In Praise of The Nose

Your unique vehicle to beauty and memory.

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The senses are arguably one of the most overlooked parts of our lives.

They are our primary window onto the world, the central means by which we discover things within it – and for precisely this reason, we take the senses for granted. Focusing on things in the world, we frequently look past the bodily means by which those things are made available to us in the first place.

At the very least, it’s fair to say that compared to how much time we use the senses (namely, whenever we’re awake), we spend relatively little time thinking about them.

For that reason, I’d like to appreciatively focus on the senses – and in particular, look at the one that is most often overlooked, occasionally even derided.

That sense is smell.

The seven senses

Received wisdom holds that there are five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing.

This list goes all the way back to Aristotle, but as with much of his scientific work – as opposed to his strictly philosophical thought – it’s been superseded. Nowadays psychologists tend to recognise two further senses: proprioception and the vestibular sense. Proprioception is our sense of our own body in space (and in particular, where our body parts are in relation to each other), while the vestibular sense broadly refers to our sense of balance.

This list of five (or seven) senses is often implicitly or explicitly accompanied by a hierarchy.

In general (and in the West, at least), people regard sight as the most important and indispensable sense. This is for reasons that you may well identify with. Sight gives us the open expanse of the world in a single sweep, continuously guides us in movement and action, and can be directed with ease at objects both near and far. It is, perhaps, the most comprehensive sense, which is presumably why so many of our grandest metaphors draw on the visual field: we speak of insight, enlightenment, and seeing the light.

Next in the hierarchy of the senses tends to come hearing and touch, although their precise order is extremely subjective. Musicians and lovers of music often cannot imagine life without access to that art form, and so tend to place hearing higher. Other people think, quite reasonably, that touch nevertheless grounds our life in a multitude of crucial ways. Although touch is a very general sense, since it isn’t restricted to one part of the body, it allows us to hold and feel things, enjoy a primordial connection to the earth through the soles of our feet, and, of course, feel the touch of another person, which ranks very highly as one of life’s most precious feelings.

Either way, after hearing and touch tends to come taste. Taste isn’t a sense that we continuously rely on, which distinguishes it from the previous three. However, when we do use it – and if we are lucky enough to choose what to eat and drink – it tends to be a source of pleasurable sensations: sweet, savoury, spicy, and so on. Moreover, people often find that their palette changes over time, such that they newly appreciate certain foods (blue cheese!) and even entire domains of flavour. Bitterness, in particular, has a beauty that maturity can reveal.

The case for smell

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Then there’s smell. Poor old smell.

Almost universally, people rank smell as the least precious of the five traditional senses. Indeed, my friend’s wife was born with congenital anosmia, meaning she has lacked a sense of smell since birth. Her main complaint? That it diminishes her sense of taste.

When we compare smell to the other senses, it’s not hard to see why it’s valued less. The problem is that, like sight, hearing, and touch, smell is a sense that we continuously rely on. Unlike those senses, however, it is far less subject to our control, meaning that we have relatively little choice over what we do or don’t smell.

Of course, we can control the smells of our own person and our own home through washing, cleaning, and so on. But beyond that, it’s tricky. If I open a window with the aim of letting fresh air into the house, I might instead find myself assaulted by the smell of manure freshly dumped by the farmer onto his fields. Equally, when I lived in cities, the smell of sewage, bins, and exhaust could be revolting, particularly on a hot day.

The fact that we can be easily overwhelmed by unpleasant smells is perhaps why the adjective ‘smelly’ doesn’t mean a positive excess of smell but quite the contrary. (Compare this to ‘tasty’!) Yet despite all of this, I can think of three reasons why we should mindfully appreciate the sense of smell.

The first is, I admit, not the most compelling of reasons. It’s that smell has an important function in alerting us to bad stuff. Excrement, decay, and certain diseases smell terrible to human beings because they point toward a potential danger, namely, bacteria.

Secondly, however, there is the array of positive scents that we’re able to enjoy through the nose. Sometimes, these are enjoyable in isolation, like a wonderful perfume. More often, though, they form part of the fabric and texture of the world. For me, the scent of pine trees is as important to the beauty of a walk in the woods as actually seeing any trees; likewise, I find the salty tang of the Atlantic Ocean to be integral to the British coastline. Readers in other countries might identify with more commonplace examples: the aroma of coffee wafting across a café or that of fresh bread in a bakery.

Most persuasive of all, though, is smell’s uniquely powerful connection to memory. Even more so than taste, touch, sight, and hearing, smell has the ability to instantaneously take us back in time.

The perfume of a loved one is a well-known example of this startling effect: someone walks past you in the street, wearing the same perfume as your grandmother did when you were a child, and you momentarily feel like that little boy again. Just the other day, I was clearing out drawers full of old paperwork, and I came across a clear plastic box with a small woven pot inside. As soon as I opened the box, the heady smell of frankincense rushed up to meet me, and I was transported back to the rock-hewn Ethiopean churches where my wife bought it some years ago. More so than photos of those churches – which are, after all, mere representations – the scent was taken directly from them, and smelling it viscerally took me back there.

Mindful sensing

The above reflections might do little to bump smell higher up our ranking of the senses. If so, that’s ok because they may still have a twofold positive effect.

Firstly, we might be more inclined to look at smell in the round, appreciating not only the beautiful parts of the world that it makes available to us but also its uniquely powerful connection to memory.

Secondly, it might help us to appreciate the senses as a whole. Far from overlooking them in the course of our daily lives, as we focus on things and tasks before us, we might look again at the sensory means by which those things and tasks are given to us. Seen in that light, even the sense of smell seems a precious gift.