A World Without Smells

 

Alex Grey - Dying

We’re reading about Ed Yong’s new book, I Contain Multitudes. It’s about the microbiome and how it runs our bodies.

Wired writer Sarah Fallon interviews Yong, and one of the first thing she asks is this –

“What would happen if every germ on Earth suddenly vanished?”

To which Yong responds –

“All hell would break loose. Animals that eat grass (deer, cows, horses) would starve, since they need germs in their stomachs to digest cellulose. Coral would bleach out. “In the deep oceans, many worms, shellfish, and other animals rely on bacteria for all of their energy,” Yong writes. “Without microbes, they too would die, and the entire food webs of these dark abyssal worlds would collapse.” And don’t stand there all smug, vegetarians. Microbes make nitrogen, and plants need nitrogen, so there’s the rest of the food supply shot. Also, as Yong says, “microbes are lords of decay.” There would be shit (and rotting leaves and dead bodies) everywhere.”

Cool. Now, first thing I ask is – what does this smell like? But wait, does it smell at all? And then, wait, microbes do all the decomposing, all of it. So not only is there no rotting, there’s no decomposition of any kind, isn’t that right? Everything stays in a state of suspended bacterial animation. And now I’m thinking a bit far afield and off subject, but does that mean somehow ridding a planet of its microbes is a kind of instant fossilization?

Notes:

Germs Are Magic and Other Things We Learned From Ed Yong’s New Book

Sarah Fallon, 2016 July 28, Wired

Link to Harper Collins

Why Do I Smell Cat Piss

AKA The Full Cat Piss Moon

I know this might sound crazy, but cat butts is a thing.

I wrote Hidden Scents because I have this thing where I smell what others can’t. This is not to say that my nose is any better than anyone else’s, only that I must pay attention more.

For example, I've been catching cat piss like crazy lately. Maybe you will too, now that I'm mentioning it.

The other day I'm at my friend’s house. “Come out back, check out my new weathervane.” I go outside, and BOOM, it hits me in the face. At first I thought they bombed their yard with mosquito repellent. Nah, that's definitely cat piss. You see, in a situation like this, I have learned not to say anything. Chances are they won't smell it, and I'll seem insulting. I wait a minute, just to make sure. After all, she is female, and I do smell “cat piss” on women sometimes (and once in awhile on men too) but I won't get into that...except to suggest that since civetone is such a big molecule, and lasts so long as a fragrance ingredient, that I might just be getting very old whiffs of that.

Anyway, finally I'm sure it's cat piss, so I go for it, “You have stray cats around here?”

“Yeah, why?“ “You don’t smell it?” No. They never do.

Yesterday it happened again. We are outside looking through the telescope – a crescent moon and Saturn – a beautiful night. And there it is. Listen – I actually don't mind the smell – it's fragrant! It's no coincidence that civet (which smells a lot like cat piss because it basically is cat piss) has been a primary ingredient in perfume for centuries.

Back to the backyard. The friends I’m with now are both male, so I don't hesitate, “You got stray cats up in here?”

“All over…You smell it don't you??” He knows; he's the guy who helped me name my book so he's familiar with my nose-thing. I sniffed-out the mold in his house a few years ago. “It’s mating season, I hear ‘em at night going crazy.”

Later that night, and out of nowhere, he says, “Yeah, it's like a perfume, I can smell it now.” Finally. I'm not alone.

I urge anyone who knows more about this than I do to leave a comment, and I'll continue a bit about civet.

And is it really cat mating season?

*Let's get this out of the way real quick: there is an ingredient in perfume called blackcurrant bud that smells like cat piss, and it does grow around here, and it fruits in midsummer. My friends, however, do not have any blackcurrant bushes on their property. Thanks Perfume Shrine for this.

POST SCRIPT

Civet is a kind of animal musk. In this case, it is a fragrant substance taken from a certain kind of wild cat by the same name, and usually specified as the African Civet. For centuries, these cats (it’s technically more like a mongoose) were hunted and trapped for their potent, musky pheromones, which are repeatedly scraped from their anal glands while in captivity. At smaller dilutions it becomes very pleasant – just like grapefruit oil, which at the right concentration can make you vomit uncontrollably. Civetone is the name given to the molecule that most represents the Civet smell, and it is very similar to Musk/Muscone, and has in it traces of Skatole (faeces). I’m not certain of this, but I think any synthetic alternative to getting Civetone is kept a secret. You can buy it, but you can’t make it yourself (without hella experimentin’ chemists).

POST POST SCRIPT

In order to attract jaguars, National Geographic-type people are known to use Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men 1986.

So You Like Ambiguity

The duck-rabbit illusion is an oldie but goodie. This new square-cylinder illusion will make you second guess your visual cortex. It's a square, it's a circle, it's both, it's neither.

The Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion wins the illusion of the year contest2016

 gif:

https://lovelace-media.imgix.net/uploads/892/dae451c0-24fa-0134-0cab-0a0b9a139ea7.gif?

Video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oWfFco7K9v8

Crossmodal Perception and Cultural Difference

Infrared Central Park by Paolo Pettigiani circa 2016, via wired

It is not often that we get to hear scientists talking about the language of smell, so let’s hear from Asifa Majid, a scientist who studies, among other things, the language of smell as she talks to cognitive scientist Jon Sutton about language and thought:

“For example, in English sweet (taste) can also be used to describe people; i.e. a ‘gentle, kind or friendly’ person. But in Hebrew when sweet is used metaphorically it refers to ‘inauthenticity’. A spicy person in English might be considered ‘full of spirit’, but a spicy person in Hebrew would be someone ‘intellectually competent’. If a young man in Guhu Samane (Papua New Guinea) described a group of girls as sweet, the man could relate to them as sisters, and approach them. But if the girls were described as bitter, that would be because they are potential wife material (because they come from the appropriate clan), and so the young man should be cautious and keep his distance. These are all examples of how taste vocabulary can be used for traits and characteristics of people. Metaphor is pervasive in language.”

- taken from The Content of Minds in The Psychologist, July 2016

The entire language of smell is a proxy for other senses. All smells are named for what they’re like, for the experiences they evoke. To name a smell, to verbally explore what a thing smells like, is to reveal something deep inside our minds and at the core of our culture.

Old Folks Jokes

It’s not news exactly, we’ve known this for some time. Your sense of smell can measure the health of your brain. It makes sense becaus smell is so deeply embedded in the most primitive parts of your mind, that for something to go wrong there, shows there is something wrong in those most basic parts, which especially includes the memory.

Whereas other senses do most of their activity in their respective cortices, or info-processing areas of the brain, like the visual cortex, smell has no cortex. It is “processed” by the limbic system itself, and the limbic system, named for its control of the limbs and thus motility, is really at the base of our neural schematic. You could lose your Broca or Wernicke areas of your brain, the parts that deal with speaking and decoding language, and your life would take a hit, sure – but if you lost a part of your limbic system, you probably wouldn’t have much of a life at all. (Although there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.)

My friend’s mom recently told me about how she’s getting phantom smells – smelling stuff when it’s not there. This could be caused by all kinds of things, really, but as she is approaching 70 years old, I told her to take that as a reminder to check her mental health. I think her olfactory phantoms (Ren and Stimpy called them “nose goblins,” just kidding) have since subsided, but it’s a story of caution to anyone getting to that age, or those with parents etc. who are.

Let’s make sure not to confuse this: people with anosmia, or the inability to smell, do not automatically have mental illness. It’s when people with functioning olfactory systems suddenly get changes to them that there should be concern (and especially when they’re 60 or older).

And finally, I always thought, what does this mean for me, a guy self-diagnosed with pseudo hyperosmia? I think I have a strong sense of smell, although it’s measurably the same as other people, I pay attention to it more, and it does weird things to my brain, not gonna lie. For example, freshly baked bread, spoiled mushrooms, and rotten fish are all related as smells, they really are, says science, but also my nose-brain told me. Problem is, sometimes I can’t tell if I’m really smelling something, or if I’m just going crazy (because I often smell things others can’t, which is sometimes called hallucinating, and which is a prime ingredient for feeling crazy). You better believe I’m getting one of these tests in 20 years.

Notes:

Smell test may be effective in early detection of Alzheimer's

CTV News, July 2016

The Olfactory Narratives of Josh Meyers

One of Josh Meyers’ Imaginary Authors

I didn’t get into smells for the fragrance, but after discovering an artist like Josh Meyers, it makes me wonder what the hell I’ve been missing.

In his interview with fragrance blog Olfactif, Meyers recounts his high school self shunning perfume as too conformist. Like Josh, I have always been perfume-averse. Perfume was an adornment, like jewelry, which I do not wear, and furthermore like a form of branding. “You know, he’s one of those Drakkar Noir guys.” (In late adolescence I wore Drakkar and was obsessed, and then in high school my friend dropped a bottle of it outside his locker and we all reeked for days; I didn’t start buying perfume again until twenty years later.)

My pursuits in the osmic sensorium are slowly leading me back to perfume-obsessed, but I still have that anti-conformity, anti-branded-identity thing to overcome in the process. That’s why when I came across the work of Josh Meyers, I had to stop and really absorb what he was doing with his chemical poetry.

He’s composed a series of fragrances titled Imaginary Authors, where each fragrance represents a story about a fictional author’s biography and written works. In his bottle of Soft Lawn, we experience the world of Claude LeCoq (1893-1957) and his (doubly) fictional character Hampton Perry, a charmingly snotty tennis champ at a New England college. Leisure; clay court and tennis balls, that’s what it smells like. Something you wear when you go to Princeton, or to a country club. Imaginary Authors is described as wearable with a dose of weirdness, riding a fine line between art and commodity. Who doesn’t want to smell like The Weekend?

“Intellectually engaging” is another way his scents are described. He really puts the “cognitive” in fragrance, something usually taken as emotional. But at the base of it, and what I am so into, is the fact that he's taking full advantage of our surreal relationship with the language of smell. He describes his fragrances based on when you should wear it (weekends) and where (the country club), not by using typical olfactory descriptors like “citrus” or “sandalwood.” He gives you the backstory, the context.

In reality, smells are holistic and contextual more than they are a combination of aromatic units. It's the “whole” he's going for, and the whole he delivers. And for once I realize that you can’t do this with a painting, or with a good book. A book might smell good, but it won’t smell like the story you’re reading. When the story is crafted into the fragrance itself, we can let it interact with a deeper part of our imagination.

***

I can't talk about fragrance alone, because my first love is the mind. Place and context are essential to our understanding of sense, and it is to the benefit of all when used in describing olfactory experience, for the two cannot be separated in our minds.

Besides the amygdala, the emotional core of our brain, the second most popular part of our odor-ceptive system is the hippocampus. This is the area associated with spatial orientation and memory. Any talk on Memory touches on the ancient technique of creating a “palace of the mind” where memory objects are stored. One simply “walks through” this imaginary palace to remember everything. And speaking of quintessential examples, how does Proust finally discover the source of his most famous shudder of exquisite pleasure?

Excerpt from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past:

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

-circa 1913

It happened when he went to her bedroom. On this, I rest the case. Smell needs context to be understood, and by that I emphasize the hard, physical space which our bodies inhabit and not the ephemeral lexicon of detached, abstract linguistic descriptors.

Josh Meyers certainly gets this, and we get to immerse ourselves in a narrative that goes way beyond its literary content. There is only one place where pieces of our brain extend beyond the envelope of the body to be directly exposed to the world outside, and that is in the holes of our nose. The words “upper-crust” don't jump the blood-brain barrier in quite the same way as Meyers’ “Soft Lawn”.

Disambiguator Supreme

 aka Common Misperceptions in the World of Smell

Polymathic artist/scientist Elena Vosnaki keeps a very different kind of perfume site. It focuses as much on the raw materials of fragrance and their omnicategorical contexts as much as the fragrances themselves.

Vosnaki authored one post in particular that is so informative to the curious nose that I wish I could add it as an appendix to my book. It is a breakdown of the "vocabulary of scent," a lexigraph connecting chemical names, perfume notes, and everyday descriptors for so many of the smells that surround us in our daily lives.

As I point out repeatedly in Hidden Scents, there is no such thing as a language of smell, and for such a variety of reasons as to require a book of explanation. From the way the smells enter our minds and the language parts of it, to the lack of general public discourse about olfactory experience, to the lack of intellectual property protections on fragrance, which severely limits public access to information about the ingredients of fragrances, for all of these reasons, it is so difficult to talk about smells and to think about them. Additionally, because this language is usurped by chemistry, which is too complex for the layperson to use, and by advertising, which relies on prestidigitation of experiential cues, any information we do get about smells is clouded by confusion, superstition and outright dirty data.

So what Perfume Shrine does here is great – she has generated her list in response to user comments by regular people, confused people, curious people. She takes that list and clarifies and disambiguates a few dozen terms, or odor entities as they might be called, from the smell of nail polish to play-doh to "barnyard." I wish that this list could be posted in every kindergarten room in the world; one generation may be all it takes to dispel from our society this Lingua Anosmia.

“In the end, getting to know the vocabulary of scent not only facilitates a common language reference among fellow fragrance enthusiasts, but also enriches the experience itself, much like getting to know the parameters of art critique enhances the appreciation of art itself.”

-Perfume Shrine

Please check this out, if you've ever wondered, "What is that smell?" or "Why does that girl smell like cat piss?" (hint: it's blackcurrant buds in her perfume, not her 15 cats and the piss-soaked apartment she lives in).

Without a doubt, and as with anything else, the more you know, the more you notice. Inform yourself with this little lexicon and watch as you slowly become a Sherlock Holmes of scent.

Mapping the Vocabulary of Scent:

 What Smells like Nail Polish/ Metal/ Sweat/ Horses/ Hairspray/ Burnt Toast/ Baby Powder/Dirty Socks etc?

-Perfume Shrine, Feb 2011