Smellosophy: What the Nose tells the Mind

2021

Mention perception, and those with neuroscience training often swiftly turn to sight. Mention studies of perception, and classic Hubel and Wiesel images of oriented bars, concentric receptive fields, or tuning curves may leap forth, framed by eyeballs and an optic chiasm's course toward V1. These images represent cell specificity, hierarchical processing, localization, and, most importantly, an elusive mapping between brain structure and function. And thus, a neuroscientist thinking about perception could well conjure the story that a stable, stereotypic arrangement in the brain can match what is happening in the world. But what about smell? asks A. S. Barwich. What reasons do we have to think that its scientific story is anything like that of vision? Smellosophy begins with appreciation for the dramatic headway made over the past three decades in our scientific understanding of olfaction. The book provides a historical account of the scientific study of smell, noting odor's long resistance to any attempt to probe it. This chronology depicts a rebellious, if powerful, sense: odor failed to fit into traditional schemas of classification, baffled those who tried to understand its flow patterns in the nasal cavity, and fooled scientists into generating tools too simple to capture its existence as a chemical mixture.

iCog Blog, 2018

Why the characteristics of odor perception and its neural basis are key to understanding the mind through the brain. My post for @iCogNetwork.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2011

Analysis

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see how a representational view of it might go. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

Human and animal olfactory perception is shaped both by functional demands and by various environmental constraints seemingly peculiar to chemical stimuli. These demands and constraints may have generated a sensory system that is cognitively distinct from the major senses. In this article we identify these various functional demands and constraints, and examine whether they can be used to account for olfaction's unique cognitive features on a case-by-case basis. We then use this as grounds to argue that specific conscious processes do have functional value, a finding that naturally emerges when a comparative approach to consciousness across the senses is adopted. More generally, we conclude that certain peculiar features of olfactory cognition may owe more to limited neocortical processing resources, than they do to the challenges faced by perceiving chemical stimuli.

Paper for Dublin Gastronomy Symposium 2012 - Gastronomy: Past, Present and Future, also presented at London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT2015), UCL, London, 2012

Paper discussing the sense of smell, memory and the brain in relation to food and taste.

TRENDS in Neurosciences, 2005

Olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) expressing the same odorant receptor gene share ligand-receptor affinity profiles and converge onto common glomerular targets in the brain. The activation patterns of different ORN populations, evoked by differential binding of odorant molecular moieties, constitute the primary odor representation. However, odorants possess properties other than receptor-binding sites that can contribute to odorant discrimination. Among terrestrial vertebrates, odorant sorptiveness -volatility and water solubilityimposes physicochemical constraints on migration through the nose during inspiration. The non-uniform distributions of ORN populations along the inspiratory axis enable sorptiveness to modify odor representations by affecting the number of molecules reaching different receptors during a sniff. Animals can then modify and analyze odor representation further by the dynamic regulation of sniffing.

Mind & Language

Humans are gifted at detecting and discriminating odors, yet we have difficulty identifying even the most prevalent everyday odors by name. This paper offers a new explanation for the puzzling discrepancy between our olfactory capacities for discrimination and identification by weaving together recent neuroscientific findings regarding the cortical connectivity of the olfactory system, the olfactory system's proprietary semantic integration center, and recent philosophical research on the olfactory system's compositional format of representation. The paper combines these areas of research to develop the comprehensive explanation that we cannot readily deploy conceptual resources in naming odorants, because of an incompatibility of compositional formats employed by our conceptual semantic resources and the olfactory system.

Our view of the world is shaped by memory, language, culture and anticipation, and is of our times. While our sense of sight dominates in the ability to understand our environment, the breath, ‘previously associated with the life force, knowledge and divinity’ (Classen 1998) carries information to us about the world. Rhythmic inhalation brings an abundance of smells and fragrances that prompt us to create mind pictures around them. Published :Performance Research 8(3), pp.104–112 © Raewyn Turner (2003)