A nasal curiosity

This prompted by the paper at reference 1, brought to my attention by the newsletter from reference 6.

It is commonly thought that we humans have a poor sense of smell, perhaps because smell has been pushed out of the way by the more pressing needs of sight and sound; smell being very old in terms of evolution. It is also the case that most languages, in particular English, have a poor smell vocabulary, at least if we leave aside specialists like wine tasters and parfumiers who have specialised smell vocabularies. Think, for example, of the large number of words about colour, a number which is, to be fair, rather inflated by the efforts of the people selling paints and wallpapers. Over the years, various researchers have pondered about why this might be so, some of them offering explanations in terms of the organisation of the brain. Others have suggested that the few remaining groups of hunter gatherers, now mainly concentrated in warm, damp parts of the globe, that is to say smell friendly parts of the globe, and who can talk about smells, do so because smell is an important part of hunting and gathering. While for the rest of us, smells are mostly something to be got rid of, covered over – or otherwise suppressed.

Majid points out that human discrimination of smells is actually pretty good, with all the necessary biochemical machinery being present in heads and noses – although he doesn’t point out that we are not much good at very dilute smells. We cannot smell upwind deer in the way that deer can smell upwind humans, for which see references 7 and 8. Nor does he do much to compare and contrast the smell scene with that of taste and touch.

Nevertheless, he does, in reference 2, report on a striking experiment involving 30 people from Nijmegen in the Netherlands and 30 from the Hulu Perak district of peninsular Malaysia, these last being speakers of the Jahai language, one of the few languages in the world to have at least a small smell vocabulary, a vocabulary which is to be found at reference 3. Vocabulary in the sense that it has words which describe the nature of smells rather than their sources; ‘sickly’ rather than ‘the smell of ivy flowers in the autumn’.

These people were tested with about 40 smells, presented on the sniffin’s sticks illustrated above. The smells were chosen to play to Jahai skills in these matters and were all single chemical smells, for example the fishy smell of 2-methyl butyl amine, rather than smells of mixtures. The idea was to capture both the oral response and the facial response, this last appearing to amount to good versus bad smells.

The results were quite striking. The people from Nijmegen took their time and tended to reply in terms of something which had the smell in question; they focussed on the likely source of the smell. While the people from Hulu Peal responded more consistently and more quickly in terms of the nature of the smell. They also used a much smaller vocabulary of around 20 terms, mainly abstract smell terms, rather than the 700 terms, mainly source terms, that the Netherlanders managed.

Facial responses were much more alike, with both groups, on the whole, liking and disliking the same smells.

I come away from this with the thought that, for some reason, we here in Europe don’t much care to talk about smells and so don’t have the vocabulary so to do. 

On the other hand, we do buy a lot of stuff where smell is important: food, drink, perfume and toiletries. And lots of people are putting serious effort into leveraging that importance into commercial advantage – for which see references 4 and 5. From the second of which we have, by way of example: ‘… utilizes ScentSational’s Micro-Encapsulated Coating (MEC) technology to provide scented print and spray coatings for packaging or products. The scented microcapsules are designed to be ruptured with a simple swipe of the finger or when the product is handled, releasing the desired scent. EncapScent Inks and Coatings are an excellent tool for Scent Sampling from the shelf, or as a method to enhance product aroma during use. EncapScent MEC’s can be printed directly onto film, cartons, paperboard, or other packaging materials on commercial print presses as the package is being printed. The aroma stays dormant until activated with a light swipe of the finger. MEC’s will last at least 12 months until activated by touch.  Once activated, the aroma lasts a few minutes and can be reactivated over and over again. MEC’s are available in a wide variety of stock and custom scents…’.

A curiosity indeed. One to keep an eye on.

PS: I have also learned about a new phobia, phobic enough to have a name. According to Wikipedia: 'neophobia is the fear of anything new, especially a persistent and abnormal fear. In its milder form, it can manifest as the unwillingness to try new things or break from routine. In the context of children the term is generally used to indicate a tendency to reject unknown or novel foods. Food neophobia, as it may be referred to, is an important concern in paediatric psychology...'. But is it to be found in DSM-5? For which see references 9 and 10.

References

Reference 1: Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology - Asifa Majid – 2021. Floraoddmenu_263.

Reference 2: Olfactory language and abstraction across cultures - Asifa Majid, Niclas Burenhult, Marcus Stensmyr, Josje de Valk and Bill S. Hansson – 2018. Floraoddmenu_265.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahai_language. 

Reference 4: Leading the consumer by the nose: on the commercialization of olfactory design for the food and beverage sector - Spence, C. – 2015. Floraoddmenu_266.

Reference 5: https://scentt.com/. ‘… Of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, only smell has a direct link to the limbic mode, the section of the brain where creativity, emotion, hunger and impulses are processed.  It is also where memories and experiences of pleasure are stored. All the other senses are processed in the left side of the brain, the cerebral cortex, where logical thought is processed. That is why smell is the only sense capable of triggering a true impulse reaction that drives preference…’.

Reference 6: http://martinedwardes.me.uk/eaorc/. 

Reference 7: https://www.realtree.com/deer-hunting/articles/busted-5-things-you-don-t-know-about-deer-senses. 

Reference 8: The World of the White-Tailed Deer - Leonard Lee Rue – 1962. 

Reference 9: https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm. 

Reference 10: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/06/dsm-5.html.