What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [60]
In my opinion, the Edgar Allan Poe Award for the most macabre tale of bodily decay goes to Aron Ralston, the young hiker whose arm got wedged by a boulder as he was climbing a rock face. Stuck out in the wilderness, Ralston could do nothing as his injured limb turned gangrenous, and he had the mind-boggling experience of smelling the rotting of his own flesh. He solved the dilemma by self-amputating the arm, and happily lived to tell the tale.
CHAPTER 7
The Olfactory Imagination
It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self
—WALLACE STEVENS,
“The Pure Good of Theory”
EARLY IN MY CAREER, I WANTED TO EXPLORE THE psychology of smell, so I decided to do a free-association experiment. The test design was simple: have someone sniff from a squeeze bottle and say the first thing that comes to mind. My main concern in planning the experiment was data reduction—how to record, transcribe, and code the expected torrent of words. I envisioned a panel of judges who would rate the transcripts for emotional content and imagery. I needn’t have worried. When given a lemon odor, most people told me, “It smells like lemon.” Any particular kind of lemon? “Not really. Just…lemon.”
So much for the free-association approach. In my naive enthusiasm, I had underestimated the Verbal Barrier. The average person becomes tongue-tied when trying to describe a smell. The reason for this, according to a variety of pundits, is that we have a limited vocabulary for smells. We could describe them better if only we had more words for them. As an explanation, this one is pretty weak. Tar, fish, grapefruit—every smelly thing in the world is a potential adjective. Add to these the names of brands with iconic scents: Play-Doh, Vicks VapoRub, Dubble Bubble, and WD-40. Clearly, there are plenty of words for smell. This means that the Verbal Barrier is not a vocabulary problem, it’s a cognitive problem. The words are there, but we have a hard time getting to them.
Psychologists have a name for this slipping of the mental gears: they call it the “tip-of-the-nose” phenomenon. You recognize an odor but can’t come up with its name. Tip-of-the-nose happens in real life, but not that often. We are rarely forced to name a random odor with no practice, no context, no prompting, and no multiple-choice options. Yet that is precisely what sensory psychologists ask people to do all the time. Not surprisingly, scores on laboratory tests of stone-cold odor naming are abysmally low. (Researchers give credit for “near misses,” such as calling strawberry raspberry, but easy grading doesn’t change the overall result.)
Putting a name to a random odor is tough, but the annoying thing about the tip-of-the-nose phenomenon is that you know you know the name of the odor. According to the sensory psychologists Harry Lawless and Trygg Engen, the problem is a failure to retrieve verbal information that would lead you to the name. A person trapped in this state of suspended olfaction can name a similar odor about half of the time, but can’t think of a word with similar meaning to the odor name. Lawless and Engen could knock loose the correct name in 70 percent of cases by reading the person a definition of the smelly substance. Access to semantic information breaks the tip-of-the-nose spell.
I’m convinced that we make too much of our poor ability to describe smells. The grim reports come from psychology labs, where smells are stripped of context, put in bottles, and given code numbers. Think how hard it would be to verbally describe colors under similar conditions. Interior decorators have fifty-seven words for white, while the rest of us get by with “bright white” and “off-white.” Yet for some reason commentators don