Follow the smell

Follow your nose? Smell, smelling, and their histories.

“A GREAT MANY THINGS have been said of Smells,” observed the late-seventeenthcentury Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini, but “a particular and exact History of ’em is yet wanting.”1 This was still the case nearly three hundred years later when Roy Porter wrote his foreword to the English translation of Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant, the work that more than any other wafted odor i...

To smell or not to smell? That is the question!

The Smell of Representations

ingful and are expected to elicit robust and reproducible The nose and palate never doubt / Their verdict on the physiological and behavioral responses. All of the above world without, / But instantaneously condemn / Or may facilitate the correlation of stimuli with the neuronal, praise each fact that reaches them: / ... Compared with physiological, and behavioral response. almost any brute, / ...

The intentionality of smell

If any sense modality represents, vision does, but argument is needed to show that smell does. This paper rebuts two reasons for doubting that smell represents, and offers several arguments that it does. The paper then considers several recent proposals as to exactly what a smell represents, and defends a version of the author's original proposal-that a smell represents a miasma in the air-agai...

The Science of Smell

presented in the text can be readily appreciated by the informed layman without a complete comprehension of the mathematical treatment. The caliber of the theory and mathematics is unfortunately not reflected in its presentation, which is often brief and incomplete. This is a stimulating book and its chief value lies in its function as an introduction to theoretical biology and in the questions...