We routinely undervalue the power of senses other than the two most dominant ones, sight and hearing. Specifically, scent seems to receive fairly weak press. Granted, the mechanics of the sense give it a significant handicap — because of how the scent is propagated (through the chemical properties of matter and not the mechanical or fundamental vibrations), the resolution and the sampling rate is much smaller than in the case of vision or hearing — we can only detect changes in scent something like 2-3 seconds apart, and the number of different “primary” scents is much lower than the possible harmonics or distinct visual objects.

However, precisely because it’s a chemical reaction (and not a mechanical or physical one), I think it has potential to be much more fundamental to us. Scents have much more entropy than sounds or sights, and the mechanisms that interpret them are much more complex than what drives the ear and the eye (which is why we could easily emulate the latter and are still struggling with the former).

Most importantly, scents have the unique property of being able to transport us into places deep within our memories, almost instantaneously. A scent of something can bring back memories so vivid that I literally stop doing anything I was doing just to be able to take in the memory. Too bad we don’t associate more of our past with various scents.

Try to explore the world primarily with those underdog senses, see what you can discover.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 12:55 and is filed under art, comparisons, reductions, things everyone should do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.