Perfume

Excerpt

Perfume qualities are described in musical metaphors not solely because of the aesthetic relationship between perfume and music but because there are so few specific words dedicated to olfactory experience. Anthropologists have found that in all known languages, there are fewer words that refer explicitly to our experience of smells than there are for any other sensation (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994). In English, aromatic, fragrant, pungent, redolent, and stinky exhaust the list of adjectives that specifically describe olfactory stimuli and nothing else. More common terms used to describe odors, like floral or fruity, are references to the odor-producing objects (flowers and fruits), not the odors themselves. We also borrow terms from other senses; chocolate smells sweet, grass smells green, and so on (Herz 2005, 2008).

Various possibilities explain why our sense of smell and language are so disconnected. First, unlike other sensory systems, olfactory information does not need to be integrated in the thalamus prior to processing in the cortex, and it is argued that the thalamus has relevance for language. Second, a large body of evidence indicates that the majority of olfactory processing occurs in the right hemisphere of the brain, whereas language processing is known to be dominated by the left hemisphere (see Royet and Plailly 2004, for review). It has also been suggested that odors are hard to name because of competition between odor and language processing for cognitive resources that share the same neural substrates (Lorig 1999). This latter theory is supported by a magnetoen-cephalographic study which showed that the presence of an odor altered the semantic processing of words and degraded word encoding, but did not influence nonsemantic processing (Walla et al. 2003).