“If olfaction were his most important sense, man’s linguistic incapacity to describe olfactory sensations would turn him into a creature tied to his environment. Because they are ephemeral, olfactory sensations can never provide a persistent stimulus of thought. Thus the development of the sense of smell seems to be inversely related to the development of intelligence.” – ALAIN CORBIN
Tag Archives: cognition
The Poetics of Smell as a Mode of Knowledge
“The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself. Immediately, at the very moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertoires throughout the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, old memories, connections. This is as it should be, I suppose, since the cells that do the smelling are themselves proper brain cells, the only neurons whose axones carry information picked up at first hand in the outside world…â€
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/28/lewis-thomas-on-smell-long-line-of-cells/
This is an extract from a larger essay on the sense of smell smell. The original source: Thomas, L. (1983). On Smell. In L. Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (S. 40–44). New York: Viking Press.
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Cross-cultural research makes a difference
Since ancient times there has been the common belief that the experience of a smell is impossible to put into words. The New Yorker presents an overview of more recent cross-cultural research challenging this belief: Culture, not biology, rules the relation between smell and language