What The Nose Knows: The Science Of Scent In Everyday Life - Plot & Excerpts
THEY float up the nose on the tidal rhythms of normal breathing and may not reach conscious awareness until minutes later. When we want to pay attention to an odor, we don’t wait for the next lungful of air—we capture it with a sniff. Sniffing is an odd behavior—it has no analog in vision or hearing. (Dogs, mice, and deer can rotate their external ears to focus on sounds; we can’t.) Sniffing is ignored by students of “body language.” It can be done covertly, and in polite company it usually is; sniffing is considered rude, and audible sniffing is downright vulgar. It takes an uninhibited, bumptious soul like Walt Whitman to draw attention to it, much less revel in it. But there is no getting around it; sniffing is essential. Whether one is tracking down a dead mouse in the basement or savoring a newly opened bag of Doritos, the sniff is the prelude to a smell.The purpose of a sniff is to get scent molecules to the place where we can smell them. The question that took philosophers and scientists thousands of years to answer was, Where exactly does smelling happen?
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