Tag Archives: perception

We smell the way we make sense of it…

“We see what we see, we smell what we smell and feel what we feel, and there seems no more to it. Experiences that make no claim whatever would be truly incorrigible. But we must allow in the first place for the fact that what we see or feel depends very much on the way we make sense of it, and in this respect it is corrigible.” – MICHAEL POLANYI

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Simulation

“It is easier to make an airport tunnel smell like real jasmine than to use pictures, a video, or a trompe l’oeil to make people believe that they are walking through a real jasmine plantation in that tunnel.” – CHRISTOPHE LAUDAMIEL

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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…”

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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