“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
cognition
“The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself. Immediately, at the very […]
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