Spaced Out

Because of its key role in navigation, odor-detection and spatialization go hand-in-hand. A paper from McGill's Department of Psychiatry and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute gives evidence to support this relationship.

The hippocampus, which is the central location where spatial memories are "stored," is a key part of the olfactory system. The two – space and smell – are so closely related that they can become difficult to disentangle.

There is a great philosophical essay about the ontogeny of a salamander (see Hosek and Freeman below) in which a creature develops its identity (if questionably-sentient creatures can be said to do so) by way of olfaction. This creature, as with many others, interfaces its environment primarily by smell, especially in the beginnings of its life. The decisions that it makes then are in response to olfactory information, which through iterated reinforcement forms the foundation of its self.

I was so impressed by this idea that I was compelled to write a short essay myself about space, information and dimensionality, as narrated via the odyssey of the Eukaryote evolving through the epochs to its present-day instantiation as a self-aware human. It can be read here.

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On this relationship between navigation and olfaction, I am reminded of a comment I received more than once when I was first telling folks about my book on smells – "What is it about architects and smells?" I studied both architecture and olfaction, and apparently, I'm not the only one.

That was something I couldn't answer at the time; I had never heard about it. As I began to meet more people involved in an olfactory occupation, be it writing about fragrance or designing olfactory experiences, I did notice a few interdisciplinary architects scattered among them.

Now it occurs to me quite clearly – architects are not experts at navigation so much as spatial perception in general, and specifically on moving through space. Whereas the painter is concerned with the way the eyes move through two dimensions, and the sculptor thinks about eyes moving in 3-D, the architect is concerned with the moving body.

The late architect Michael Graves made this the thrust of his speech as he opened his own School of Public Architecture at New Jersey's Kean University in 2015(ish?) – he told us that in designing a building, the human scale is the only one that matters. The way we feel in a space is the primary criterion when evaluating it. If you think about it, a building is like a body for our body.

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Architects don’t have to learn much about proprioception, but maybe they should. Proprioception is the feeling that we have of our own bodies, where the parts are, how they're related, what they're doing, and whether we should move them out of the way of danger. (Anybody ever see the hand-smashing phantom limb trick? This is a good example of the power of proprioception.)

As we move through a building, our proprioception recognizes and records not only our own bodies, but the “bigger body” that we're in, whether it’s a building or a backyard. Before there was such a thing as architects or buildings (i.e., before we were human), we used olfaction as a way to calibrate our proprioception, and to navigate this bigger body that we’re in.

It seems I’ve done a pretty good job of navigating myself into the part of this post that I now have no idea how to get out, so I’ll have to leave it there. Architecture and olfaction make a good pair.

Notes:

Good spatial memory? You're likely to be good at identifying smells too

Oct 2018, phys.org

Louisa Dahmani et al, An intrinsic association between olfactory identification and spatial memory in humans, Nature Communications (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06569-4

Hosek R J & Freeman W J (2001). Osmetic Ontogenesis, or Olfaction Becomes You: The Neurodynamic, Intentional Self and Its Affinities with the Foucaultian/Butlerian Subject. Configurations 9: 509–541.

Michael Graves College

School of Public Architecture, Kean University

The Rubber Hand Illusion

BBC, 2010

Limbic Fitness and The Aging Brain

We all know that memory function decreases as we age. One of the ways in which this is evidenced is in the correlation between how much our eyes move and the brain activity that comes with it. You see grandpa's eyes skipping around the room, from one face to another, but he isn't recording any of it. (Exaggeration of course, depends how old he is, and his mental capacity.)

It's normal for people of all ages that the more we look at the same thing, the less and less brain activity there is in our memory-forming hippocampus. But in older folks, they can dart their eyes all over the place, and yet generate no information about what they see. No matter how many times they look at a thing, it can remain unfamiliar.

Despite the fact that smell is typically associated with airtight bear-trap memories, we can experience similar diminishing effects with our sense of smell. The relationship is so intimate that our olfactory perception is used to forecast dementia decades in advance.

It is certainly possible that your 60-year old self can be transported 50 years into the past by the mere wisp of familiar a molecule. But your 110-year old self will be less likely to transport so swiftly back to your 60's - the older we get, the less robust the memory-complex formed by each sensation.

This is covered pretty thoroughly in Hidden Scents. Olfaction, the limbic system and our episodic memory form a powerful complex of stored experience. But this system works less and less as we age-out of episodic memory and begin to rely more regularly on semantic memory for our day to day activities.

Episodic memories, i.e., the collection of feelings in your body during a particular episode in your life, are very powerful when recalled. Ironically, they cannot be recalled at will. They must come to us from outside, unlocked by a face, a voice, or a smell. The name of a friend from first grade doesn't do it. The smell of the inside of your first lunchbox, that'll do it.

You're way less likely to be brought to tears at the re-smelling of your first new car (if you were to somehow recreate that, or be so lucky as to be exposed to it later in life). Your dad's first new car - the one you got to ride in when you were 8 - smelling that might get emotional.

Notes:

Link between what we see and how we remember 'breaks' as we get older

Oct 2018, phys.org

Zhong-Xu Liu et al, Age-related changes in the relationship between visual exploration and hippocampal activity, Neuropsychologia (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.07.032

Image source - link

Subjective Cartography

Where you at? I’m at 5-spice, north of Orange Peel.

Can city 'smellfies' stop air pollution?

Mar 2017, BBC

The image I have above is from NYC 2011, but Kate McLean nonetheless. And now she’s going even further with her work. Artist and designer Kate McLean from Canterbury Christ Church University is now using her smellmaps to indicate pollution emissions. At the nexus, however, is language – that is, the words used to describe these places. I cut a piece here from the BBC article because it emphasizes this is the most interesting part, for me. For the project as well, it’s a serious point to consider.

“Clicking on a street on the London map allows you to zoom in and see how people have described the area, using terms related to emissions, nature, food, animals or waste.

“So where people have tagged pictures with words including "cars" or "petrol" or "exhaust", these would be classified as emissions-related in the system and the map would show more red.

“But can something built on people's subjective impressions of what they're smelling bear any relationship to objective data on air quality?

"Some people might say you're using social media, it's biased so you're just capturing most of the hipsters in East London," said Daniele Quercia, the computer scientist from Bell Labs who led the study.

So, for example, what happens if a bunch of Londoners come to New York and do this? What does the '5-spice' neighborhood of NYC smell like to a Londoner? And can we compare those maps? Now we’re talking.

The Smells of Expansion and Contraction

wrinkled tesseracts

In the contemporary parlance of computer security, this is called a "zero day exploit": Olfaction is the back door to our un-thinking mind, and big business knows this.

Smells can represent spatiality to us, and unconsciously direct our decision-making. This can be used to the advantage of 'retail sales' by using clever olfactory design of sales spaces to "trick" our emotionally-reined limbic system.

Using a scent reminiscent of enclosed spaces, like the smell of firewood, and a scent evoking open spaces, like the seashore, scientists found benefit in augmenting retail spaces with their complementary smells.

American Journal of Business via phys.org

It is interesting to think that space itself can be distinguished by its smell, but on second thought, of course it can. Half of smell is place. That is to say, the hippocampus, or "place" part of the brain, plays a critical role in smell/memory.

Closed spaces and open spaces both affect us psychologically, and the co-located smells of those places would do so as well.

On Space and Place

Confused John Travolta

The hypothalamus is called the seat of social behavior. The hippocampus is the thing that knows where you are, your internal GPS. Together, these brain parts, along with your olfactory system, of course, influence all of your decisions. Everything we do is dependent on where we are (or where we think we are) and who we’re with (or who we think…). Olfactory data informs these things. Places and the smell of those places are centrally located both in the memory and in the motivating, motility actuating parts of us. The emotions that drive us are informed by the smells of the places we are in.

This new report shows that there may be very specific cells that can tell who’s house you’re in. (The experiment is on male mice and other male’s habitats.) They’re looking to use this to help people with social disorders, like autism, schizophrenia, depression, and social anxiety. Anyway, this just points to the use of olfactory studies to help with larger social problems.

Smell tells intruder mice how to behave

phys.org, Jun 2016