Blink for the Smelly Set
There's a real difference between books/articles written by scientists who write and writers with a scientific beat. I loved What's Next and 1491, but even though Jared Diamond is a trained scientist, GG&S was weak and don't get me started on how infuriating it is to try to trace Malcolm Gladwell's sources.
Avery Gilbert is the former and I wonder if What the Nose Knows is the educated, edited version of his file of "cool things about scent" that he has accumulated in the course of his work. It has everything from a discussion of formulating the smell of pot to olfactory theater. With all that, I don't think Avery Gilbert ever realized the underlying theme of the book is that smell is about cognition as much as it is about senses. Over and over throughout the book, he mentions examples of how, for example, people can be trained to follow a chocolate scent trail with just their nose. Most people have roughly the same sense of smell: what makes a sommelier different from a Bud drinker is that the former has trained not necessarily his/her sense of smell, but also how to describe it. It is not enough to be able to detect; you have to be able to describe it too. For example, they've found a significant gender difference in smell-ability, but that correlates with verbal abilities, in which women often have a slight edge. Gilbert also mentions it decreases with age, which depending on the sample, could be correlated with verbal skills (or the simple mechanics of fewer sensors). This makes a lot of sense to me. Part of what OperaBoss and I do when we go for dinner is sit and describe what we're tasting in the food. I think we enjoy our food far more than LBro, who is completely uninterested in the flavors.
The book was particularly interesting to me bc not only is it a topic in which I'm interested, but the language is evocative and bc it gave me some pointers on "how to think" about scents as well. For example, the first chapter of the book described the matrix approach used by newbie perfumers to learn the scents and Noble's wine aroma wheel, which are also interesting from a epistemological perspective. Gilbert includes discussions of Elizabeth Rozin's flavor principle that a cuisine can be defined with just 3-4 ingredients and Paul Sherman & Jennifer Billing's finding that comparing different cuisines, spiciness correlates with temperature better for meat dishes than vegetable dishes. He's critical of Sigmund Freud's theories of smell, claiming the father of psychology overgeneralized his own experiences with colds, nose problems (and eventually surgery). Gilbert also includes interesting factoids about how easy to lose one's sense of smell - waiters can lose it from being hit in the head with a tray, for example, with only 10% ever recovering their sense of smell from such an accident, compared to 32% recovering their sense of smell from a bad cold. Which btw, I hadn't known before and horrified me.
The good news is, Gilbert notes that sense of smell doesn't correlate with smoking, unless someone has smoked in the past 15mins, which explains Anthony Bourdain. And subliminal smells work only as well as other advertising, in that while they can have subtle effects on behavior, it only works if you get it perfectly. The example Gilbert gives is that smelling a cow orker's pizza might make you buy a slice, instead of a burrito, but then seeing a Coke ad might make you more likely to eat it with a sugary drink rather than water. Golly, advertising works, whether it's visual or through smell.
As you might guess from this review, the book's biggest weakness is the number of characters it introduces and the number of chemicals the audiobook reader mentioned. I'm not sure there's much he could've done about that in a book of this breadth. However, I also found the last third of the book very slow - nobody needs an entire chapter on Smell-O-Vision vs. AromaRama - but I happened to read it on a run of some length (yeah, it's been that long since I finished it :( and it became clear that the last third of the book is about artistic visions. There's a chapter on what he calls fragrance artists such as Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City; Hawthorne in "Rappaccini's Daughter" (incidentally one of my favoritest short stories evuh); Dickinson (calls herself an "Inebriate of Air" and a fragrance vampire); Wagner (every time someone commits incest, the score is marked with the german word for fragrance, whereas dwarf sex is marked with yucky smells); and William Faulkner in The Unforgiveable and The Sound & The Fury. Perhaps I'll be following up Gilbert's work of non-fiction with a few of these.
Avery Gilbert is the former and I wonder if What the Nose Knows is the educated, edited version of his file of "cool things about scent" that he has accumulated in the course of his work. It has everything from a discussion of formulating the smell of pot to olfactory theater. With all that, I don't think Avery Gilbert ever realized the underlying theme of the book is that smell is about cognition as much as it is about senses. Over and over throughout the book, he mentions examples of how, for example, people can be trained to follow a chocolate scent trail with just their nose. Most people have roughly the same sense of smell: what makes a sommelier different from a Bud drinker is that the former has trained not necessarily his/her sense of smell, but also how to describe it. It is not enough to be able to detect; you have to be able to describe it too. For example, they've found a significant gender difference in smell-ability, but that correlates with verbal abilities, in which women often have a slight edge. Gilbert also mentions it decreases with age, which depending on the sample, could be correlated with verbal skills (or the simple mechanics of fewer sensors). This makes a lot of sense to me. Part of what OperaBoss and I do when we go for dinner is sit and describe what we're tasting in the food. I think we enjoy our food far more than LBro, who is completely uninterested in the flavors.
The book was particularly interesting to me bc not only is it a topic in which I'm interested, but the language is evocative and bc it gave me some pointers on "how to think" about scents as well. For example, the first chapter of the book described the matrix approach used by newbie perfumers to learn the scents and Noble's wine aroma wheel, which are also interesting from a epistemological perspective. Gilbert includes discussions of Elizabeth Rozin's flavor principle that a cuisine can be defined with just 3-4 ingredients and Paul Sherman & Jennifer Billing's finding that comparing different cuisines, spiciness correlates with temperature better for meat dishes than vegetable dishes. He's critical of Sigmund Freud's theories of smell, claiming the father of psychology overgeneralized his own experiences with colds, nose problems (and eventually surgery). Gilbert also includes interesting factoids about how easy to lose one's sense of smell - waiters can lose it from being hit in the head with a tray, for example, with only 10% ever recovering their sense of smell from such an accident, compared to 32% recovering their sense of smell from a bad cold. Which btw, I hadn't known before and horrified me.
The good news is, Gilbert notes that sense of smell doesn't correlate with smoking, unless someone has smoked in the past 15mins, which explains Anthony Bourdain. And subliminal smells work only as well as other advertising, in that while they can have subtle effects on behavior, it only works if you get it perfectly. The example Gilbert gives is that smelling a cow orker's pizza might make you buy a slice, instead of a burrito, but then seeing a Coke ad might make you more likely to eat it with a sugary drink rather than water. Golly, advertising works, whether it's visual or through smell.
As you might guess from this review, the book's biggest weakness is the number of characters it introduces and the number of chemicals the audiobook reader mentioned. I'm not sure there's much he could've done about that in a book of this breadth. However, I also found the last third of the book very slow - nobody needs an entire chapter on Smell-O-Vision vs. AromaRama - but I happened to read it on a run of some length (yeah, it's been that long since I finished it :( and it became clear that the last third of the book is about artistic visions. There's a chapter on what he calls fragrance artists such as Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City; Hawthorne in "Rappaccini's Daughter" (incidentally one of my favoritest short stories evuh); Dickinson (calls herself an "Inebriate of Air" and a fragrance vampire); Wagner (every time someone commits incest, the score is marked with the german word for fragrance, whereas dwarf sex is marked with yucky smells); and William Faulkner in The Unforgiveable and The Sound & The Fury. Perhaps I'll be following up Gilbert's work of non-fiction with a few of these.