A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

Smell is the most direct of all our senses. Ackerman outlines the singular qualities of our smell-sensation that set it apart from all other bodily functions: Indeed, that route is a greater shortcut to our cognition and psychoemotional circuitry than any of our other senses can offer. Not so the links between the smell and the memory centers, a route that carries us nimbly across time and distance. But the physiological links between the smell and language centers of the brain are pitifully weak. The charm of language is that, though it is human-made, it can on rare occasions capture emotions and sensations that aren’t. Still, when we try to describe a smell, words fail us like the fabrications they are… Smells coat us, swirl around us, enter our bodies, emanate from us. It takes us about five seconds to breathe - two seconds to inhale and three seconds to exhale - and, in that time, molecules of odor flood through our systems. In fact, every breath we take in order to live is saturated with an extraordinary amount of olfactory information - a fact largely a matter of scale:Įach day, we breathe about 23,040 times and move around 438 cubic feet of air. Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton from ‘The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert.’ Click image for more. Cover your eyes and you will stop seeing, cover your ears and you will stop hearing, but if you cover your nose and stop smelling, you will die.

But we smell always and with every breath. Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it’s almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it… We see only where there is light enough, taste only when we put things into our mouths, touch only when we make contact with someone or something, hear only sounds that are loud enough to hear. Ackerman, who also happens to be a spectacular poet and the author of the gorgeous cosmic verses that Carl Sagan mailed to Timothy Leary in prison, paints the backdrop of this perplexing and unique sensory experience: That’s precisely what science historian Diane Ackerman explores in A Natural History of the Senses ( public library), her 1990 prequel to the equally fantastic A Natural History of Love. “A man may have lived all of his life in the gray,” John Steinbeck wrote in his beautiful meditation on the meaning of life, “and then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose.” Why is it that smell lends itself to such poetic metaphors, sings to us so sweetly, captures us so powerfully? Susan Sontag listed “linen” and “the smell of newly mown grass” among her favorite things. “Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes,” Anna Quindlen advised in her indispensable Short Guide to a Happy Life.

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman