What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (15 page)

Odor-associated symptoms are fertile ground for misinterpretation. If you believe that a particular odor is making you sick, that odor is likely to make you sick even if your original symptoms were caused by something entirely different. Van den Bergh finds that such beliefs better predict odor-induced symptoms than does the person’s actual history of odor exposure. People can be made ill by a mistaken belief about a smell. Believing trumps smelling.

I
N THE DECADE
and a half since the hue and cry in Marin County, many researchers have investigated the MCS/IEI phenomenon, trying to better characterize its symptoms and determine its cause. A review of the large literature on the topic found little evidence that perfume ingredients were the root cause. In fact, it concluded that the toxic-exposure theory of MCS/IEI was dubious: its “hypothesized biological processes and mechanisms are implausible.” At the same time, a growing body of scientific evidence points to a nontoxic explanation. Another review found that a psychogenic theory—the idea that the condition originates in the mind as much as the body—is well supported. MCS/IEI may be a psychogenic illness, with patients suffering from the runaway results of symptom learning and stimulus generalization. What’s happening to people in the real world may reflect the principles that Pam Dalton and Omer Van den Bergh discovered in the laboratory.

The psychological nature of odor aversions has been known for over a century. “Imagination has, besides, a great deal to do with the supposed noxious effect of perfumes,” wrote Eugene Rimmel in
The Book of Perfumes
, in 1871. Rimmel tells of a lady “who
fancied
she could not bear the smell of a rose, and fainted on receiving the visit of a friend who carried one, and yet the fatal flower was only
artificial.
” Contemporary research has confirmed the power of the mind. What we believe about a smell, and the malevolent power we attribute to it, alters our sensory perceptions and our physiological responses. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: we believe that scent can makes us sexy, relaxed, or alert. This is merely the other side of the coin.

The psychogenic hypothesis doesn’t sit well with some IEI patients. They believe their problem is caused by chemicals and nothing else, and they resent any suggestion that some of the problem may be in their heads because it implies their suffering isn’t real. The good news for them, if they will only hear it, is that the psychogenic hypothesis points to a treatment and to the hope of a happier life.

From Sacrament to Sacrilege

Fear of fragrance is one of those currents that flows through society like an underground stream. Fed by a mix of well-meaning sympathy, honest confusion, and alarmist hype, it bubbles to the surface here and there, with ironic results.

you love righteousness and hate wickedness.

Therefore God, your God, has anointed you

with the oil of gladness above your fellows;

your robes are all fragrant with myrrh

and aloes and cassia.

—P
SALMS
45:7

Church members who are wearing scented products, hair sprays, freshly dry-cleaned clothing, or clothing that was cleaned with fabric softeners, or who have been in a smoky room, will significantly contribute to indoor air pollution.

—Accessibility Audit for Churches, A United
Methodist Resource Book about Accessibility

Now, can it be possible that in a handful of centuries the Christian character has fallen away from an imposing heroism that scorned even the stake, the cross, and the axe, to a poor little effeminacy that withers and wilts under an unsavoury smell? We are not prepared to believe so….

—M
ARK
T
WAIN
,
About Smells
(1870)

I Smell Dead People

HARRY
(B
ILLY
C
RYSTAL
): Suppose nothing happens to you. Suppose you live there your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anybody, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts into the hallway.

S
ALLY
(M
EG
R
YAN
): Amanda mentioned you had a dark side.

—
When Harry Met Sally
…(1989)

Harry was definitely on to something. The “New York death” is a staple of tabloid journalism. The basic story is always the same: police respond to a neighbor’s complaint about a foul odor and discover the body of someone who died alone and unnoticed days or even weeks before. What gives these episodes a typical New York edge is the undertone of alienation and impersonality in a city where people literally live on top of each other—you have to rot before anyone notices your absence. The New York death reveals the city at its worst. In the Bronx in 2004, neighbors heard the sounds of a “battle royal” coming from the apartment of an ex-con who abused drugs, alcohol, and women. Nobody intervened. Nobody called the cops. Two days later the building superintendent phoned police “to report a foul odor.” They found the ex-con and a woman dead inside the apartment. Call it the Eau de Kitty Genovese effect.

A New York death can happen anywhere. In Chicago an elderly couple committed suicide with vodka and sleeping pills in a posh Harbor Point Towers apartment. Their bodies were discovered by police only “after residents complained of a foul odor” days later. Near Houston, police found an elderly couple dead in their home “after a neighbor reported a foul odor coming from the house.” They had died several weeks earlier, around the time that Adult Protective Services had visited but left when no one answered the door.

The key elements of the New York death are so ingrained in our national consciousness that they have the potential to create embarrassing misunderstandings. After being acquitted in the slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald Goldman, O. J. Simpson moved from Los Angeles to Florida. In 2000 and 2001 he made the news there for various run-ins with the law. He also began dating an attractive young blond woman named Christie Prody. In January 2002, a next-door neighbor noticed “a foul smell” emanating from Prody’s apartment and realized she had not seen the woman in about a month. She put two and two together and called the Miami police. They too feared the worst, and had firefighters break into the apartment. Inside, they found no sign of Prody, but they did discover the badly decomposed body of her pet cat. The missing-persons unit was notified and Simpson was questioned. When he reached his girlfriend on the phone, with police present, the matter was resolved. Prody had been out of town for a month and a half, and her cat had starved to death.

One story of stinky corpses has taken on mythic proportions. The “body in the bed” urban legend involves motel guests in Las Vegas who complain of a foul odor in their room, only to discover the next morning that they’ve slept in a bed with a corpse hidden in or beneath it. Sadly, there is very little mythical about it, other than its being set in Las Vegas. In the past twenty years, odor complaints by motel guests have led to the discovery of murder victims in Atlantic City, New Jersey; Pasadena, California; Alexandria, Virginia; Mineola, New York; and Kansas City, Missouri. Everywhere, it seems, except Sin City.

A common feature of body-in-the-bed incidents is that the telltale odor doesn’t appear until several days after the murder. A typical case, for example, involved Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, the hit man immortalized in an HBO television documentary. According to crime writer Katherine Ramsland, Kuklinski killed one of his victims in a by-the-hour motel on Route 3 near the Lincoln Tunnel in North Bergen, New Jersey. Kuklinski fed the man a cyanide-laced hamburger, and his accomplice strangled him with a lamp cord for good measure. They hid the body under the bed, where it wasn’t discovered until the fourth couple to rent the room complained of an odor.

Why does it take motel guests so long to recognize the stench for what it is? Part of the answer lies in biology. In the early 1960s, a Clemson University graduate student named Jerry Payne worked out the detailed chronology of bodily decay that is now the basis of crime-scene forensic investigations. (For example, he pioneered the identification of the stages of insect material—eggs, larvae, and adults—to help determine time of death.) In outlining six stages of postmortem decay, Payne did for death what Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did for dying. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are followed by fresh, bloat, active decay, advanced decay, dry decay, and remains.

With the exception of the first, each of Payne’s stages has a characteristic odor profile. Stage two (bloat) begins on the second day postmortem and lasts one or two days, depending on environmental conditions. Gut bacteria produce sulfur dioxide, and the skunklike smell is often mistaken for a natural-gas leak. (This gives rise to an entire subgenre of New York deaths discovered when a landlord calls utility workers to check out a gas leak. Sometimes there is an ironic twist. In the South Bronx in 2002, an apartment building superintendent and a Con Ed worker sniffing for a gas leak found three people bound and stabbed to death. The telltale gas smell was, in fact, caused by gas. The killers had left the oven open and turned on, and votive candles burning in the living room, hoping that an explosion would obliterate evidence of their crime.)

Active decay—stage three—brings the intense stench of putrefaction. Body tissues liquefy and ferment, giving off a paradoxically sweet smell (and drawing a cheerier crowd of insects such as bees and butterflies). By day six (advanced decay) the breakdown of amino acids produces the accurately named chemicals cadaverine and putrescine, and the superoffensive smell of rot is replaced by an ammonia-like scent. (Cadaverine is sometimes found in bad breath.) Dry decay, which begins about a week postmortem, has a smell reminiscent of “wet fur and old leather.” The final stage, like the first, is nearly odorless. All that’s left are teeth, bones, and hair.

With this chronology of stench in mind, we can understand why it takes days before motel guests complain. Lynn Nakamura and her brother Dennis Wakabayashi checked into a Travelodge in Pasadena, California, in July 1996. They didn’t like the first room they were given, and when the next one proved to have an off-putting odor, they were reluctant to ask for yet another. Two days after they checked out, the motel manager found the body of a murdered young woman hidden in the wooden platform under a twin bed. How could people picky enough to ask for a new room tolerate the smell of death? Easy: they rationalized the problem away. Dennis Wakabayashi said that, to him, the room “smelled like kim chee.”

A
DECOMPOSING VICTIM
is a special challenge for the murderer who lives at the scene of the crime. Most perps fold after a couple of days. From the
New York Daily News
: “A 65-year-old woman was shot dead by her husband and left to rot in the basement of their Staten Island home for two days, police sources said yesterday. The slain woman’s 67-year-old husband called cops yesterday because the stench of her decomposing corpse became unbearable.” In Foley, Alabama, a thirty-nine-year-old mentally handicapped man died of malnutrition after being kept in a lightless room for ten years by his mother and stepfather. They left his body there for several days, until they could no longer tolerate the smell, at which point they called 911 and were charged with murder.

Some perps are made of tougher stuff. In Tucson, Arizona, a man was found living in an apartment with a the body of a woman who had been dead for almost two years. Police investigated after (yes, you guessed it) “neighbors complained of a foul odor.” The man had been paying the rent with the dead woman’s checkbook. He told a nosy maintenance man that the odor came from food that had spoiled during a power outage. This guy should be nominated for a Norman Bates Award. Another nominee might be the woman found wandering incoherently inside a Wal-Mart store in Palm Coast, Florida. Sheriff’s deputies found her after shoppers complained about a foul odor coming from a car in the parking lot. She and her sixty-five-year-old mother had been on a road trip from Covington, Oklahoma. According to the medical examiner, the mother had died about five days earlier, but the woman had kept driving.

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

—W
ALLACE
S
TEVENS
,
“The Pure Good of Theory”

E
ARLY 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’t moan about our small color vocabulary. In both cases, regular people have enough words and context to get the job done.

The Three Traits of Olfactory Genius

It’s a depressing fact that nearly every analysis of putting smells into words—by scientists and pundits alike—stresses weakness and incapacity. The conventional wisdom is oddly anti-intellectual: it seems to deny smell a place in the life of the mind and dismiss its contribution to art and literature.

Yet some writers and artists manage to create works of art in which we recognize our olfactory experience. They invest smells with meaning. They turn an odor into a symbol, a clue to a character’s personality, or the atmosphere of a time and place. What do these artists have that the rest of us do not?

I’d like to challenge my academic friends to stop giving random odors to college sophomores in the psychology lab, and start observing odor fluency where it happens naturally—in creative people actively engaged with smell. We need to take a fresh look at how they express olfactory experience in their finished work and at the role of smell in the act of creation. As a first step toward characterizing olfactory genius, we can look for the psychological traits of the olfactively minded artist. I’ll kick things off by proposing three of them: awareness, empathy, and imagination.

Let’s begin with awareness. Charles Darwin was a great field biologist because he was a careful observer. He was also attuned to smell. Both talents are in evidence in this passage where he describes animal musk: “The rank effluvium of the male goat is well known, and that of certain male deer is wonderfully strong and persistent. On the banks of the Plata I have perceived the whole air tainted with the odour of the male
Cervus campestris,
at the distance of half a mile to leeward of a herd; and a silk handkerchief, in which I carried home a skin, though repeatedly used and washed, retained, when first unfolded, traces of the odour for one year and seven months.” For Darwin, smell was a recordable fact like time, place, and species.

Behavioral clues help us identify the odor-aware person. In Portugal years ago, I was eating dinner at a
pousada
, an old castle refitted into an elegant restaurant and hotel. At the next table was a tall, elderly American, his wife, and a Portuguese gentleman. The tall fellow looked familiar; with a bit of eavesdropping I realized it was John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and diplomat. At the end of the evening Galbraith followed his guests from the dining room. He paused before a large bouquet of red roses near the door, stooped down, and took a long, contemplative sniff. Here was a guy of impressive achievement who actually did stop to smell the roses.

To portray scent in a believable way and have it resonate emotionally, an artist must be alive to smells in the real world. The odor-aware artist is by nature a scent seeker who finds the smells of things, places, and people intrinsically fascinating. He thinks in smells and finds them to be distinct and almost palpable, not wispy and transparent.

To be odor-aware, a person needs only an adequate nose, not a supersensitive one. Emile Zola, the nineteenth-century French writer, is a case in point. His novels were known for their abundant references to smell. Late in life he agreed to be examined by a panel of physicians and psychologists eager to trace creative genius to “organic” factors. Among other things, they did a thorough work-up of his sense of smell. It turned out that Zola’s sensitivity was somewhat below average, but not bad for someone in his mid-fifties. Despite his relatively dull nose, his sense of smell was quite refined—he liked to compare and analyze odors, and did so “with a confidence that always astonished his followers.” Zola’s memory for odors was especially good, and he was able to bring them to mind more vividly than colors or shapes. The investigating panel concluded that Zola’s fictional smells were more the result of a supple olfactory imagination than of nose-skills as such.

True odor awareness is probably not very common. We all know people who are indifferent to scent; smells don’t grab them emotionally or intellectually. They don’t give a damn what their dish detergent smells like, nor do they spend money on perfume or cologne. According to a consumer survey, 23 percent of the population is “apathetic” about perfume and doesn’t buy much. At the other end of the spectrum is the 11 percent of the population who are “fragrance fanatics.” They own a large wardrobe of scents, which they wear according to season and mood. Let’s assume for the moment that artistic talent and olfactory awareness are statistically unrelated. Based on the survey results, we would expect about a quarter of all artists to be indifferent to smell and therefore unlikely to use it in their work. Likewise, only one artist in ten will be a scent-head.

Odor awareness by itself doesn’t make one an olfactive genius. Consider the short, messy life of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain. According to the critic Tom Appelo, Cobain’s personal journals were riddled with scent images: the lingering
Obsession
of a girlfriend, for example, or Courtney Love’s perfume on his pillow. The biographer Charles Cross thinks Cobain was preoccupied with smell. His favorite book was Süskind’s
Perfume: The Story of a Murder,
which he read twice. (One wonders whether the hero’s suicide fascinated him as much as the smell angle.) However strong his personal fascination with scent, there is little to show for it in his music. The Nirvana anthem
Smells Like Teen Spirit
is an exception. It was inspired by an incident in which friends taunted Cobain about smelling like his girlfriend’s deodorant. Kurt Cobain may have been a scent-head, but that didn’t make him an olfactive artist.

T
HE SECOND TRAIT
of olfactive creative genius is empathy: a feel for how other people experience smell and respond to it. One might think perfumers are good at this, but it is not necessarily so. The perfumer works in regal isolation. Marketers enter on bended knee with the latest trend forecast, focus-group summary, and consumer test data. A perfumer seldom meets his public. On the other hand, Eric Berghammer revels in his public. He is creating an entirely new artistic medium from scent; he is the world’s first Aroma Jockey. This young Dutch artist, who goes by the stage name Odo7, has been “live-scenting” clubs, music venues, and commercial events all over Europe. His tools are simple: braziers and hot-water baths to get the scent into the air, and fans to push it into the audience. In a dance club, Odo7 synchronizes his performance to the DJ’s music selections in sets that can last up to two and a half hours. His on-the-job experience makes him an expert in olfactory empathy: from his stage platform he observes how the crowd reacts and he can change the vibe on the dance floor at will. Even in this emotion-laden setting he finds ways to play on smell meaning. He can get laughs from a crowd by wafting baby-powder scent during a heavymetal tune. Originally a graphic designer and illustrator, Odo7 has shifted paradigms completely. He now translates mood and meaning into scent instead of images. One admires his brass: perfumers would never dare to perform in public.

T
HE THIRD TRAIT
of olfactive genius is a well-developed olfactory imagination. Imagination lets the smell-minded artist translate between the senses and invent new ways for scent to speak to the mind and the emotions.

At the core of olfactory imagination is skill at mental imagery. We can bring to mind an odor the same way we imagine a visual scene. With my colleagues Sarah Kemp and Melissa Crouch, I found a way to measure this ability. We translated a well-validated test of visual mental imagery into olfactory terms. Instead of imagining a specific scene (a lake in the woods, for example) and rating how vivid it appeared in your mind’s eye, we asked people to think of an odor (a barbecue, for example) and rate its mental vividness. Compared with civilians, perfumers and other fragrance professionals had more vivid smell imagery, but the same degree of visual imagery. Other researchers have used our test to show that olfactory imagery ability is linked to superior odor perception. It is likely that similar brain areas underlie olfactory imagination and real perception.

A
FTER IMAGINING
an olfactory effect, the artist has to create it for the public to experience. The stage has always been a favorite experimental playground for the olfactively minded artist. The innovative American director and stage designer David Belasco was an early adopter of olfactory special effects. In 1897 he directed a play set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His staging impressed the
New York Times
: “The senses of sight, hearing, and smell are violently appealed to for the sake of creating an illusion; for the perfume of Chinese punk fills the theatre and the music is as Chinese as possible.” The critic for the
New York Journal
didn’t buy it: “The entertainment last night began with small whiffs of sickening, nauseating odor that was burned for atmospheric and not for seweristic reasons…. The theatre was bathed in this hideous tinkative odor of incense, and during the long overture, you sat there getting fainter and fainter.”

Belasco was not discouraged. In 1912 he created a detailed stage replica of a Child’s Restaurant (a then-famous New York chain), complete with a working stovetop on which the restaurant’s specialty pancakes were prepared during the show. For a melodrama set in a forest of the Canadian Northwest, he strewed pine needles on the stage floor. Aroma was released as the actors crushed them underfoot.

Theatrical scent today rarely ventures beyond Belasco-style realism. Incense and cooking food are popular effects, but nonliteral atmospheric scents are rare. The campy use of smell, as when Britain’s National Opera handed out scratch-and-sniff cards before a performance of
Love for Three Oranges,
leads some directors to avoid odor for fear of wallowing in kitsch. Aroma design remains an intriguing possibility for the theatre; it can be unique or as trite as any other aspect of staging.

The husband-and-wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames created some of the most beautiful (if uncomfortable) pieces of furniture in the twentieth century. Less well known is that they were pioneers of olfactory multimedia. In 1952 they created a show about “communication” for the University of Georgia.
Time
magazine’s William Howland called it “one of the most exciting things I have seen, heard and smelled in many years.” The show used three slide projectors, two tape recorders, a movie with its own soundtrack, and “a collection of bottled synthetic odors that were to be fed into the auditorium during the show through the air-conditioning ducts.” Charles Eames wanted to overstimulate the audience: “We used a lot of sound, sometimes carried to a very high volume so you would actually feel the vibrations. So in the sense that we were introducing sounds, smells, and a different kind of imagery, we were introducing multimedia. We did it because we wanted to heighten awareness.” Eames liked the results: “The smells were quite effective. They did two things: they came on cue, and they heightened the illusion. It was quite interesting because in some scenes that didn’t have smell cues, but only smell suggestions in the script, a few people felt they had smelled things—for example, the oil in the machinery.” Edwin E. Slosson would have been proud; if you cue them with sights and sounds, the audience will create the smells in their own heads.