What's That Smell?

Odors can make us remember but can also make us ill

Feb 17, 2022

NOTE: you can also read this on the Craft page where it was created. Not all Craft formatting transfers to SubStack.

The nervous system of a flatworm, a mouse or a human monitors the environment for potential harm or reward. But if a brain of any size or complexity is cut off from its feelers into the world of heat and light, texture and tone, it becomes useless. Those specialized feelers to the world outside us, we call "the five senses."

The flatworm and mouse are stuck with using the original sensing equipment only; no upgrades. But humans are not content with that basic package, and we are eternally striving to extend and amplify those light and heat and noise and touch and odor detectors we are born with. We are compelled by curiosity to know the world better than to rely only on the limited impressions that our built-in protoplasmic software can provide us.

Consider the James Webb Space Telescope that will soon extend what we can see back to the first galaxies from the baby Big Bang, as well as allowing us to add a unique filter to our enhanced infrared view of objects, distant in both space and in TIME.

The electron microscope extends the reach of our eyes in the other dimensional direction, to the very very small. And we can see and hear with increasingly powerful super-senses via radio-telescopes.

But the sense of smell—a form of chemical detection and perhaps the most primitive of the five senses, gets little love. Until now.

Enter: the Nasal Ranger.

It’s inventor, Chuck McGinley, has been referred to as the “Alexander Graham Bell of Smell.” His device, called the Nasal Ranger, (since 2002) looks like the offspring of a mating between a bugle and a radar gun. With the help of a human nose, it helps measure the intensity in parts per billion, for odors from pig farms, chemical plants and any nuisance-by-smell that gets public complaints of the stink. (The Ranger is getting a lot of use sniffing nuisance pot smoke lately.)

But with that stink might also come nausea and other unpleasant and potentially harmful reactions. Wait: Can the SMELL of something in such small amounts really make you sick?

In recent years, McGinley has “advised governments on odor regulations and empowered communities near smelly places to find a vocabulary for their complaints and a way to measure what their noses are telling them.”

Odor is a real risk, and is itself a form of pollution. Like noise and litter, it crosses property boundaries and becomes a stink in The Commons we all share. Now it can be quantified to say just HOW MUCH does it stink.

But what IS the smell? How can a professional sniffer write down the “flavor” of the smell in their report?

If you think about it, we tend to describe smells in terms of what they smell LIKE (grandma’s kitchen or essence of cat box), and generally in the context of our own memory of smells. Outgassing from a manufacturer smells like cherry cough syrup. The outflow from the local chemical plant smells like mildewed socks. The meat department in the dingy grocery store smells like roadkill. This is technically known as “reference vocabulary.”

Odor is a perception. A quality. A sensation. A personal experience. How do we avoid total subjectivity when identifying smells?

Enter: the Odor Wheel

More than one wheel has been created to evaluate subjective judgments of odor type for other than industrial effluent. To get an idea of how these work, might I offer the serving suggestion that you explore the BEER FLAVOR WHEEL for starters. And once you catch on there, move on the far more complex WINE AROMA WHEEL, perhaps especially useful for aged wines where we are told we might note that..

“With time and bottle age, wines develop secondary or tertiary qualities which add layers of depth and complexity to a wine’s bouquet. Some of the more easily recognizable tertiary aromas include tobacco, truffle, earth, spice box, chocolate, smoke, crushed stone and cigar box. ↩

Crushed stone and cigar box.” Indeed. Give me a glass of that.

👃🏼 So in our times, the chemical senses are finally getting much more attention.

What we smell and our personal experience of odor reaches a deep and persistent seat in our memory. We strongly bind emotion and meaning to smells.

All the better then that we develop ways to measure and to talk with precision about and more deeply experience the smells of our lives—but preferably, not so much the cigar box mildewed socks.

MEANWHILE: citizen odor patrols are popping up around the country, powered by Google Maps, many of the using the Nasal Ranger.