Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 140008234X, Hardcover)
• How many smells are there? And how many molecules would it take to create every smell in nature, from roses to stinky feet?
• Who was the bigger scent freak: the perfume-obsessed Richard Wagner or Emily Dickinson, with her creepy passion for flowers?
• By scenting the air in stores, are retailers turning us into subliminally controlled shopping zombies?
• Were Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama mere Hollywood fads or serious technologies?
Everything about the sense of smell fascinates us, from its power to evoke memories to its ability to change our moods and influence our behavior. Yet because it is the least understood of the senses, myths abound. For example, contrary to popular belief, the human nose is almost as sensitive as the noses of many animals, including dogs; blind people do not have enhanced powers of smell; and perfumers excel at their jobs not because they have superior noses, but because they have perfected the art of thinking about scents.
In this entertaining and enlightening journey through the world of aroma, olfaction expert Avery Gilbert illuminates the latest scientific discoveries and offers keen observations on modern culture: how a museum is preserving the smells of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row; why John Waters revived the “smellie” in Polyester; and what innovations are coming from artists like the Dutch “aroma jockey” known as Odo7. From brain-imaging laboratories to the high-stakes world of scent marketing,
What the Nose Knows takes us on a tour of the strange and surprising realm of smell.
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:43:15 -0500)
Wikipedia in English
Neat Things I Learned:
* Women's farts are stinkier but men fart more
* Women are better at smelling odor than men and have their highest sense of smell around ovulation
* Helen Keller, despite being blind and deaf, did not have a remarkable sense of smell
* Corona beer was originally poorly made and thus oxidized quickly, a lime's acid neutralized the off odor. Now Corona is well made, but the lime tradition lives on
* If you tell people a scent is relaxing, they'll relax when they smell it. Tell them the exact same scent in stimulating and they'll perk up. Scents are all in your head.
* Sniffing coffee beans doesn't "reset" your sense of smell, it's just a placebo effect
* Some companies have "logoscents." Westin hotels has a logoscent called "White Tea" that they put in their lobbies
Pros: Sources cited, concludes with a look to the future.
Cons: Far too much about smell and odors in the arts and not enough about the science of smell. So much so, that the subtitle could be called misleading. (