The Nose Knows

The Iliad shows both sides sacrificing a hecatomb (100 oxen) at the drop of a hat to win divine favour. The gods, however, don’t just want dead cows. They want cooked cows for it is the smell of barbequed bovine which they really crave. This, of course, results in large amounts of meat hanging around the plains of Troy and, well, what are you going to do?

This practice spilled out of the literature and into the culture (albeit at smaller scale – a sheep or goat replaced the century of oxen), so if you found yourself transported back to the ancient world, one thing you would notice would be that it smelled like your local Greek/Turkish/Lebanese restaurant.

Though that would only be part of the “bouquet” because there would be lots of other aromas which assaulted your nostrils. The Romans may have built world-class sewers, other cultures didn’t. As well as dead animals, there were live ones too. And they produce substances with an odour all of their own.

We don’t think about this much because smell is not, we know, our strong suit. Other species are better than we are – bomb disposal squads, customs agents and truffle hunters use dogs as extensions of the human nose. We are creatures of sight, and sight dictates how we think about the world. There are all sorts of ways you can describe how something looks – shape, colour, size, pattern – but once you get beyond the basics like “good” or “bad”, we often resort to analogy when it comes to smells – it smells like cherry, for example.

We do, however, sell ourselves slightly short. We are more sensitive to the smell of water than a shark is to blood. That’s why your nose lights up after a summer storm and, possibly, why enough of your ancestors survived pre-history to produce you.

Thus, while smell may not be the dominant way we describe the world, it does form part of our descriptions of the world and part of our memories of the world. A whiff of perfume might bring back a figure from the past. Walk past a Mediterranean restaurant at the right time of day, and I am transported back to the souvlaki shops of my youth just as Proust’s narrator is taken back to his childhood by the taste of a madeleine.

These moments of reverie arise, of course, unbidden. They hijack us, dragging us away from our train of thought to another time and another place. They remind us that our minds are not sovereign and pure, but in a constant dialogue with our environment; the subjects we ponder are sometimes chosen, but just as often imposed.

But smell’s power over us is not just retrospective. It shapes our futures.

Consider your partner. What attracted you to them?

You probably thought they looked nice. They may have tickled your mind with a witty remark (humans treat humour as a proxy for intelligence).

But you also liked the way they smelled. Not the gallons of Lynx that teenage boys regard (despite all evidence to the contrary) as a sure-fire aphrodisiac, but their natural odour.

Humans do not have identical immune systems. Different genes go into the mix and when it comes to ensuring the survival of offspring, the widest possible range is advisable. Studies show that women tend to rate the sweat of men whose immune genetics are different to their own as being more attractive, the effect being particularly pronounced around ovulation.

Production of cortisol, the stress hormone, recruits a particular set of glands which produce sweat more generally deemed as smelling unattractive.

So while you may tell your friends about the moment your eyes met across the floor, in reality, your nose had worked out that your potential mate was a good genetic match, and they were quite chilled out.

You “know” these things, it turns out, but you don’t know you know them. Similarly, the mother of a sick infant will produce breast milk containing more immune cells before she is aware that her child is ill. Your body does things for reasons you do not know, and often without you knowing it.

We don’t, generally, like to think about this. The notion of the sovereign individual making reasoned choices has dominated human self-image for millennia. To the philosopher Epictetus, we were animals with a spark of divine reason. But it is that divine spark which captures our imagination.

Reason makes us legible. It allows us to explain to ourselves, and to others, why we have done what we have done. It can, when needed, be used as a defence.

But if we remain partly animal, using animal senses to behave in animal ways, these explanations will often fail. They will not tell us why we did what we did, at best they tell us what we would like to be our reasons for what we did. Our conscious, understanding minds over-reach when they explain us through conscious, understandable reasons.

Most of the time, things work just fine. The processes of which we are unaware get us to where we want to go, like an efficient servant bustling around unseen to keep everything in order. But we have to trust them. And that may be the problem. Realising that you are, in many ways, a mystery to yourself means that you have no choice but to loosen the reins and let your body get on with things. The illusion of control is more comforting than the reality of reliance.

Perhaps that is why we write smell off as an animal sense. Because it is the one which most clearly tells us we are still animals.