The nose DOES know

"There's a mickey in the tasting of disaster..."  - Sly Stone 

Jonas Olafsson's new book The Forgotten Sense definitively explodes a lingering duality that had persisted for a surprisingly long time regarding the human sense of smell - that we aren't good at it, but our smaller and furrier cousins (dogs, rats, rabbits) are particularly adept, often possessing keen senses of smell far in excess of our own sensitivity. Well it turns out this is just about... are you ready for this? ... entirely NOT true.

(ed. note: this is something of a spoiler, but it's mentioned so early in the book I will let it pass. Olafsson's book is positively crammed with fascinating revelations like this). 

Instead, human beings DO in fact have a highly developed sense of smell; one that is at least roughly on par with that of the majority of other mammalian species, if not substantially better, contrary to longstanding conventional wisdom. Not only this, but the locus of our intellectual abilities - long associated more or less exclusively with language - is strongly intertwined with the 'forgotten' sense of smell (and its related sense, taste: more like different aspects of the same neurological system, but each with its own distinct set of external receptors).

What's more, Olafsson draws his conclusions from a rather surprising and novel source: the baffling array of olfactory disorders suffered by COVID-19 patients, including anosmia (loss of smell), hyposmia (decreased sensitivity to smell), hyperosmia (unusual sensitivity to smell), and dysosmia (a change in the quality of certain smells). There's clearly a lot more than meets the eye regarding the role smell plays in defining some of the most important characteristics of the experiential world we encounter every day of our lives, and in light of this it's almost unsettling how little is actually known about the underlying process. It is surprising, for instance, that there is no general consensus or universally accepted theory explaining the exact mechanism by which odors are detected. That's not at all to say that there are any mysterious, extra-dimensional "goings on" going on (although one of the more exotic theories of olfaction does involve quantum tunneling - I'm really not kidding), but only that the precise mechanism - among several competing hypotheses - is not currently known. What does seem to be clear is that both smell - and taste - play a significant role in establishing the identities of the places, people and things, coloring the feelings we associate with them, and contributing to the quasi-semantic structure of memory.

 

Footnote: Interestingly, it would appear that the book I've just got through describing reveals itself as a possible example of nominative determinism, the concept that people are influenced in their choice of profession or area of research according to meanings associated with their own name. (This was something featured on Wikipedia recently). Since "Olafsson" is a near permutation of "olfaction", the formal term in English for the sense of smell, can we conclude that the author arrived at their chosen field of study at least partly as a result of such a connection? Sadly, the preliminary results are not promising, as by all accounts it seems the one thing that definitely cannot be proved is that it was the name by itself that caused someone to make a particular choice. The problems with nominative determinism do not in any way end there, however. The basic issues, to my thinking anyway, revolve around the inherent indefinability of what constitutes a "close enough" fit between a profession and a name. Do we permit near-permutations such as this, along with possibly even more abstruse associations like Feather the ornithologist or Snide the etiquette instructor, or must we restrict ourselves to the Bakers, Clarks, and Smiths? Finally, the idea fails to account for the likely far more numerous examples of names and professions that would seem to lack a clear reference to the other category without, as it were, overtaxing the imagination in the service of plausibility. Somehow, I don't think we're going to see a rash of baby names like "IT Specialist" or "Hooker" popping up anytime soon, but I suppose anything's possible...