What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (22 page)

Among some social critics, scented ads inspire violent imagery; words like “assault” and “bombardment” get thrown around. To the journalist Emma Cook, consumers are helpless victims: “Whereas you can exercise the choice to stop listening or watching, physically you can’t help smelling things.” Artificial scents put A. S. Byatt, the English novelist, into a foul mood: “I think we are bringing up a generation…desensitised by constant loud and garish smells.” If man-made scents were sounds, “they would be a cacophony.” Byatt is a formidable intellectual who has deconstructed the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge and lectured on American literature at University College London. How does she account for the inexplicable desire of the masses for scented products? She blames advertising.

“The television screen shows branches and violets. It shows pine forests and sheets of falling white water ending in curls of clean, shining spray. It shows meadows full of buttercups and pine forests full of mystery and crisp needles. It is telling you—enticing you—to re-create these atmospheres in your own home with air fresheners, with aerosol sprays of scented furniture polish, with…” You get the drift.

Byatt objects on ethical grounds: “The smells that have invaded our modern lives are neither the good smells nor the bad smells, but the guilty, masking smells. Smells that we use to cover human smells.” Apparently perfumes are deceitful because they hide our true primate stinkiness.

Unsurprisingly, Byatt’s fiction is riddled with morbid smells. Here’s a typical example: “It was not a clean train—the upholstery of their carriage had the dank smell of unwashed trousers.” Elsewhere she describes a husband’s “evil-smelling breath full of brandy and stale smoke.” Occasionally she outdoes herself: “It was a liquid smell of putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.” Her preoccupation with unwashed trousers gives the impression of a nose tuned to the Dark Side. She recoils from perfume like the Wicked Witch from the fire bucket. Hide the
Giorgio
or she’ll send the flying monkeys after you.

Perhaps an elderly British novelist is entitled to get cranky about perfume, but why should a thirtysomething Internet columnist lose it over an air freshener? That’s what happened when Mark Morford, of the
San Francisco Chronicle’s
SFGate.com
website, teed off on Procter & Gamble’s ScentStories aroma player:

What vile marketing decision was made, and by whom, that said we must now progress from static mute little tabletop chemical-bomb air fresheners to more sinister, electronically activated Glade plug-in thingies with silly little built-in fans to full-fledged toaster-size appliances that require huge amounts of plastic and massive marketing campaigns and full AC power and interchangeable chemical-soaked disks?

It’s not just the ever-grander technology that makes Morford hot under the collar—it’s the implied message contained in the aroma:

This is the marketing strategy: each disc is apparently designed to somehow lift you out of your sanitized tract-home suburban kids-’n’-dogs-’n’-minivans dystopia and transport you straight to the Misty Mountains or the sultry Bahamas or the Brazilian rain forest or whatever.

What unhinges Morford and others like him isn’t a particular smell, it’s the marketing of smell. Consumerism, mass consumption, and the excesses of the free market as embodied by a scent-delivery contraption really put his nose out of joint.

The psychoanalysts G. G. Wayne and A. A. Clinco offered a related criticism in 1959: “What was once a vital instrument for survival—directing and warning primitive man—has now deteriorated to an instrument for irrelevant and obtuse titillation through the double-jointed vocabulary of advertising.” Emma Cook makes a similar claim: “Until recently, appealing to our sense of smell was relatively virgin territory for marketeers and manufacturers.” (Cook missed the fact that her countryman Eugene Rimmel was marketing up a scented storm in the 1860s.) Common to all these critics is the notion that things were better in the good old days. They long for the unscented state of nature that existed before air fresheners, television, and perfume. Their olfactory Eden ended the moment one cavewoman asked another, “What are you wearing?” and traded a mastodon steak for a handful of aromatic resin. The fact is that millions of people enjoy giving their homes a pleasant scent, and, as in other areas of everyday life, they are willing to pay for convenience and a modest amount of fantasy.

I had a close encounter with anticapitalist scent-bashing a few years ago, when I was among a group of experts invited by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to help the National Museum of Natural History plan a large traveling exhibit on the science and history of smell. Along with curators, exhibit designers, and high-ranking staff members, we spent the day in the museum’s dark-paneled boardroom that looks out on Constitution Avenue and the IRS building. It was a typical institutional brainstorming session, with lots of cringe-inducing “exercises” meant to sharpen our creativity. One of these involved free association with pictures clipped from magazines. We took turns arranging them in domino fashion on the floor and afterward tried to interpret the pattern. The group decided the pictures fell into two categories: “human” and “environment.” (I was puzzled; aren’t humans part of the environment?) Then a senior curator reached down and removed an Estée Lauder soap ad from the arrangement; she felt it didn’t belong to either category. I grew more puzzled.

For the next exercise, we broke into working groups. The soapsnatcher and I were assigned to the same group. Our task was to think of exhibit topics that would interest teenage visitors. With no prompting, she launched into a heated speech: the exhibit should make teens aware of how companies use smell to influence them. Others in the group gently challenged her, but she wouldn’t relent. Her mission was to alert teens to the sinister corporate conspiracy behind fragrance advertising. I pointed out that subliminal advertising was largely a crock, but still she wouldn’t let go. She was determined to stop America’s youth from being turned into scent-controlled mall zombies. Finally, I reminded her that the Smithsonian was planning to fund the show with donations from corporate sponsors, and that these folks might be reluctant to fork over three million dollars for the privilege of having their business smeared.

The Smithsonian never did get around to doing a smell exhibition.

F
OR EVERY ANTAGONIST
of scent marketing there are a dozen crazily optimistic Martin Lindstroms preaching the benefits of sensory branding and experimenting with new ways of appealing to consumers through the nose. It’s true that scent marketing has been promoted many times by futurologists of the past—it’s a field whose promise has yet to be fulfilled. But the same can be said of Internet advertising or other new frontiers. The strategies of scent marketing are still evolving, but its technology has matured rapidly. All sorts of scent-delivery devices are available today, ranging from industrial-scale diffusers that cover an entire Wal-Mart to point-of-sale displays that blow a scented kiss at individual customers. There are passively activated devices that spritz as you walk past, and interactive kiosks that immerse you in a multisensory audio-visual-olfactory experience. Marketers will soon learn the best ways to put this hardware to use.

There is another reason to believe the field has a bright future. We are now raising a generation of scent-centric young consumers. Unilever’s Axe body spray is a major hit: walk past any high school and smell for yourself. Aromatherapy has evolved from a quasiclinical folk practice to mainstream product positioning; no college dorm room is complete without an array of scented candles. Students use them for studying, for chilling, and for, well, you know. So scent-aware is this generation that Procter & Gamble’s Febreze odor eliminator is equally popular—and often seen in the same dorm rooms. These are the consumers who will put scent marketing on the map.

CHAPTER 10

Recovered Memories

To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest—smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of newmown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss.

—H
ENRY
A
DAMS,
The Education of Henry Adams:
An Autobiography
(1918)

W
HO HAS NOT ENCOUNTERED A LONG-FORGOTTEN
odor that brings to mind suddenly, and with great clarity, a moment from the past? It leaves one marveling at the potency—and persistence—of smell memory. It’s an experience people are eager to share with me. A compilation of their stories would make a great autobiography of the nation’s collective nose. The American essayist Ellen Burns Sherman had a similar idea: “Were they all collected in a volume, what a golden treasury of poetry and romance would be the thousand records, grave, sweet and tender, which are evoked from every one’s past by the swift coupling line of olfactory association.”

Conventional wisdom credits the French novelist Marcel Proust with the first literary description of the link between smell and memory. His well-known account appears in the opening pages of his multivolume novel
Remembrance of Things Past
(1913), when the scent of a madeleine dipped in tea awakens childhood memories for the narrator, Marcel. A madeleine is a scallop-shaped sponge cookie—a bite-sized Hostess Twinkie without the filling, and without much flavor. That Proust constructed a 3,000-page story around it is, by itself, one measure of his literary genius.

The madeleine episode has become a cultural touchstone for the smell-memory experience. The poet Diane Ackerman calls him “that voluptuary of smell” and a “great blazer of scent trails through the wilderness of luxury and memory.” The psychologist Rachel Herz claims, “Proust may have been prescient in noting the relationship between olfaction and the phenomenological experience of reliving emotions of the past.” The science essayist Jonah Lehrer believes Proust revealed “basic truths” about memory, specifically that it “has a unique relationship” with the sense of smell. Lehrer credits the novelist with arriving at these truths before scientists did; in fact, he says “Proust was a neuroscientist.”

Psychologists have made Proust their mascot for smell memory. Psychology journals are full of brand-conscious titles like “Proust nose best: Odors are better cues of autobiographical memory” and “Odors and the remembrance of things past.” One has to admire how thoroughly Proust cornered this market—no other novelist has a branch of science named after him. Skepticism being one of the chief values of science, this sort of cheerleading makes one wonder whether Proust’s insights justify the hero worship. Was he really the first writer to note a link between smell and memory? Did he really foreshadow modern neuroscience? To find the answers, we need to look more closely at Proust’s original account.

T
HE ICONIC MADELEINE
passage was published in 1913 in
Swann’s Way,
the first installment of
Remembrance of Things Past.
A grown Marcel is served tea and a madeleine by his mother. When he lifts a spoonful of tea and cookie to his lips, he shudders and feels an “all-powerful joy”: “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.” Marcel is overwhelmed by a nonspecific sense of familiarity. The smell and taste of the madeleine have something to do with it, but are not enough to evoke a specific memory. Marcel struggles to pinpoint the source of his déjà-smell. He tastes the madeleine again, plugs his ears, and tries to relive the initial experience. Finally, after two pages of strenuous effort, it comes back to him. When he was a child, his aunt Léonie would give him, on Sunday mornings, a piece of madeleine dipped in her tea.

Proust’s struggle with the soggy madeleine is distinctly
not
the way most people experience odor-evoked memory. For most of us, these recollections spring to mind easily. We experience Sherman’s “swift coupling line of olfactory association,” not a prolonged, constipated mental effort. The smell scholar Dan McKenzie captures the feeling of effortlessness: “This strange revival of bygone days by olfaction is…automatic. It is most clearly and completely to be realised when the inciting odour comes upon us unawares, and then as in a dream the whole of the long-forgotten incident is displayed, even although it may have been an incident in which the odour itself was not specially obtrusive.”

Here is another remarkable thing about the madeleine episode: it is utterly devoid of sensory description. Across four pages of text, Proust, that “voluptuary of smell,” provides not a single adjective of smell or taste, not a word about the flavor of the cookie or tea. This is hard to square with his reputation as the sensual bard of scent. Outside of psychology, in fact, the experts are more impressed with his visual imagery. The literary scholar Roger Shattuck, for example, thinks that Proust’s dominant mode of description is visual. Shattuck took a close look at the eruptions of involuntary memory that Proust called reminiscences or resurrections (
moments bienheureux
). Of eleven examples in the entire novel, only two are triggered by smell, the madeleine incident being one of them.

Victor Graham is another scholar who finds that Proust’s sensory imagery is largely visual. Graham indexed all 4,578 sensory impressions in the novel and found that 62 percent were visual. Smell and taste together accounted for less than 1 percent. This seems shockingly low, but it is on a par with other writers. In 1898 an obsessive psychologist named Mary Grace Caldwell tabulated every sensory adjective in the poetry of Shelley and Keats. She found that visual descriptors predominated: 79.9 percent for Shelley, 73.7 percent for Keats. Smell barely registered: 1.8 percent for Shelley and 2.7 percent for Keats.

Despite his reputation, Diane Ackerman’s “great blazer of scent trails” was no more nasal than the next guy; nor did he write about smells very well. As Graham pointed out, Proust liked involuntary memories because they called forth “a flood of visual images” and emotions, but the flood contained very little aroma. Proust’s trademark as a writer was to observe the recovery of a memory in excruciating detail, though after 3,000 pages it’s not clear whether Marcel even liked the taste of madeleines. He was more interested in the process of introspection than in the smells it dredged up.

If Proust’s reputation for psychological accuracy is questionable, what about the common assumption that he was the first author to recognize a powerful link between scent and memory? The record is clear, and it does not favor Proust. In American literature the memory-evoking power of smell was a commonplace observation long before
Swann’s Way.
Sixty-nine years earlier, for example, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “I believe that odors have an altogether idiosyncratic force, in affecting us through association; a force differing
essentially
from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight, or the hearing.”

In 1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed the same idea in
The House of the Seven Gables
: “‘Ah!—let me see!—let me hold it!’ cried the guest, eagerly seizing the flower, which by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought innumerable associations along with the fragrance it exhaled.”

In 1858 Oliver Wendell Holmes called attention to odor memory in his collection of essays
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
: “Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel.” Holmes illustrated his observation with an example from his own life. It’s a sensory rhapsody of childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sometime before 1825:

Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses.

Holmes was a practicing physician as well as a writer. From his medical training he was well aware of the neuroanatomical basis of odor perception, and he had the Autocrat himself discuss it:

There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve—so my friend, the Professor, tells me—is the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly, the olfactory “nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes.

The Professor contrasts this with the wiring of the gustatory system to explain why smell has a powerful link to memory but taste does not. Holmes’s understanding of brain function is correct and modern—and it was written fifty-five years before
Swann’s Way.

While Proust was working on his novel, other writers were exploring the smell-memory connection. In 1903 the American physician Louise Fiske Bryson wrote, in
Harper’s Bazaar,
“An odor, a perfume, will serve to recall bright scenes of other days with a vividness that is almost a miracle.” In 1908
The Spectator
published the essay “Scent and Memory,” which used the image of a magic-carpet ride to describe how a sudden scent makes “miles of distance and decades of years vanish.” Five years later Proust likened smell memory to being magically transported by a genie from the Arabian Nights.

Ellen Burns Sherman’s thoroughly psychological account of odor memory was published in 1910, three years before
Swann’s Way.
She described how an emotional moment woven into a man’s memory along with the scent of his lover’s perfume is brought to mind decades later when he catches “an infinitesimal whiff of the fragrance.” Sherman says the former scene appears instantaneously, as if with “the turn of an electrical switch.” In 1913 the American popular science writer Ellwood Hendrick, writing in
The Atlantic Monthly,
said, “These flashes of memory aided by smell are wonderful. Through smell we achieve a sense of the past.”

Clearly, the subject of scent and recovered memory was very much in the air during the first years of the twentieth century. Proust shared this fascination and gave it his characteristic introspective literary treatment. For anyone not wearing Proust goggles, however, he was obviously not the first author to anticipate the discoveries of modern neuroscience.

H
OW SECURE IS
Proust’s reputation as an olfactory innovator, if all these Yankees were saying the same thing years earlier? Perhaps he was the first French author to capture the phenomenon? Ah,
mais non.
The French author Louis-François Ramond de Carbonnières (1755–1827) was well known in Proust’s day. In his most famous work,
Travels in the Pyrenees,
he described his descent from a mountaintop glacier on the border between France and Spain. He became intoxicated with the rustic smells of newly mown hay and flowering linden trees. As night fell, he tried to account for “the sweet and voluptuous sensation” that came upon him with such involuntary insistence. “There is something mysterious in odors which powerfully awaken the remembrance of the past…. The odor of a violetrestores to the soul enjoyments of many springtimes.” This has a Proustian ring to it, and for good reason. As the historian and critic Charles Rosen points out, “The coincidence is not fortuitous: Proust knew this page of Ramond.” It was anthologized in French high school textbooks until very late in the nineteenth century.

Contemporary French psychology is another possible source of Proustian insight. Introspection was the research technique of choice—studies were done with one or two subjects trained to report their mental experience in precise detail. This emphasis on self-observed mental processing, of narrating one’s inward gaze, is similar to Proust’s “modernist” literary style. Théodule Ribot was the founder of modern scientific psychology in France; his 1896 book on the psychology of the emotions included a chapter on olfactory memory, which had been published earlier in the widely read
Revue Philosophique.
Ribot discussed such “Proustian” matters as odor memory, mental imagery for smell and taste, smell dreams, and smell hallucinations. The
Revue
was read not only by scientists but by the educated public, and Proust, who devoured periodicals, likely knew of it.

Between 1901 and 1903 the
Revue
published several articles on emotional memory. One, by a twenty-one-year-old French psychologist named Henri Piéron, contained this observation: “Sometimes, when passing through a certain place, while in a certain physical or mental state, I perceive a scent that, by itself, cannot be expressed or determined, that does not fit into the classification of odors; a composite, mixed scent that suddenly and violently plunges me in an indefinable, completely inexplicable but clearly felt and recognized emotional state.” This sounds a lot like Proust’s version of smell memory—all that’s missing is the madeleine. (Piéron went on to coauthor a textbook and become
un grand frommage
in French psychology.)