Remembering Smell (27 page)

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Rachel Herz tells: Scent of Desire,
1–3, 5, 16–17. Michael Hutchence was riding a bicycle in Copenhagen when he was hit by a car. Herz notes that he lost only his sense of smell but that he thought he'd lost both smell and taste; the experience of eating is so intertwined with smell that it's led to the common misconception that taste and flavor are the same thing. In fact, flavor is the combination of taste and smell. Herz says that depression after anosmia is almost
always progressive. Those who suddenly go blind are more traumatized in the immediate aftermath but improve over time, while "follow-up analyses on the emotional health of [anosmics] one year later showed that the anosmics were faring much more poorly than the blind." See also Mike Gee's
Final Days of Michael Hutchence.

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an idiot savant:
Engen,
Odor Sensation,
3–5.

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Elizabeth Zierah had:
"Nose That Never Knows," Slate.com.

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TASTING THE HOLIDAYS

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Rachel Herz had:
Herz,
Scent of Desire,
197–98.
Taste is said to:
Estimates range from 80 to 90 percent, though it's impossible to measure this.
One olfactory expert:
Gilbert,
What the Nose Knows,
91–102.

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cultural conditioning:
See Corbin,
Foul and the Fragrant.
How odor perception is formed by culture is also the subject of Constance Classen's
Aroma
and a prominent theme of Patrick Suskind's
Perfume.

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Most humans:
Callaway, "Neanderthal Genome." The
New Scientist
reported this early finding by study leader Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Researchers will use the information to help determine precisely when humans and Neanderthals took separate evolutionary paths and if there was interbreeding. See also Paabo, "A Complete Neandertal Mitochondrial Genome."

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Autism makes it difficult:
Wilson and Stevenson,
Learning to Smell,
21. The authors cite several syndromes that adversely affect odor memory: "That we find relationships between stimulus and discriminative ability and odor quality is not surprising, because these will often have similar patterns of receptor activity."

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IDIOT SAVANT

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Smell scientist Stuart Firestein:
Firestein is a geneticist at Columbia University and a leading expert on signal transduction. On his website he explains that "the olfactory neuron is uniquely suited for these studies since it is designed specifically for the detection and discrimination of a wide variety of small organic molecules, i.e., odors." His
studies of mammalian receptors have been published in
Nature Neuroscience
and the
Journal of Theoretical Biology,
among other journals.
a recent contest:
Sobel, "Mechanisms of Scent-Tracking." Psychologist Noam Sobel conducted the contest. The humans proved that our species has an excellent scent-detecting system, thanks to an individual's twin nostrils. While dogs and humans both cycle back and forth between nostrils, only people can connect a smell to a conscious event or label. As Richard Doty pointed out, verbal scores increase when smells are delivered to the left (language) side of the brain. Commenting on the contest, Shepherd noted that "olfactory genes do not map directly onto smell acuity; dogs, which have superior tracking abilities, have only about 850 functional genes. In fact, behavioral tests show that primates have surprisingly good senses of smell, and it has been argued that the decline in olfactory-gene number is more than offset in humans by their much enlarged brains [capable of] analysis and complex processing of smell to guide critical human behaviors." Shepherd also suggested "that evolution has produced in humans an excellent overall sense of smell and, combined with taste and somatosensation and other inputs, the best sense of flavor in the animal world."
women score higher:
Smell dysfunction expert Richard Doty told me that women usually outperform men on smell-identification tests.

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SENSELESS EATING

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Kessler thinks food companies:
Kessler,
End of Overeating.

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appetite is erased.:
Linden,
Accidental Mind,
15. In his book, Linden discusses new research on hunger and satiety.
Venture capital is pouring:
Lee, "Local Firms."

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CULINARY ART

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Born in Provence:
Lehrer,
Proust Was a Neuroscientist,
chapter 3. I am indebted to Jonah Lehrer for his overview of the evolution of fine cooking.

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Alinea challenges:
My husband and I dined at Alinea most recently in March 2009, and we met Grant Achatz, whose cancer was then in remission. Medical details of Achatz's cancer diagnosis and treatment are from Max, "Man of Taste."

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OLFACTORY ART

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University of Michigan study:
Achen and Stafford, "Data Quality of Housework Hours."
To entice both:
Byron, "Smell of Moroccan Bazaar."

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the
New York Times: Chandler Burr was hired as perfume critic in 2006.

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chief perfumer at Aveda:
DePass, "For Aveda."
Another innovation in perfumery:
Singer, "Underdog Pursues."

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A HISTORY OF THE SENSUAL NOSE

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the nineteenth-century Italian composer:
Wakin, "Verdi with Popcorn."

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Cultural anthropologist Constance Classen:
Classen,
Aroma,
157–58.
As flesh was despised:
Harvey,
Scenting Salvation,
129–30, 205.

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Patrick Suskind's
Perfume: Süskind,
Perfume,
3, 14–15.

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between the "hillocks":
Ackerman,
Natural History of Love,
237.
cleaned up its act:
Vida, "Scents and Sensibility."
neurologist-turned-analyst Sigmund Freud:
Details of the Fliess story were taken from the transcript of a 1986 interview with Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson on the ABC Radio program
The Science Show.
Also see Masson's
Assault on Truth.

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THE EROTIC NOSE

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males of almost:
Ridley, "Modern Darwins."
A famous study:
Wedekind et al., "MHC-Dependent Mate Preferences." See also Wedekind and Penn, "MHC Genes."

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Pherlure cologne:
This I found advertised online in 2006.

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in the animal world:
The prairie vole studies were conducted in the late nineties by Tom Insel and Sue Carter at Emory University's primate research center. Joseph LeDoux discussed their work in
Synaptic Self
Insel believes that "the neural basis of attachment can be investigated in animal models." These neural pathways also may prove to be important in treating clinical disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, both of which result in social isolation and detachment.
actually stick around:
Basu, "Marmoset Dads." A sentor scientist at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at UW-Madison, Toni Ziegler published her findings in
Biology Letters
in 2008. In
2006, Ziegler compared weight gain in both control and paternal marmosets and tamarins during the pregnancy and birth period.

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Catherine Dulac:
Catherine Dulac has identified MHC pathways in mice. She explains on her website: "The functional characterization of M10 highlights an unexpected role for MHC molecules in pheromone detection by mammalian VNO neurons and opens new avenues of research on the process of sensory detection leading to behavior." See Dulac, Kimchi, and Xu, "Functional Circuit," for the details of the mouse-pheromone experiment.

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human babies send:
Ashkenazy, "Mothering Touch." The article notes that Hebrew University psychologist Marsha Kaitz published data showing that mothers could identify their own children by smell 90 percent of the time. Subsequent research has shown that any woman who holds a baby long enough can pick it out from others by smelling it. See also Eidelman et al., "Mothers' Recognition."
An organ that:
Axel called the VNO "the erotic nose" in answering a question after his 2004 speech to alumni at Columbia University.
Dulac and her colleagues:
Dulac et al., "Olfactory Inputs." In 1995 Catherine Dulac and Richard Axel published work on gene-splicing techniques that enabled her to go on to focus on parsing the respective roles of olfaction and the VNO in mice. Back-to-back studies in 2005 confirmed that sexual activity is not limited to the VNO, which opens the door to the possibility that humans also have a pheromone-based system operating through smell.

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atrophies before birth:
This has been widely accepted for decades.
As Dulac explains:
This quote from the Dulac lab website reads in full: "Our data contradict the established notion that VNO activity is required for the initiation of male-female mating behavior in the mouse and suggest instead a critical role in ensuring sex discrimination."

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or possibly the skin:
Herz, in
Scent of Desire,
page 145, speculates that "the chemicals responsible for inducing menstrual synchrony are transmitted directly through the skin. That is, the sweat of the donor female is absorbed through the skin of another woman through touch (sweat-to-skin contact), which over time enters her bloodstream, causing changes to her hormonal system that are in synch with the donor woman." It should be noted that, as Wilson
and Stevenson point out in
Learning to Smell
(page 139), "some of the reported synchrony effects may be artifacts of the recording procedure and that synchrony may not confer any benefits with respect to reproductive success." See also Doty,
Great Pheromone Myth. the Bruce effect:
The widely studied phenomenon was referred to in Dawkins's
The Selfish Gene.

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trees in Beijing:
Rayner, "Bug Wars."
Doty compares pheromones to Snarks:
Doty makes the argument in
The Great Pheromone Myth
that "[w]ithout negating the fact that biological secretions ubiquitously influence mammalian social and sexual behaviors, as well as endocrine state,... in the vast majority of cases such influences cannot be divorced from the brain and are not fundamentally different from similar influences of other sensory systems."
normal sex lives:
Doty's point is that people born without smell are "normal" in every other respect. They don't know what they're missing, that's true; but what they're missing, at least according to their own testimony, has no negative impact on their marriage, their interest in sex, their interest in life. They even enjoy food. My take on this is that they are no different from someone born lacking an arm or a leg, vision or hearing. The brain is plastic and begins adapting to such disabilities even in utero; what's traumatic is the sudden loss of a function that the brain is already wired to rely on.

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a religious sect:
Ober, Gilad, and Loisel, "Sex-Specific Genetic Architecture." University of Chicago geneticist Carole Ober has also done studies on the Hutterites with Martha McClintock.

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Swiss researchers:
Wedekind and Penn, "MHC Genes." In this study, men adhered to a strict bathing regimen and wore no deodorants or colognes.
the Berkeley study:
Wyart et al., "Smelling a Single Component." A postdoctoral fellow working under Noam Sobel, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Berkeley Olfactory Research Program, Wyart hopes to harness her findings to help people with low cortisol levels, such as those patients with Addison's disease. Pills prescribed for Addison's can often cause ulcers and weight gain, but "[m]erely smelling synthesized or purified human chemosignals may modify endocrine balance."

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In a groundbreaking:
McClintock, "Menstrual Synchrony."
smell of clove:
McClintock et al., "Psychological Effects."

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THE LANGUGE OF SMELL

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I came downstairs:
Felten, "These Drams Are Different."

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Andrei Codrescu
: "Life Without Smell May Not Be Worth It" aired on National Public Radio's
All Things Considered
on October 30, 2008.

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They do not:
MacLean,
Triune Brain,
124–34.
A Dutch botanist:
This work on underground runners and communication is being done by Josef Stuefer at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

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Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux:
See LeDoux's
Synaptic Self,
83–85, 259.

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SMELL, MEMORY

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strength of a whiff:
Pines, "Mystery of Smell."

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Gottfried described:
Gottfried, "Assessment of Olfactory Function," in Hummel and Welge-Lussen, eds.,
Taste and Smell,
98.

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When this region:
Shepherd and Shepherd-Barr, "Madeleines and Neuromodernism"; Rosenblum, "You Drink What You Think."

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Axel concluded:
Axel discussed Marcel Proust's
In Search of Lost Time
(a.k.a.
Remembrance of Things Past),
specifically volume 1,
Swann's Way,
in his Nobel acceptance speech, and in a speech at Columbia in 2004 he used a painting by Magritte with the phrase "Ce N'est Pas un Nez" superimposed over the artist's title to illustrate the confounding nature of sense perception.
Scientists and literature scholars:
Chu and Downes, "Odour-Evoked Autobiographical Memories." These two professors at the University of Liverpool compiled and analyzed scientific studies of the Proust phenomenon going back to the very first one in 1928. They concluded that olfaction is unique in that it can summon memories that are older, more vivid, and more emotional than memories evoked by either verbal or visual cues, likely because of the smell-summoned memories' origin in the limbic system.