What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (34 page)

“Proust was a neuroscientist”
Jonah Lehrer, “The neuroscience of Proust,”
Seed
, May–June 2004, p. 48–51.

brand-conscious titles
S. Chu and J. J. Downes, “Proust nose best: Odors are better cues of autobiographical memory,”
Memory and Cognition
30(2002):511–18; S. Chu and J. J. Downes, “Long live Proust: The odour-cued autobiographical memory bump,”
Cognition
75 (2000):B41–50. For other examples, see F. R. Schab, “Odors and the remembrance of things past,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition
16 (1990):648–55; J. A. Gottfried, A. P. Smith, et al., “Remembrance of odors past: Human olfactory cortex in cross-modal recognition memory,”
Neuron
42 (2004):687–95; A. Parker, H. Ngu, and H. J. Cassaday, “Odour and Proustian memory: Reduction of context-dependent forgetting and multiple forms of memory,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
15 (2001):159–71;S. Chu and J. J. Downes, “Odour-evoked autobiographical memories: Psychological investigations of proustian phenomena,”
Chemical Senses
25(2000):111–16.

“This strange revival of bygone days”
Dan McKenzie,
Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells
(London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1923), p. 50.

Shattuck took a close look
Roger Shattuck,
Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to
In Search of Lost Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

Proust’s sensory imagery
Victor E. Graham,
The Imagery of Proust
(Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 8, 106.

poetry of Shelley and Keats
Mary Grace Caldwell, “A Study of the Sense Epithets of Shelley and Keats,”
Poet Lore
10 (1898):573–79.

“a flood of visual images”
Graham,
The Imagery of Proust.

“I believe that odors”
Poe,
Marginalia
, 1844.

other writers were exploring
Louise Fiske Bryson, “Training the Memory,”
Harper’s Bazaar
, September 1903, p. 824; “Scent and Memory,”
The Spectator
(London), July 11, 1908, pp. 52–53, reprinted in
The Living Age
(Boston), November 14, 1908, pp. 437–39; “magically transported,” Graham,
The Imagery of Proust
, p. 107.

thoroughly psychological
Sherman, “The Redolent World,” p. 319.

“These flashes of memory”
Ellwood Hendrick, “The sense of smell,”
The Atlantic Monthly
, March 1913, pp. 332–37.

“The coincidence is not fortuitous”
Charles Rosen, “Now, Voyager,”
The New York Review of Books
, November 6, 1986, p. 55. According to Rosen, Proust took another writer to task for praising Ramond, specifically for praising this very passage of Ramond’s.

Contemporary French psychology
Théodule Ribot,
La Psychologie des sentiments
(Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896), translated as
The Psychology of the Emotions
(London: Walter Scott Ltd., 1897), ch. 11, “The Memory of Feelings.” For another example, see F. Pillon, “La Mémoire Affective: son Importance Théorique et Pratique,”
Revue Philosophique
51 (February 1901):113–38.

Sometimes, when passing through”
Henri Piéron, “La Question de la Mémoire Affective,”
Revue Philosophique
54 (December 1902):612–15, translation by Laurence Dryer.

“can only be termed ingenuous”
Shattuck,
Proust’s Way
, p. 115.

sinister speculation
Marc A. Weiner, “Zwieback and Madeleine: Creative Recall in Wagner and Proust,”
MLN
95 (1980):679–84.

“The Proustian view”
T. Engen and B. M. Ross, “Long-term memory of odors with and without verbal descriptions,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology
100 (1973):221–27.

“negative experimental results”
J. M. Annett, “Olfactory memory: A case study in cognitive psychology,”
Journal of Psychology
130 (1996):309–19.

observed classic interference effects
H. A. Walk and E. E. Johns, “Interference and facilitation in short-term memory for odors,”
Perception & Psychophysics
36 (1984):508–14;T. L. White, “Olfactory memory: The long and short of it,”
Chemical Senses
23 (1998):433–41.

“the first unequivocal demonstration”
Herz and Schooler, “A naturalistic study,” pp. 21–32.

“we did not find support”
J. Willander and M. Larsson, “Smell your way back to childhood: Autobiographical odor memory,”
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
13 (2006):240–44.

criticized previous studies
S. Chu and J. J. Downes, “Odour-evoked autobiographical memories: Psychological investigations of proustian phenomena,”
Chemical Senses
25 (2000):111–16.

came a quick challenge
J. S. Jellinek, “Proust remembered: Has Proust’s account of odor-cued autobiographical memory recall really been investigated?”
Chemical Senses
29 (2004):455–58.

studies now claim
Chu and Downes, “Proust nose best” Willander and Larsson, “Smell your way back to childhood.”

A Norwegian survey
S. Magnussen, J. Andersson, et al., “What people believe about memory,”
Memory
14 (2006):595–613.

“When I was a boy”
Haydn S. Pearson,
New England Flavor: Memories of a Country Boyhood
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).

“A time like that”
Ben Logan,
The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People
(New York: Viking, 1975).

“I grew up on the Nevada desert”
Donald A. Laird, “Some normal odor effects and associations of psychoanalytic significance,”
Psychoanalytic Review
21 (1934):194–200.

Chapter 11. The Smell Museum

“My collection of semi-used perfumes”
Andy Warhol,
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
(New York: Harvest Books, 1975), p. 151.

“[E]ach work of fiction”
Bernard Benstock, “James Joyce: The olfactory factor,” in
Joycean Occasions,
edited by J. E. Dunleavy, M. J. Friedman, and M. P. Gillespie (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), pp. 138–56.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California”
John Steinbeck,
Cannery Row
(New York: Viking, 1945);
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
(New York: Viking, 1962).

“In the days before Prohibition”
H. L. Mencken,
Happy Days 1880–1892
(New York: Knopf, 1940), p. 236.

“there is a thick, musty smell”
Joseph Mitchell,
McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon
(New York: Pantheon, 1992; reprint of 1943 edition), p. 19.

half of Americans
“Brew a Pot? Latte Nation Thinks Not,”
New York Post
online edition, August 13, 2006.

manure-scented scratch-and-sniff
“Ag Board’s Brochure Is a Real Stinker,”
Patriot-News
, June 17, 2005.

Back in 1931
Gove Hambidge, “Scents that make dollars; The next wave of fragrance?”
World’s Work
60 (August 1931):32–34.

“I turned eight”
Rem Koolhaas, “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis…or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa,” in R. Koolhaas and B. Mau,
S, M, L, XL
(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).

“Now, the smell of the autumn smoke”
Edgar Lee Masters, “Hare Drummer,”
Spoon River Anthology
, 1916.

“[W]e should be hanging on”
Lewis Thomas, “On Smell,” in
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
(New York: Viking, 1983).

composition of prehistoric diets
J. G. Moore, B. K. Krotoszynski, and H. J. O’Neill, “Fecal odorgrams: A method for partial reconstruction of ancient and modern diets,”
Digestive Diseases and Science
29 (1984):907–911.

“Behind the office is a room”
Steinbeck,
Cannery Row,
p. 22.

proved too unpleasant
Author’s interview with Leti Bocanegra, August 30, 2006.

Scented museum exhibits
“‘Smellovision’ Enhances Visit to Smithsonian,”
Los Angeles Times,
November 30, 1967; Martin Whitfield, “Museum Haunted by a Scent of Old Times,”
The Independent
(London), July 12, 1993; “Smells That Sell Not to Be Sniffed At; The T-Rex Model at London’s Natural History Museum,” CNN-Reuters, June 27, 2004; Matthew Tanner, “Satisfying the paying public: The effective interpretation of historic ships and boats,” Third International Conference on the Technical Aspects of the Preservation of Historic Vessels, San Francisco, April 20–23, 1997.

“aromatopia”
Jim Drobnick, “Volatile Architectures,” in B. Miller and M. Ward eds.,
Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos
(Toronto: YYZ Books, 2002).

atomizer historian Tirza True Latimer
Tirza True Latimer,
The Perfume Atomizer: An Object with Atmosphere
(West Chester, PA: Schiffer, 1991), p. 7.

an exhibit honoring Gale W. Matson
Gale W. Matson, “Microcapsules and process of making,” U.S. Patent 3,516,941, issued June 23, 1970; Jack Charbonneau and Keith Relyea, “The technology behind on-page fragrance sampling,”
Drug & Cosmetic Industry
, February 1997, p. 48.

15
scent of burnt cordite
Ad in February 1989 issue of
Armed Forces Journal International
, opposite p. 57.

installation by Alex Sandover
Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 2000.

Sissel Tolaas
Sally McGrane, “The Odor Artist,”
Wired
, April 24, 2007; also “This Art Stinks, and That’s by Design,”
KansasCity.com
/
The Kansas City Star,
February 4, 2007.

“Lewis’s dialectical odours”
Drobnick, “Volatile Architectures.”

“
‘It smells a little like dirty socks’”
“An Aroma Like…OK, OK, Plant Not Totally Foul, But No Bouquet,”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, July 7, 1998.

“Smells are surer than sounds or sights”
Rudyard Kipling,
The Five Nations
(London: Methuen, 1903).

“I saw this Australian trooper”
A. B. “Banjo” Paterson,
Happy Dispatches
(Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934).

three translucent globes AIR—Urban Olfactory Installation
, in SAUMA: Design as Cultural Interface exhibit, World Financial Center, New York, June 20–September 10, 2006.

accompanied a
New York Observer
reporter
Kate Kelly and Elizabeth Manus, “In a Smelly Summer, Our Team of Noses Sniffs up the City,”
New York Observer,
August 9, 1999.

Washington Post
reporter rides along
David Segal, “Eau Dear: Sniffing Out the Big Apple’s Smelliest Spots,”
Washington Post
, August 17, 2006.

“Yes, I admit I’ve taken the subway”
Paris Hilton with Merle Ginsberg,
Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 93.

“I can easily distinguish”
Helen Keller,
Midstream: My Later Life
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), p. 165ff.

“My eyes flew open”
Celeste Bowman, “Going Home for Two,”
Texas Magazine
in the
Houston Chronicle,
May 12, 1996.

part of Baltimore
“You Smell That? An Olfactory-Bulb Tour of the City That Stinks,”
Baltimore City Paper,
September 19, 2001.

“I spent a lot of time”
www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/heather_macdonald.htm

“Seeping in through open windows”
“Scent of a City: Heady Essence of Oranges,”
Los Angeles Times
, February 8, 2001.

Chapter 12. Our Olfactory Destiny

“They were, I now saw”
H. G. Wells,
The War of the Worlds
, 1898.

An informal test in 2006
“Sniffing Out Spoiled Meat,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 12, 2006.

a future in medicine
E. I. Mohamed, R. Linder, et al., “Predicting Type 2 diabetes using an electronic nose-based artificial neural network analysis,”
Diabetes, Nutrition & Metabolism
15 (2002):215–21; P. Dalton, A. Gelperin, and G. Preti, “Volatile metabolic monitoring of glycemic status in diabetes using electronic olfaction,”
Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics
6 (2004):534–44; “What the Nose Knows,”
The Economist
, March 9, 2006.

an entire book on the topic
R. Andrew Russell,
Odour Detection by Mobile Robots
(World Scientific, 1999).

Amy Loutfi
M. Broxvall, S. Coradeschi, et al., “An ecological approach to odour recognition in intelligent environments,”
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA), Orlando, FL, 2006; A. Lofti, “Odour recognition using electronic noses in robotic and intelligent systems,” Ph.D. thesis, Örebro University, Sweden, February 15, 2006.

“in general public use” Kyllo v. United States
(99–8508) 533 U.S. 27 (2001), 190 F.3d 1041, reversed and remanded.

A group in Britain
J. A. Covington, J. W. Gardner, et al., “Towards a truly biomimetic olfactory microsystem: An artificial olfactory mucosa,”
IET Nanobiotechnology
1 (2007):15–21.

shred of the yeast cell membrane
J. M. Vidic, J. Grosclaude, et al., “Quantitative assessment of olfactory receptors activity in immobilized nanosomes: A novel concept for bioelectronic nose,”
Lab Chip
6 (2006):1026–32.

use bacterial cells
J. H. Sung, H. J. Ko, and T. H. Park, “Piezoelectric biosensor using olfactory receptor protein expressed in
Escherichia coli,
”
Biosensors and Bioelectronics
21 (2006): 1981–86; Q. Liu, H. Cai, et al., “Olfactory cell-based biosensor: A first step towards a neurochip of bioelectronic nose,”
Biosensors and Bioelectronics
22 (2006):318–22.