to smell each other as predictably as rats and dogs, they do so largely unconsciously.4
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Frans de Waal (Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist)
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Our sense of scent has a limited vocabulary. Across known languages, anthropologists have found fewer words for our olfactory experience than any other sensation. So, we speak of our olfactory experience in similes and metaphors. We reach for language to describe smells in relation to our other senses. Bright, green, metallic, smoky, floral, fecal, loud, round, sharp, or citrus are words I might use, but these notes can be traced to objects, not the odors themselves. My favorite perfumes are slightly addictive, like the feeling of devouring a book. Perfume language is purple, its prose comfortable for me, it’s as if I revert to sensory language when I forget the performance of writing for a society (a country? a culture?) that loves a bare, spare sentence. I’ve been a devotee of purple anything since childhood: clothes, lipstick—a sentence. I admit that when I write in perfumed language, I feel truer as a writer, wilder and messier, anachronistic or mystic, I feel more embodied, when I write the physical materials I work with, encapsulating a story inside of a vessel. I perfume with materials distilled from the earth, but also aroma chemicals extracted from fossil fuels. This leaves me with more questions than answers, but perhaps that’s how we know there is a future, when we continue seeking answers to eternal questions: What is real, what is false? What is natural, what is artificial? What is necessary, what must be thrown away?
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Tanaïs (In Sensorium: Notes for My People)
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I do so love books. I can’t think of many truer pleasures than settling into a fat armchair, letting my mouth fall open, and reading a novel. And I mean really reading one – not just skim-reading it before a live TV interview, or pretending to read Middlemarch while smiling sagely to look more attractive in a departure lounge – genuinely reading. For me, books aren’t just a feast for the eyes. I love the feel of books: the flaps of reformed pulp nestling compliantly in the crook of my hand, my fingers tracing their supple spines; I love the sound of books – I don’t mean audiobooks, I don’t like audiobooks, I’ve never liked audiobooks: If I want to hear Sam West reading Inspector Morse out loud I’ll go to one of his garden parties; no, I’ll only allow audiobooks if you’re operating heavy machinery or are just plain blind (and don’t forget they have been given braille) – I mean the sound of a book: The moth-like thrum of flicked pages, the gedoink of a thudding tome as it lands on a bedside table. But most of all, I love the stench of books; the thick odour that leaps from their pages. If I’m feeling a little low and I’m in a library, I’ve been known to open a book (just a little), slot my nose into its tempting crevice, and inhale a deep whiff of book until my eyes roll back in their sockets and I have to lie down in a section where no-one goes (such as African literature). For me, nothing beats the delight of quietly slipping my nose into the crack of a Brontë or A Few Good Men and letting the aroma tantalise my olfactory nerve endings. Oh, the smell! Oh! The! Smell! The trusty, musty, dusty, fusty, crusty, and (if it’s a Jilly Cooper) busty and lusty smell of literature!
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Alan Partridge (From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast (Series 2))
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Our eyes can distinguish several million colours, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odours. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. Smells feature in our choice of sexual partners and in our ability to detect fear, anxiety or aggression in others. Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as 34,000 molecules in one square centimetre, the equivalent of a single drop of water in 20,000 Olympic swimming pools. For an animal to experience a smell, a molecule must land on their olfactory epithelium. In humans, this is a membrane up and behind the nose. The molecule binds to a receptor, and nerves fire. The brain gets involved as chemicals are identified or trigger thoughts and emotional responses. 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 signalling cascade that alters fungal behaviour. Fungi live their lives bathed in a rich field of chemical information. Truffle fungi use chemicals to communicate to animals their readiness to be eaten; they also use chemicals to communicate with plants, animals, other fungi – and themselves. Through smell, we can participate in the molecular discourse fungi use to organise much of their existence.
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Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition: How Fungi Make Our Worlds)
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Odorant receptors can also vary from one individual to another in dramatic ways. For example, the OR7D4 gene creates a receptor that responds to androstenone, the chemical behind the stench of sweaty socks and body odor. To most people, it’s repulsive. But to a lucky few who inherit a slightly different version of OR7D4, androstenone smells like vanilla. That’s just one receptor out of hundreds, and all exist in varied forms, bestowing every individual with their own subtly personalized Umwelt. Everyone likely smells the world in a slightly different way. And if it’s that hard to appreciate the olfactory Umwelt of another human, imagine how hard the task becomes for another species.
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Ed Yong (An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us)
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As soon as they’d arrived, the odors of fertilizer and manure had overwhelmed him. They were staggering, almost intolerable, clouding his olfactory sense just when he really needed it. He leaned back against a fence post and pressed his hands against his temples, breathing through his mouth. His superior sense of smell made him part bloodhound, part pointer, and part bulldog. But sometimes, it just made him sick.
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James Patterson (Holmes, Marple & Poe (Holmes, Margaret & Poe #1))
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SMELL: Creating a Soothing Olfactory Environment Your sense of smell can be a double-edged sword, as it can either overwhelm you or provide a source of joy. If you’re sensitive to smells, try eliminating toxins and chemicals from your living space to reduce discomfort and minimize migraine triggers. If you live with others, feel free to mention how smells affect you and see if everyone is on board with sensory-friendly options.
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Dr. Megan Anna Neff (Self-Care for Autistic People: 100+ Ways to Recharge, De-Stress, and Unmask!)
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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.
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Jarod Kintz (Rick Bet Blank)
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I haven’t got the goddamnedest idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Kierkeguard, what’s that? Sounds like deodorant, which is to say that the whole thing smells as far as I’m concerned.
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Cynthia Ozick (Foreign Bodies)
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Chicken shit is horrible stuff. Unlike cow manure, which, according to David Foster Wallace, smells "warm and herbal and blameless," chicken shit is an olfactory insult: a snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell. Needlessly, gratuitously disgusting; a stench of such assaultive tenacity that it burns your eyes. Even the light inside the coop was smudged and grimy through the haze. Rather than making you never want to eat a chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by God, and you'll chew really, really hard.
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David Rakoff (Fraud: Essays)
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The olfactory stem cells replenish constantly even in a healthy nose. They are some of the only neurons in the human body with the ability to regenerate from scratch. And they do so constantly, growing like the perennial flowers in my mother’s garden but on warp speed.
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Molly Birnbaum (Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way)
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It is possible that the olfactory neurons die and regrow because they are exposed so intensely to the environment, he explained. These are the only cranial nerve cells that actually make contact with physical stimulus directly from the outer world, interacting directly with odor molecules on each inhale. They aren’t in the possession of that buffer of skin.
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Molly Birnbaum (Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way)
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SMELL (OLFACTORY): Our nose contains sensory receptors which send information to the olfactory bulb located in the mid-brain. The interesting fact about smells is that a smell can take a direct “shortcut” to the part of the brain that is responsible for emotional memory—the limbic system.
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Cara Koscinski (The Parent's Guide to Occupational Therapy for Autism and Other Special Needs: Practical Strategies for Motor Skills, Sensory Integration, Toilet Training, and More)
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I could see into the shadows, where the very blades of grass and the leaves and buds of plants were sharply defined though it was a dark night. I was acutely aware of my ears, hot, pulsing, and humming. Now fragrance took command, and I was struck with the scents of the evening. Unable to resist, I rolled on the ground, breathing in the wet tang of dewy grass and the musk of the mud in which it grew. I glided my muzzle through the blades, letting each soft edge tickle my nose. When I lifted it, I caught the delicate fragrance of wildflowers and the powdery sweetness of red clover. The aromas permeated my body as if I could smell with my eyes, my toes, and my tail. I detected the essence of living fowl on the feathers of a fallen bird, but was quickly distracted by the blood-warm effluvia of rabbits and voles wafting up from a small hole in the ground.
The air carried the scent of wet leaves after a forest rain. My senses were torn in two, with one thing calling my attention into the air and another, even more compelling, back down to the earth. The miasma of fetid earth, God's creatures, and the aromatic night air swirled in my head and through my body, competing with a cacophony of noises that grew louder and louder. The muffled sound of my paws as they made contact with the ground resonated in my ears. I felt in my body the vibration of all things touching the earth- animals small and large, as they interacted with the same soil that I was treading. The rustle of leaves in the trees, the screech of the wind blowing the hairs on my face, the fluttering of bees' wings, the distant cry of an owl- I heard each as a distinct, sharp sound. My senses were in control of my body. I was a living machine that processed sights, smells, and sounds.
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Karen Essex (Dracula in Love)
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She opened the kitchen door and the smells came to greet her. The sensual, come-hither scent of chocolate cake. Mint, for the customer who always liked hers fresh-picked for her late-night tea. Red pepper seeds and onion skins, waiting in the compost pail that Finnegan had not, she could tell, emptied last night. Cooked boar meat from a ragout sauce that was a winter tradition, the smell striding toward her like a strong, sweaty hunter.
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Erica Bauermeister (The Lost Art of Mixing)
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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.
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Anonymous
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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.
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Bee Wilson (First Bite: How We Learn to Eat)
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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
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Ehsan Sehgal
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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.
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Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body)
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Everyone froze.
In real time the whole sequence had probably taken ten seconds. In the slow motion of crisis time it had unreeled in ponderous elegance, and the crystalline immobility that followed was intensified by the lingering smell of gunfire, like an olfactory echo of the big bang.
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Robert B. Parker (Playmates (Spenser, #16))
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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.
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Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
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Pump changed my own umwelt. Walking through the world with her, watching her reactions, I began to imagine her experience. My enjoyment of a narrow winding path in a shady forest, lined with low bushes and grasses, comes in part from seeing how Pump enjoyed it: the cool of the shade, of course, but also the pathiness, allowing her to zoom along unchecked, stopping only for rousing scents along the sides.
I now see city blocks, and their sidewalks and buildings, with their investigatory sniffing possibilities in mind: a sidewalk along an uninterrupted wall without fences, trees, or variation, is a block I'd never want to walk down. Where I'll choose to sit in the park--which bench, what rock--is based on where a dog at my side would have the best panoramic olfactory view. Pump loved large open lawns--to plop down in, to roll repeatedly in, to sniff endlessly--and high grass or brush--to lope regally through. I came to love large open laws and high grass and brush in anticipation of her enjoyment. (The interest in rolling in unseen smells remains elusive...)
I smell the world more. I love to sit outside on a breezy day.
My day is tilted toward morning. The importance of mornings has always been that if I awoke early enough, we could have a long, off-leash walk together in a relatively unpeopled park or beach. I still have trouble sleeping in.
It is a very small bit comforting to realise how deeply she is in me, even over a year from the day when she was also aside me, willing to submit to a tickle of the dense curls under her chin as she rested it on the ground for the last time.
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Alexandra Horowitz (Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know)
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How can we humans claim ourselves to be superior to other animals? Is it because of the technological development we’ve made? Destroying one resource to create another one! Egotism is what we humans are fraught with… We boast of our intellectual superiority, but why do we have to depend upon a dog to sniff out a thief, one from our own race? Why do we need a dog for that? Why don't we just train ourselves and do the job on our own? The defence we produce here is that we don't have as many olfactory receptors in our nose as there are in a dog, and a part of a dog’s brain is devoted to analyzing smells. But then why is our developed logical and intellectual ability considered superior to their developed instinctive abilities? Isn't it ironical that a race that considers itself superior to others needs another race that it looks down upon, to sniff out someone of its own race? Doesn't it seem at variance with our own asset, logic that is, that we, who haven't yet developed a reliable device to predict an earthquake, consider ourselves better than a race that has an uncanny ability to predict future catastrophe? Being at the top of the food chain isn’t everything; even the dinosaurs disappeared, and the ones which were at the bottom still exist… I truly believe in nature's impartiality.
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Anurag Shrivastava (The Web of Karma)
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And the olfactory part of a dog’s brain is forty times larger than a human’s; depending on the breed, a dog can have up to 300 million olfactory receptors in his nose, compared to about 6 million in ours. Even with that extreme superiority in equipment, dogs don’t merely smell a superstrong version of what we smell (or don’t smell); instead, they can perceive multiple layers of smell, which gives dogs a far greater range of information.
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Kay Frydenborg (A Dog in the Cave: The Wolves Who Made Us Human)
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The Science of Scent The human sense of smell is about ten thousand times more powerful than other senses, and scent travels to the brain so rapidly that the mental or physical response to the fragrance an essential oil emits can be immediate. When you inhale an essential oil, its scent travels first through olfactory nerve cells inside the nose and into the larger olfactory system. The olfactory system then delivers the aroma to the olfactory bulb located inside the brain’s limbic system, which serves as the seat of emotions and the originator of emotional behavior. Depending upon which essential oil you are inhaling, you may feel a rapid release of mental strain or negative emotions, and you may feel muscle tension ease at the same time. You may feel more alert, excited, or engaged with your surroundings, and if the scent you are inhaling is a familiar one, you may rapidly access your collective unconscious and experience strong memories, particularly when those memories are closely associated with deeply emotional feelings.
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Althea Press (Essential Oils for Beginners: The Guide to Get Started with Essential Oils and Aromatherapy)
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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.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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The theory is that with the emergence of full color vision we lost the need for detecting the world so keenly with our sense of smell, and there was essentially an exchange in importance between these two senses in primate evolution. The better you can see, the less acutely you need to smell. Animals, including humans, either have excellent color vision or an excellent sense of smell, but not both. The finite size of the human brain is to blame. The human brain is limited to between 1,300 and 1,400 grams in weight. Having a highly complex sense of both smell and vision would take up too much brain space and so these functions had to compete with each other for which had the better survival value. It seems superior visual detection was better for our ancestors’ survival than superior olfactory acuity, and the advantages offset the limitation to our sense of smell; hence, the large proportion of pseudogenes in our olfactory code.
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Rachel Herz (The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell)
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For humans to be able to smell a chemical, it must be of low molecular weight,* volatile, and able to repel water, so that it can stick to our olfactory receptors.
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Rachel Herz (The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell)
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People couldn’t detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scent. If you smoke cigarettes, it damages your olfactory capacities so much that you can’t smell smoke anymore. Scents are strange; even the strongest fade with constant exposure. That’s why no one was using Febreze, Stimson realized.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)