On Smell
Imagine it’s Circa 2050 — Apple has just announced its revolutionary iPhone Scent for $2,500 and Google being the fast follower is getting ready to release the Google Aroma. The Samsung Kimchi and the Ultra cheap Xiomi Wen are soon to hit the market. Apple’s new “Smelloji” has taken the world by storm and people have just started transmitting their favorite smells across continents.
Virtual reality with smell is just beginning to revolutionize the gaming industry. Machine learning is helping fire stations use wireless smoke alarms to determine if there is a real fire or just burnt food that caused the smoke alarm to go off. Wireless car fresheners at $9.99 with natural odors transmitted from remote corners of the world have become the hottest Christmas gifts of the year.
New Apps with a collection of smells from across the world are getting a million downloads a day. Perfume manufacturers, candle makers and retailers selling these products are having their Kodak moment. 5D movies with pictures, motion and smell are beginning to revive the movie theater market while furniture manufacturers are partnering with phone manufacturers to bring the 5D effect to your media room.
You can now start saving your own favorite smells and those of your loved ones and your pets. New research has revealed that this alone has helped people cope better with losses of their loved ones. Restaurants have just started to use location based data by sending smell alerts to all customers in the vicinity. Even the whoopee cushion has been improvised to include a smell bomb in it. Now you can imagine how different the world could be then.
If you have read my favorite Nobel Laureate’s — “Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman” you probably have a whiff of what I am about to discuss. Feynman famous for his cranky experiments once actually tried to blindfold himself while he was hospitalized to see if he could sense his wife coming into the room. Our sense of smell is what we don’t talk about much and is probably not developed or used as much as other senses.
Can we smell our loved ones? How many distinct smells can we identify? Why is it there is no smell equivalent of a wine tasting class? How come our pets have a more advanced ability to smell than us? If we put ourselves to the smell test like Feynman, what do you think we will find? Since we can’t live without breathing don’t you think our smell ought to be our most advanced sensory perception.
It’s not that we can’t remember smells. I can remember the smell of rotten cauliflower in the food trucks at the transportation service outside my primary school. I distinctly remember the stench of a cat being roasted by the Nari Koravas outside my high school classroom, and the stench of the trash on the streets while I walked on the streets in my hometown. Interestingly it appears that my memory has recorded the bad smells (badhboos) more as a Pavlovian reflex so it would be easy for me to avoid. Of course we remember the aromas from our favorite foods.
But why then can’t we smell our loved ones. Think of someone you knew can you remember how they smelled. We remember how they looked, we can hear their voices and might even remember the feeling of their touch. But why can’t we recollect their odor. Is it because we don’t try to smell them like we smell our foods or is it because people don’t have a natural odor.
Babies and infants I conjecture can remember their mothers smell due to their closeness to their moms. But as they grow older and become grown men or women maybe they never have that closeness with another being. Also along the way their ability to recognize the odor of a human probably diminishes due to it being used very seldom.
Should we wait for the Apple’s IPhone Scent or should we invest time in trying to get a whiff of our loved ones and storing that perception in our brains so we can distinctly recollect and remember. Just to see them, hear them and feel their touch without their smell deprives us of a full experience. Why wait for Circa 2050, let’s start that journey now.
