Imagine: anosmia

The first condition to understanding a foreign country is to smell it. –Rudyard Kipling

A rigorous study of smell has been delayed in the academy by a pervasive “objectivist” bias that took hold in the early modern period (Age of Reason) and reached its climax in the positivism of the 1950’s. Although now, in very recent years, smell has finally achieved a place among the other senses as worthy of real study, scientific investigation, and philosophical consideration, our sense of smell spent years undiscovered in the academic dark. It was dangerous. And “subjective”. And perhaps most condemning, it was … animalistic. No sense as much as our sense of smell, places us so clearly in the natural, animal world–a world we were historically trying desperately, by our systematic cultivation of a life of the mind, to escape. The smell of our own bodies was the worst, most consistent reminder of our mammalian embodiment, and so perfume was made (at least in certain eras) not to make us smell delightful, but to make us smell unlike ourselves –unrecognizably other. The pursuit of enlightenment across cultures and centuries involved denying our weak, mortal, physical selves in favor of the eternal, virtuous mind: Plato, Buddha, the Stoics, Christ. In each case our bodies were demonized as deterrents to knowledge and stumbling blocks on the path to immortality. Our sense of smell, so visceral in its reminders that our bodies do exist, was, therefore, problematic. Vision was taken to be enlightening and illuminating by its seemingly clear, direct representation of the natural world (a process we have more recently found to be far more complicated and far less “direct representation” than neurological interpretation) and was therefore, puzzled over by A.J. Ayer and leaders in fields of science and psychology, whereas smell could not be trusted. The look of a thing was generally taken to be credible evidence attesting to the way that thing really is, objectively, out in the world apart from us. Olfaction, on the other hand, was elusive and more personal. It was hard to believe smells, in part, because we couldn’t see what was going on. The Microscope, for example, simply did us no good when it came to figuring out why or how a thing smelled a certain way. And so, it was easier to ignore this invisible sense.

In fact, the dismissal of smell as evidence in the scientific community is still more or less in practice. As Chandler Burr reported in his 2002 narrative “The Emperor of Scent”, Luca Turin, in presenting the most basic evidence of a theory of smell (the smells themselves), consistently encountered resistance from people in the field who would ask how the smells he was talking about could be objectively defined–the “what you smell isn’t necessarily what I smell–but smell isn’t really real, is it?” line of thinking. Not only is smell real, I would argue that it is the most real of the senses. Unlike sight, hearing, and touch, smell is a chemical sense, and unlike taste, smell receptors seem to be highly specialized: whereas tastebuds lump chemicals into 6 (or so) basic categories and produces only as many precepts, smell receptors respond to thousands of molecules and produce individualized precepts for each one. Humans, we now believe, are able to respond to and distinguish between 10,000 or so individual molecular smells, and (amazingly) we are also able to smell smells as they are invented–brand new smells that we have not only never smelled before, but that have never existed in the world before.

But perhaps to fully come to terms with just how amazing smell really is, this material detector we too often take for granted, we should listen to those who have lost the incredible, invisible sense. Oliver Sacks gives us such an account in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat: Referring to a patient who has lost his sense of smell after a head injury, he says the following:

“He has been startled and distressed by the effects of this: ‘Sense of smell?’ he says. ‘I never gave it a thought. You don’t normally give it a thought. But when I lost it–it was like being struck blind. Life lost a good deal of its savour–one doesn’t realize how much ’savour’ is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring–maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer…’ There was an acute sense of loss, and an acute sense of yearning, a veritable osmalgia: a desire to remember the smell-world to which he had paid no conscious attention, but which, he now felt, had formed the very ground base of life.” (159)

And smell is, in more than just a metaphorical way, the ground base of life: we live in a world of matter, a world of chemistry, a world made up of molecules. Our sense of smell is the sense that allows us to know where we are in such a chemical world. Navigating without it would be like trying to walk without being able to feel the ground. Losing one’s sense of smell is, in fact, a kind of blindness that brings with it a sense of profound loss. Rachel Herz (a psychologist at Brown) goes so far as to argue that the loss felt in cases of acquired anosmia can be so profound as to cause the individual to become profoundly depressed and even suicidal. Because of its physiological relationship to our limbic system, she says, “The derailing of our olfactory system caused by anosmia can have a progressively negative downstream effect on the healthy functioning of our emotional system” (The Scent of Desire, 8).

Conversely, individuals who have experienced an enhanced sense of smell, even for a brief period of time recall that state of extreme olfaction with nostalgia. Stephen D, 16 years after a three-week period of amphetamine-induced super-smelling, said the following: ‘That smell-world, that world of redolence! So vivid, so real! It was like a visit to another world, a world of pure perception, rich, alive, self-sufficient, and full. If only I could go back sometimes and be a dog again.” During that time, each experience of smell had a compelling immediacy. The world for him had been saturated in a way that was super-real and infinitely interesting. Good smells and bad smells had a whole new aesthetic significance. “Somewhat intellectual before, and inclined to reflection and abstraction, he now found thought, abstraction and categorisation, somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience.” (157)

Imagine, if you can, a world without smell. It is impossible. It is like trying to imagine a world without gravity, or light. Such a world would be utterly foreign. And until we smell an utterly foreign world, we cannot claim to know it (says Rudyard Kipling). Olfaction, in its immediacy and specificity, is of first epistemological importance, and rather than covering it up, ignoring it, or simply pretending smell is meaningless and void, the time has come to lend it credence, to expand our olfactory palettes, to put our noses to the grindstone, and the bookbinding, and the workglove, and the street; the time has come to enlighten ourselves as to just how much we can know by our noses.