What The Nose Knows: The Science Of Scent In Everyday Life

• How many smells are there? And how many molecules would it take to create every smell in nature, from roses to stinky feet?

• Who was the bigger scent freak: the perfume-obsessed Richard Wagner or Emily Dickinson, with her creepy passion for flowers?

• By scenting the air in stores, are retailers turning us into subliminally controlled shopping zombies?

• Were Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama mere Hollywood fads or serious technologies?

Everything about the sense of smell fascinates us, from its power to evoke memories to its ability to change our moods and influence our behavior. Yet because it is the least understood of the senses, myths abound. For example, contrary to popular belief, the human nose is almost as sensitive as the noses of many animals, including dogs; blind people do not have enhanced powers of smell; and perfumers excel at their jobs not because they have superior noses, but because they have perfected the art of thinking about scents.

In this entertaining and enlightening journey through the world of aroma, olfaction expert Avery Gilbert illuminates the latest scientific discoveries and offers keen observations on modern culture: how a museum is preserving the smells of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row; why John Waters revived the “smellie” in Polyester; and what innovations are coming from artists like the Dutch “aroma jockey” known as Odo7. From brain-imaging laboratories to the high-stakes world of scent marketing, What the Nose Knows takes us on a tour of the strange and surprising realm of smell.

Editorial Reviews

Psychologist and smell scientist Gilbert's serious science is enlivened by a whimsical sense of humor. He is entertaining when affirming common wisdoms regarding smell-mothers can discern the smell of their child's diapers from another's (and think the smell sweeter), and, yes, women's sense of smell is better than men's. Gilbert destroys some shibboleths-blind people smell no better than sighted people, and dogs' and humans' senses of smell are probably reasonably similar. Gilbert is also interested in how smell is treated in the arts, riffing on Proust's ruminations on smell and memory, or "déja-smell," as Gilbert calls it. He energetically describes the epic 1950s Hollywood battle between "Smell-O-Vision" and "AromaRama"; the physiology of the popular tabloid tales of dead, decaying bodies found after a neighbor's report of "a foul odor" from a nearby apartment; and the possible evolutionary future of the human ability to smell. Gilbert is also surprisingly romantic, and elegiac, in describing smells that modern society has lost, odors he includes in his novel concept of "smellscape." Gilbert is an entertaining guide and worth sniffing around with. (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.