Several years ago, the sensory psychologist Avery Gilbert wrote a blog post on the subject of body odor in the erotic romance novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E. L. James. The book, he observed, is liberally scented. At one point, its male protagonist, Christian Grey, is said to be redolent of “freshly laundered linen and some expensive body wash,” which prompts its female protagonist, Anastasia Steele, to announce, “I want to breathe this elixir for eternity.” Ana’s aroma is equally enticing, as Christian makes clear on several occasions: “You smell so good”; “You smell divine”; “Do you know how intoxicating you smell, Miss Steele?” Gilbert concluded that Ana, unlike Christian, smells good “in a completely banal, non-specific sort of way.”
When it comes to the vocabulary of sense, in bodice rippers and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, smell is at a significant disadvantage; nonspecificity is commonplace. A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of in_scent_?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
Olfaction experts each have their pet theories as to why our scent lexicon is so lacking. Jonathan Reinarz blames the lingering effects of the Enlightenment, which, he says, placed a special emphasis on vision. Jay Gottfried, who is something of a nasal prodigy—he once guessed, on the basis of perfume residue, that one of his grad students had gotten back together with an ex-girlfriend—blames physiology. Whereas visual information is subject to elaborate processing in many areas of the brain, his research suggests, odor information is parsed in a much less intricate way, notably by the limbic system, which is associated with emotion and memory formation. This area, Gottfried said, takes “a more crude and unpolished approach to the process of naming,” and the brain’s language centers can have trouble making use of such unrefined input. Meanwhile, Donald A. Wilson, a neuroscientist at New York University School of Medicine, blames biases acquired in childhood. “When you’re sitting there with your child, saying, ‘Here’s a ball, that was the sound of a dog barking, a fire truck just went by, did you hear that?,’ you’re labelling visual and auditory objects all the time,” he said. “Other than, ‘Ooh, there’s a poopy diaper,’ it’s really rare for people to do that same sort of training with kids with odors.” (Moreover, he said, olfaction is easily manipulated. He sometimes gives his undergraduates a whiff of isovaleric acid, which, depending on how he identifies it, smells to them either of Parmesan cheese or of vomit.)
But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
The Jahai, according to Majid and Burenhult, have a “preoccupation with odor.” In English, smells are often described in terms of the things that emit them (“chocolaty”) rather than in terms of their inherent, abstract qualities (“musty”). In Jahai, however, there are about a dozen abstract words in common use for distinct scents, such as the one that emanates from stale rice, mushrooms, cooked cabbage, and certain species of hornbill (yes, the bird). Majid couldn’t tell me for sure whether the Jahai facility with odor was the result of culture, physiology, or environment, but she suggested that their surroundings may play a significant role. When visiting the Jahai, Majid noticed a rich smellscape—heady wafts from flowers and pungent elephant dung. The thick jungle, she said, seemed to render vision less important. “You can have viewpoints and places where you get vistas, but the sensory input is really quite different, so then things like smell—and hearing, even—become much more relevant.”
The first time I spoke with Jay Gottfried, he mentioned that, owing to his personal and professional interest in smell, he is attuned to descriptions of it in literature. He proposed that Michael Chabon, unlike many other modern authors—but in tandem, perhaps, with E. L. James—pays particular and refreshing attention to odor. In the case of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” Chabon’s third novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001, scent turns out to have been foundational. The idea for the book, Chabon told me, came from his Proustian experience of opening a box of comic books that had been taped shut fifteen years earlier. He was hit with the aroma of moldering paper—it brought back his childhood, his father, New York. “It was such a powerful olfactory experience that my response was, ‘I’ve got to write about this,’ ” he told me.
Chabon allowed that it can be hard to put scent into words. But the rewards, he said, are great. One of the very things that seem to make smell so difficult to talk about—the fact that it is bound up with emotion—is what can make it so powerful when skillfully evoked. Chabon gave the example of Clay’s mother, who makes her first impression on the reader’s nose: “The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.” Chabon had written the line, he said, imagining that it might invoke cumin, coriander, or cloves, along with a more familiar scent from the reader’s school days. “If you push all those things together, maybe then you get a sense of what this woman’s armpits smell like,” he said. “And, if you get a sense of what her armpits smell like, then maybe you’ll be convinced she’s real.”
