That stinks.

[mrissa]

Sometimes when I quit reading things, I have little pithy snarky posts about it. This time I wanted to highlight a factual error so that none of you will repeat it, because I've read this wrong, wrong thing more than one place:

It is, in fact, possible to remember and/or imagine a smell.

No, really. It is. I checked with timprov, who doesn't have nearly the nose I do, and it is not just me being a mutant superhuman. You may not be able to imagine or remember a smell, and that's fine. Some people can't process faces. Some people can't tell red from green. Some people apparently can't have smells in their brain without external scent stimulus. People vary, and that's cool.

But starting with the (supposedly nonfiction!) premise that humans cannot remember/imagine a smell and basing large swaths of social theory on it is just not on. I will be done at that point. I don't go around telling you that you can't possibly make up recipes without imagining smells if you don't go around telling me I can't do it my way. Among other things, it looked like a clear sign that this person had not so much researched his book as assumed his own universality. Not a win.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

. . . I'd never even heard of somebody claiming that. Can't remember or imagine smells? What crack are they smoking? It took me YEARS to forget the smell of the dolphin necropsy I once observed!

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

What? Huh? My understanding is that smell is the first of the senses, the one that calls back the strongest and possibly the oldest memories. Even after sight and hearing fade, smell can still call up a memory.

Link: http://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-the-sense-of-smell-work.htm

And a link: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web2/Ito.html

And so on and on and on.

Somebody is promoting personal opinion as fact. That's my opinion.

Personal experience? Agrees with the links. I can remember the smell of lilacs in my grandmother's garden when I was a toddler. And her old-fashioned roses. And even the bridal-wreath tree (light, fresh, barely there). All I need to do is think of it and it comes.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

You can remember smells? That's SO COOL. I never questioned the received wisdom because I'm one of those with a crippled memory. But if I had to choose between remembering smells and having a vast library of MP3s in my head, I'd still choose the music.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I frequently have a difficult time remembering or imagining smells for the same reason I have a difficult time remembering a particular song while a different song is playing. The world is quiet rather more often than it is odorless.

I'll just file "smells cannot be remembered" with "dreams are in black and white" and "thoughts are in language" under weird things that are apparently true for some people.

(Though if he's also got the the-thoughts-that-I'm-consciously-aware-of-are-mostly-words thing going, maybe that's part of the problem? There's practically no useful descriptive language for smells, so if he's trying to remember a description rather than the odor itself, that's probably hard.)

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I... It... WHAT!?

Edited to add:

A google search turns up lots of people beginning from the assumption that you cannot remember smell. Almost all of the hits I looked at refuted the notion.

I'd never heard it before. It isn't like I've got Mris-level olfactilicious senses, but it's really very easy for me to call up lots of smells. The sorts of smells I can't remember are things like "what did the air smell like on Day X", where that is simply one of many details my mental compression routine has thrown out the metaphorical window. I can certainly imagine smells though.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

So you've heard this truly weird claim elsewhere? Because I never have.

And the other direction, smells calling back memory, is REALLY famous.

[adb-jaeger.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that smell is the first of the senses, the one that calls back the strongest and possibly the oldest memories

While I agree with you, and the links, "smell triggering memories" is not the same as "remembering a smell".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

William Ian Miller claims that you can't, you can only remember how grossed out you were.

William Ian Miller is, on this matter, full of shit, though I recall enjoying him on early Icelandic law.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In fact, this author was claiming that scent triggers so strongly called up memory because we couldn't remember smells without the external trigger.

Which is, y'know, very wrong.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My experience says that one doesn't have to make that choice. Unfortunately, my experience also says that one doesn't get to make that choice, so it's not like this is immediately useful to you. But this is one of the reasons I'm so earwormable: because I know a gajillion songs.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, he was talking about the other direction as though it not only worked exclusively in that direction, but as though it only worked that well because it worked exclusively in that direction--as though Proust wouldn't have had his madeleine moment if he'd been able to imagine the smell of them.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I can remember the smell of my grandmother's rose bushes. I can remember the smell of fresh plowed Oklahoma red-dirt. I can remember many smells. Of course smells can be remembered, someone asserting that they can't is full of bullshit, which I can remember the smell of quite clearly. Okay, actually, they probably just process smells and memory in a different manner, but honestly saying that no once remember smells...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Which would be more plausible if I had been grossed out. I wasn't; but the smell was intense.

though I recall enjoying him on early Icelandic law

That is a sufficiently divergent field that I will not hold his statements on smell against him in that matter. :-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That seems to be exactly what he's doing, yes: he talked at some length about the dearth of smell vocabulary. Which makes me wonder whether he thinks he also recalls music as "okay, dominant, minor third up, dominant again, major fifth down...."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, it was interesting to me that he had written books on such divergent subjects. Now that I have made a go at The Anatomy of Disgust, I begin to think it was not the good kind of interesting.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You have caused me to realize that I can only properly remember smells if I inhale through my nose while thinking about them.

Which is odd, and interesting. :-)

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

I can remember the smell of grape Faygo right now. I determined to do so and conjured it up. Also, Puppy's dirty diapers (less of a pleasant thing), my mom's perfume while I was growing up, my fancy leave-in hair conditioner that I did not use today after shampooing, coffee, bacon cooking in my kitchen, and Puppy's hockey equipment after a day in my car.

There.

ETA: consistency in the use or non-use of boy pseud.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I must admit that the fame of that has put me off reading Proust; since smells don't work that way for me at all. But I remember them decently well.

On the other hand, I do very little with images inside my head; sometimes I think that's why I'm a photographer, so I have a way to keep images.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is the problem with what we don't know we don't know: if you know that something works a certain way, why would you Google it? You know how it works, after all, and you can't Google everything.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Telling the difference between "I can't" and "no one can" is a major life skill, I feel.

I originally typed that as "if eel," and I suppose it would be for eels as well, on a smaller scale.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad you spotted that yourself, as I was about to e-mail it to ask if you meant to put his "real" name in.

Anyway: this is such a trivial one. You don't even have to get out of your chair to refute him if you're such a person as can refute him. Which is now a substantial number of commenters, so I'm very sure it's not a mutant superpower thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a very functional method in some ways if so: you might not always get the one you would have wanted in an ideal world, but you get something. Whereas there isn't really a way to do that with scent.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Your brain feels pretty sure that's how you smell things, and it wants to do so now? Interesting.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

Can you imagine composite smells you haven't actually smell? (You Mris, not "everyone".) I can remember smells I've smelled but I cannot imagine smells that combine two or more other smells- like for cooking. This may be part of why I'm a poor cook overall. I can't get a grasp of what a combination will smell or taste like until I experience it.

Anyone who thinks you cannot remember a smell has clearly never put meth up their nose. That's all I'm sayin'...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Part the first: yes, this is how I make up new recipes. I put things in and smell for the holes until there aren't any gaps between what I imagined and what I'm smelling, or else until what I've got smells really good anyway.

Part the second: oh dear.