The sense of smell is as underrated as it is powerful! A gentle whiff has the power to evoke memories and arouse strong emotions.

A smell goes a long way…

The sense of smell is as underrated as it is powerful! A gentle whiff has the power to evoke memories and arouse strong emotions.

    THE other day I woke up in a panic, sniffing the air, convinced that something was burning. Barely able to open my eyes I rushed out of the room, much like Wee Willie Winkie, running upstairs and downstairs in my nightgown, trying to ascertain the source of smell. A shout from the bedroom had me rushing back in; my husband had woken up shouting, “Has there been a petrol leak?”! This befuddled me further. By now, our children, the nocturnal beings who haunt the house all through night, came rushing in.
    “What’s burning?” I screamed. “Oh Mom, chill”, said my son in disgust. “It’s the foul smell from the fogging which that Dikshit woman is getting done ostensibly to save us from Dengue”! Sheila Dikshit, the Delhi CM, is the easiest target to blame for all irritable things that happen to Delhiites; I too shifted the blame for the disturbance of my sweet early morning slumber to her!
    But the experience left me thinking about the powerful sense of smell that alerted us to danger even as we lay befogged by sleep! Till then, I had believed that you cannot smell anything while sleeping, nor had I given much thought to the sense of smell!
    Not as much is known about the olfactory sense as about the other senses. If people were given the choice of losing one of their senses, in all likelihood, the sense of smell would be the first choice, while sight would be last! Some argue that along with wisdom teeth and appendicitis, the human sense of smell may become vestigial or redundant too, since its original purpose was to help us in our search for food!
    However, smell cannot be so easily dismissed; it is a very powerful sense that resides in the same part of the brain as emotions, and so is more directly connected to our emotions and associative learning than any other sense. A whiff of a scent may take you back to your mother’s perfumed bosom, while the heady smell of roses in the sun may bring back half-forgotten memories of playing in the garden as children; a particular perfume may instantly attract you to a person because of associated memories, while another may make you hate someone for similar reasons. A colleague talks of how she gets filial feelings for any man, no matter how hot, if she smells her dad’s brand of cologne on him!
    The tongue can only indicate sweet, sour, salty or bitter tastes; every other flavour we taste in food depends on smell! Remember how bland everything tastes when you have a blocked nose? Hot soups and hot meals are a great comfort, as hot food gives out distinctive smells. Smell is a good indicator of danger as well, and much before other senses alert us, humans tend to pick up smells of burning, natural gas leaks, odour of rotten food and in some super sensitive cases, “a smell of something not being quite
    right’! Women have a keener sense of smell than men and are even said to be attracted to a man by the way he smells! Smells have a powerful influence on human mood and behaviour, which is why spas and beauty parlours use aromas that relax, women use perfumes and couples also use aromas that have an aphrodisiacal effect.
Luxury has its own distinctive smell — recall the smell inside a luxurious, expensive car, an exclusive boutique or hotel? The human sense of smell gets overwhelmed easily; after a few minutes, you get used to any smell and stop noticing it, whether it is the yummy smell inside a bakery or the many perfumes in a store, or even the smell of a public urinal! An average human being is able to recognise about 10,000 different smells, and even after a year people can identify smells with 65 per cent accuracy, while visual recall falls to 50 per cent within just three months!
Experts say that any of us can improve our sense of smell with focus and practice. A good nose is important for perfumers and vintners as smell is a critical element in perfumes and wines.
Patrick Suskind says in his acclaimed classic novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, “Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will.”
So do not yet dismiss the nose -- that delight of cartoonists and the central feature of the human face — for it is the repository of the very powerful sense of smell, responsible for much pleasure in life — from food to luxury to sex!

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