idesign
10-27-2007, 06:45 PM
This is taken
from "The Emperor of Scent, A True Story of Perfume and Obession", by Chandler Burr. I thought it too good not to
share, both from "smell" perspective but also a "feel-good" story as well.
Chandler Burr is the NY Times perfume
critic.
Luca Turin is, among other things, an author, perfume critic, biologist and scent designer.
Open
quote
In the summer of 1995, Turin got a call from Dr. Glenis Scadding, a doctor in London at the Royal
National Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital. She had heard about him through Jane Brock {a friend of Turin's}, she
said. Scadding was a smell doctor. (Reading between the lines, Turin got that she was actually a very famous smell
doctor, the smell doctor of last resort in Britain.) She was faced with a bafflling medical case, that of a former
nurse living is a rather romote part of Scotland who had already seen three neurologists. the woman suffered from a
very rare disorder called cacosmia, whose symptom is that virtually all smells smell vile. Scadding was wondering
if Turin might be able to help.
Janet Rippard first noticed the cacosmia sneaking up on her in 1992. "You know",
she said, "when you leave the roast in the oven and you come back and the whole house just smells scrumptious and
full of spiced roast smell? Well, ever so slowly, it went from a wonderful smell to something vaguely unpleasant,
so slowly I almost didn't notice it." She was a practical Scotswoman and had no time for nonsense. "I remember
eating ginger biscuits and saying to my friend indignantly, 'They've changed the recipe for these ginger biscuits!
They taste like black treacle.' But they hadn't changed the recipe. What was changing was me."
Over six
months, insidiously, her life tuned inside out. The diease's initial effect was to make her astonishedly aware how
social and how constant eating actually was. Wherever she went, people offered a drink, a cup of tea, cakes, and it
was as if they were cheerfully holding up offal. "Didn't they know it all smelled oddly vile" She suddenly began
finding it difficult to walk into a supermarket, and the green grocer's was worse. Restaurants were torture, but
her husband wanted to go, and so she went, although she wanted to run away. It was like being in a sewer all the
time. When she went to church, the ladies' perfumes gave off such a horrid smell she once had to flee Aberdeen
Cathedral. Flowers were as bad. She awoke to find herself somehow, suddnely, living in a permanent noxious haze
that smelled like wet dog, in some toxic trench laced with filth.
Anytime they were making hay or silage on the
farms next door, or when the tides washed the seaweed up on the beach four miles away on the North Sea, the smell
was horrnndous. When the drover by a farmyard and the pig or horse manure made the othrer passengers exclaim, "Oh,
what an awful smell!" she'd notice absolutely nothing different.
Mrs. Rippard went to the local ear, nose and
throat surgeon in Inverness, but he didn't know quite what to do with her. He gave her a complete examination.
Everything was normal. He did scans for cerebral tumors, and there were none. There's nothing we can do, he said
apologetically. She aw another doctor. And another. He referred her to a clinincal phychologist, who, baffled,
suggested that Mrs. Rippard "go to the tip of the tree," and so they arranged for her to see Dr. Scadding.
Down
in London, Scadding did MRIs and other scans and tests and came up with nothing. After the ordeal was over,
Scadding said with great regret that there was nothing else they could do, they had gone as far as they could go.
In order to end Mrs. Rippard's suffering, Scadding suggested severing the olfactory nerve. She knew a surgeon in
Amerca who did the operation, so she checked with him, but then she went back to Mrs. Rippard and reported that the
procedure was experimental and dangerous and had a low success rate. She felt helpless saying it. She happened to
mention the case to Brock, and Brock told her about Turin.
Turin was doubtful. "I'm not a doctor." But
Scadding said, "This woman has tried absolutely everything, and we're about to section her olfactory nerve
surgically", and so he thought, Well, OK, and took Mrs. Rippard's phone munmber in Scotland and called her
up.
Everyone she met, Mrs. Rippard tole Turin in that first conversation, had taken on a particular smell of
their own, their hair, their breath. Every single person stank. She stank. She hated the way she smelled,
unwashed no matter how clean she was. Stale. Sweaty and dirty both. And her life.... When they went for Christmas
dinner she had dry rolls. She could just manage a bit of Christmas pudding. The only things she could drink were
very black tea and very black coffee with half a teaspoon of milk. Lemonade tasted like engine oil. Orange juice
was loathsome. She hated her diease, it was just unending torture, she said, unending torture. Turin frowned in
concentration and asked her what did----and he'd name something, wood, beer, metal--smell like. Ineveitably the
answer was some shade of "Oh! it smells terrible, vile, horrible, it's like burning rubber, burning hair, fresh
vomit, I can't stand it." She lived in a sterile prison of unscented soap. Turin wrestled ever clue. He put them
all in his head and thanked her, and hung up and chewed on it. He came up with exactly nothing. That was the first
call.
A few days later, he phoned her again and asked more questions. He got in the habit, started calling her
to demand, "Could she smell this? Well, how about that?" and then going away to think about it. "Can you smell
acetone?" he asked one day. "Well", she responded crisply, "I don't know" (Ah doooon' noooo) "Havent' got any
have I !"
"Well, get up," Turin said, "and go to the chemist's and smell some." So the former nurse got up and
went to the chemist's and smelled some acetone, and went back home and called down to London and reported to him
that acetone smelled of ... nothing at all. Nothing. (It's acetone that smells, strongly, of nail-polish
removver.) He was a bit surprised (so was she), and he hung up and puzzled over the acetone, but if it held a key,
he couldn't see it. (Dr. Scadding had explained to Mrs. Rippard that Dr. Turin had some sort of new theory of
smell, but Mrs. Rippard didn't pay it any mind.)
Mrs. Rippard couldn't bear to see people eating meat; it was,
she said, as though the meat were running with pus. She couldn't eat any fruits or vegetables. For five years she
had lived on a diet of whole meal bread, all-bran ceral, and boiled bleached rice. She could get baked pototoes
down but not boiled pototoes, because they had so much water. As she made the tea, she had to hold her breath
because the steam smelled foul. She would run the bath, and because the water was a bit brackish where wshe lived,
she would retreat from the tub, gasping at the stench of it. But then in one of their conversations she remembered
the fact that there were, actually, a very few smell that remained normal. Marmalade still smelled normal and nice,
"the thick, dark variety, chunky, "Ah moost seh, Ah've always been foond ah marmalade." Tonic water was also
nearly right, and she could manage to drink that. Huh, said Turin. But he couldnn't see a connection. They hung
up.
Then one day she mentioned something else. He was asking her, for the nth time, about what the bad smell
smelled like, and she interrupted him to say that, well, every so often, when she smelled something, it would smell
perfectly fine for the very briefest moment, the normal smell, and then instantly it turned a vile, vile odor that
was completely different form the normal one. And Turin had, as he called it, a brain wave.
Epilepsy is,
essentially, uncotrollable reverb in the nerual system. Normal neural systems absorb a stimulus and respond to it
and then (crucially) damp the neural response down so that it does'nt simply go on forever. They wash the signal
out of the brain and wait for the next one. The neural systems of epileptics, on the other hand, fail to damp
things down. The brain recieves the signal, and instaed of processing it and then letting it drop, the brain lets
it go on and on, even ratchets it up into a hysterical pitch. Epilepsy is neural feedback that won't end.
Generally it is caused by some sort of physical damage to some part of the brain---scar tissue, say, from a head
injury in an accident. What most people think of when the think "epilepsy," the bodily convulsions, are probably
scarring of the part of the brain that controls motor function. And so Turin called Dr. Scadding at the Royal
National Ear, Nose, and Throat Hospital and gaver her his diagnosis. Janet Rippard had epilepsy of the brain,
specifically of the first station in the smell pathway, the olfactory bulb.
Scadding thought about it. This is a
long shot, Turin said, but antiepilepsy drugs are quite cheap and quite safe, so it wouldn't cost anything to give
her those and see what happens. Scadding said that, well, they were going to sever her olfactory nerve anyway, they
might as well try this.
September 8, 1995. "Super fascinating about the cacosmic pattient," wrote Stewart
{another friend of Turin's}, who was following it all from Washington, "you should get her on phenobarb by the end
of -today-". "Matter of fact," replied Turin, "she will be!! Glenis Scadding acted lightning fast last night and
prescribed sodium valproate." It was a common anticonvulsive used by millions of people for over thirty years.
"She's starting immediately (nearest chemist is 8 miles awasy, the stuff will get there tomorrow AM), am going on
holiday on Monday. Fingers crossed..." Scadding called Mrs. Rippard, who was about to depart for Cyrpus. Mrs
Rippard started taking the tablets in Cyprus, one tablet three time a day.
Nothing happeded. Nothing happeded in
Cyprus, nothing happened after she came back. For weeks, Turin would call Scadding and he would call Mrs. Rippard
and ask, "What effect?" and he would get the reply "Nothing".
Then on a Saturday evening, December 16, Mrs.
Rippard was sitting on her sofa when she suddenly wondered if there was something different about the room she was
in. She would have sworn the actual dimensions of the wall were changing ever so slightly, an alteration in the
geometry of the space around her, the objects in it, and their relationship to one another. Then she realized, with
a jolt, that she was smelling normally. People in that part of Scotland generally start their evening peat-bog
fires with coal, and the peat and coal fumes used to reek to her, make her mouth tingle horribly and her tongue go
dead as if it had been anesthetized by the dentist. People were starting their fires. And she could smell them.
They smelled like fires.
Cautiously, she got up and started gong about the house, smelling everything she could
get her hands on, opening tins, things she hadn't smelled in years, biscuits and fruits and flowers and clothing.
It all smelled as she remembererd, and her memeory triggered each smell with a strength that amazed her. She
couldn't believe it. She smelled water, opened a tin of pepper, then a jar of mayonnaise (but then closed it again
very quickly, the mayonnnaise smell took four months to come back), baked beans, and chocolates, which used to smell
revolting. Now they smelled lovely, and she had one, and then she got some vanilla ice cream and started eating it
(although that one took a tiny bit longer to come back properly) and drinking milk. She was over the moon. Her
husband was watching television, and she didn't mention it to him because she thought, I can't be be coming back!
It can't be... she was up and down all night. All these things she hadn't smelled in years. She went and dug the
shoe polish out of a box and smelled it, and smelled it.
The next day she decided to do the ultimate test and
smell the one thing that had the vilest stench of all: cucumber. Any cucumber, even a single slice without the peel
in a sandwich, would assault her with foul odors for hours. But she was in the middle of Scotland, and the nearest
cucumber was fifty miles away, so she got in her car and drove fifty miles to buy a cucumber. She took it home,
unwrapped it, cut it up, and fixed a nice cucumber salad on a plate. She leaned over it and inhaled. It smelled of
fresh cucumber. She ate it.
The day after that she said, "Right, Perfumes now". She got in her car, drove to
Aberdeen, went to a department store, and systematically smelled all the perfuems she hadn't been able to smell for
five years.
She called Turin, he asked, "How do they smell?" She said, "Oh, they're wonderful." But then she
told him some of the perfumes she loved, and he winced (her taste in perfumes was not exactly his) and raised an
eyebrow and said, "Mrs. Rippard, there's still somthing wrong with you nose." He sent her a bottlle of Apre
l'Ondee, Guerlain's 1906 creation. She loved it and wore it.
On January 5, Turin emailed Stewart" "Hi
Walter!!! The 'fog' lifted (her words). I feel so good about this I could cry!"
Scadding called Turin to ask
if he wanted to meet Mrs. Rippard in person, as she was traveling down to the hospital in London for a final test
before discharge. He found a lovely, solid, buxom woman in her sixties with, as he put it, "a twinkle in her eye
and a sensible skirt--you know, former nurse and all," jolly and pleasant. Seeing her, he realized why it had
taken so long for the sodium valproate to kick in. Mrs. Rippard was quite plump, and fat tends to soak up active
molecules. It had to be saturated witth the drug before there was enoguh to build up in the brain.
She said to
him, "Ach! Yerr a cleverr lad!"
He was beaming, Scadding and her nurses were beaming.
Close quote
The
book this story is quoted from chronicles Turin's attempt to publish his "vibrational" theory of olfactory response
in the journal "Nature". A good read on many levels. In short, he proposes that we we recognize scent on the basis
of electron vibration within a molecule as opposed to the molecule's shape.
See also "The Secret of Scent,
Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell", Luca Turin, 2006
Link to Turin's blog, discontinued but
archived here:
http://lucaturin.typepad.com/perfume_notes/
The more I learn about pheromones and
scent the more I'm interested in both. What is not known about either is how they are registered by our noses.
Smell is the last frontier of our senses to be understood, and I'm amazed at how little we know about it compared
to sight, sound, etc.
Pheromones of course are a special challenge, but I can't help but think that the way we
receive and initially process fragrance (primary reception) is tied to our ability to receive and process
pheromones, at least as far as a pathway is concerned. They both reach into and powerfully effect the mood and
behavior centers of the brain. Pheromones have a different effect than mere scent, but understanding molecular
reception and the tunnels to the brain is important to understanding the importance of each, whatever their
differences.
The molecule is the key, and receptors the lock, so far as I can understand. Vibration theory seems
to me to be a less limited method of reception. This may be stupid for scientists, but as a visual designer and a
trained musician, I know (believe) that music (pitch, tone, timbre. "vibration") carries more raw information than
dimensional drawings (3D space, "shape"). Color, texture and depth add to sight, but molecules have no sight.
from "The Emperor of Scent, A True Story of Perfume and Obession", by Chandler Burr. I thought it too good not to
share, both from "smell" perspective but also a "feel-good" story as well.
Chandler Burr is the NY Times perfume
critic.
Luca Turin is, among other things, an author, perfume critic, biologist and scent designer.
Open
quote
In the summer of 1995, Turin got a call from Dr. Glenis Scadding, a doctor in London at the Royal
National Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital. She had heard about him through Jane Brock {a friend of Turin's}, she
said. Scadding was a smell doctor. (Reading between the lines, Turin got that she was actually a very famous smell
doctor, the smell doctor of last resort in Britain.) She was faced with a bafflling medical case, that of a former
nurse living is a rather romote part of Scotland who had already seen three neurologists. the woman suffered from a
very rare disorder called cacosmia, whose symptom is that virtually all smells smell vile. Scadding was wondering
if Turin might be able to help.
Janet Rippard first noticed the cacosmia sneaking up on her in 1992. "You know",
she said, "when you leave the roast in the oven and you come back and the whole house just smells scrumptious and
full of spiced roast smell? Well, ever so slowly, it went from a wonderful smell to something vaguely unpleasant,
so slowly I almost didn't notice it." She was a practical Scotswoman and had no time for nonsense. "I remember
eating ginger biscuits and saying to my friend indignantly, 'They've changed the recipe for these ginger biscuits!
They taste like black treacle.' But they hadn't changed the recipe. What was changing was me."
Over six
months, insidiously, her life tuned inside out. The diease's initial effect was to make her astonishedly aware how
social and how constant eating actually was. Wherever she went, people offered a drink, a cup of tea, cakes, and it
was as if they were cheerfully holding up offal. "Didn't they know it all smelled oddly vile" She suddenly began
finding it difficult to walk into a supermarket, and the green grocer's was worse. Restaurants were torture, but
her husband wanted to go, and so she went, although she wanted to run away. It was like being in a sewer all the
time. When she went to church, the ladies' perfumes gave off such a horrid smell she once had to flee Aberdeen
Cathedral. Flowers were as bad. She awoke to find herself somehow, suddnely, living in a permanent noxious haze
that smelled like wet dog, in some toxic trench laced with filth.
Anytime they were making hay or silage on the
farms next door, or when the tides washed the seaweed up on the beach four miles away on the North Sea, the smell
was horrnndous. When the drover by a farmyard and the pig or horse manure made the othrer passengers exclaim, "Oh,
what an awful smell!" she'd notice absolutely nothing different.
Mrs. Rippard went to the local ear, nose and
throat surgeon in Inverness, but he didn't know quite what to do with her. He gave her a complete examination.
Everything was normal. He did scans for cerebral tumors, and there were none. There's nothing we can do, he said
apologetically. She aw another doctor. And another. He referred her to a clinincal phychologist, who, baffled,
suggested that Mrs. Rippard "go to the tip of the tree," and so they arranged for her to see Dr. Scadding.
Down
in London, Scadding did MRIs and other scans and tests and came up with nothing. After the ordeal was over,
Scadding said with great regret that there was nothing else they could do, they had gone as far as they could go.
In order to end Mrs. Rippard's suffering, Scadding suggested severing the olfactory nerve. She knew a surgeon in
Amerca who did the operation, so she checked with him, but then she went back to Mrs. Rippard and reported that the
procedure was experimental and dangerous and had a low success rate. She felt helpless saying it. She happened to
mention the case to Brock, and Brock told her about Turin.
Turin was doubtful. "I'm not a doctor." But
Scadding said, "This woman has tried absolutely everything, and we're about to section her olfactory nerve
surgically", and so he thought, Well, OK, and took Mrs. Rippard's phone munmber in Scotland and called her
up.
Everyone she met, Mrs. Rippard tole Turin in that first conversation, had taken on a particular smell of
their own, their hair, their breath. Every single person stank. She stank. She hated the way she smelled,
unwashed no matter how clean she was. Stale. Sweaty and dirty both. And her life.... When they went for Christmas
dinner she had dry rolls. She could just manage a bit of Christmas pudding. The only things she could drink were
very black tea and very black coffee with half a teaspoon of milk. Lemonade tasted like engine oil. Orange juice
was loathsome. She hated her diease, it was just unending torture, she said, unending torture. Turin frowned in
concentration and asked her what did----and he'd name something, wood, beer, metal--smell like. Ineveitably the
answer was some shade of "Oh! it smells terrible, vile, horrible, it's like burning rubber, burning hair, fresh
vomit, I can't stand it." She lived in a sterile prison of unscented soap. Turin wrestled ever clue. He put them
all in his head and thanked her, and hung up and chewed on it. He came up with exactly nothing. That was the first
call.
A few days later, he phoned her again and asked more questions. He got in the habit, started calling her
to demand, "Could she smell this? Well, how about that?" and then going away to think about it. "Can you smell
acetone?" he asked one day. "Well", she responded crisply, "I don't know" (Ah doooon' noooo) "Havent' got any
have I !"
"Well, get up," Turin said, "and go to the chemist's and smell some." So the former nurse got up and
went to the chemist's and smelled some acetone, and went back home and called down to London and reported to him
that acetone smelled of ... nothing at all. Nothing. (It's acetone that smells, strongly, of nail-polish
removver.) He was a bit surprised (so was she), and he hung up and puzzled over the acetone, but if it held a key,
he couldn't see it. (Dr. Scadding had explained to Mrs. Rippard that Dr. Turin had some sort of new theory of
smell, but Mrs. Rippard didn't pay it any mind.)
Mrs. Rippard couldn't bear to see people eating meat; it was,
she said, as though the meat were running with pus. She couldn't eat any fruits or vegetables. For five years she
had lived on a diet of whole meal bread, all-bran ceral, and boiled bleached rice. She could get baked pototoes
down but not boiled pototoes, because they had so much water. As she made the tea, she had to hold her breath
because the steam smelled foul. She would run the bath, and because the water was a bit brackish where wshe lived,
she would retreat from the tub, gasping at the stench of it. But then in one of their conversations she remembered
the fact that there were, actually, a very few smell that remained normal. Marmalade still smelled normal and nice,
"the thick, dark variety, chunky, "Ah moost seh, Ah've always been foond ah marmalade." Tonic water was also
nearly right, and she could manage to drink that. Huh, said Turin. But he couldnn't see a connection. They hung
up.
Then one day she mentioned something else. He was asking her, for the nth time, about what the bad smell
smelled like, and she interrupted him to say that, well, every so often, when she smelled something, it would smell
perfectly fine for the very briefest moment, the normal smell, and then instantly it turned a vile, vile odor that
was completely different form the normal one. And Turin had, as he called it, a brain wave.
Epilepsy is,
essentially, uncotrollable reverb in the nerual system. Normal neural systems absorb a stimulus and respond to it
and then (crucially) damp the neural response down so that it does'nt simply go on forever. They wash the signal
out of the brain and wait for the next one. The neural systems of epileptics, on the other hand, fail to damp
things down. The brain recieves the signal, and instaed of processing it and then letting it drop, the brain lets
it go on and on, even ratchets it up into a hysterical pitch. Epilepsy is neural feedback that won't end.
Generally it is caused by some sort of physical damage to some part of the brain---scar tissue, say, from a head
injury in an accident. What most people think of when the think "epilepsy," the bodily convulsions, are probably
scarring of the part of the brain that controls motor function. And so Turin called Dr. Scadding at the Royal
National Ear, Nose, and Throat Hospital and gaver her his diagnosis. Janet Rippard had epilepsy of the brain,
specifically of the first station in the smell pathway, the olfactory bulb.
Scadding thought about it. This is a
long shot, Turin said, but antiepilepsy drugs are quite cheap and quite safe, so it wouldn't cost anything to give
her those and see what happens. Scadding said that, well, they were going to sever her olfactory nerve anyway, they
might as well try this.
September 8, 1995. "Super fascinating about the cacosmic pattient," wrote Stewart
{another friend of Turin's}, who was following it all from Washington, "you should get her on phenobarb by the end
of -today-". "Matter of fact," replied Turin, "she will be!! Glenis Scadding acted lightning fast last night and
prescribed sodium valproate." It was a common anticonvulsive used by millions of people for over thirty years.
"She's starting immediately (nearest chemist is 8 miles awasy, the stuff will get there tomorrow AM), am going on
holiday on Monday. Fingers crossed..." Scadding called Mrs. Rippard, who was about to depart for Cyrpus. Mrs
Rippard started taking the tablets in Cyprus, one tablet three time a day.
Nothing happeded. Nothing happeded in
Cyprus, nothing happened after she came back. For weeks, Turin would call Scadding and he would call Mrs. Rippard
and ask, "What effect?" and he would get the reply "Nothing".
Then on a Saturday evening, December 16, Mrs.
Rippard was sitting on her sofa when she suddenly wondered if there was something different about the room she was
in. She would have sworn the actual dimensions of the wall were changing ever so slightly, an alteration in the
geometry of the space around her, the objects in it, and their relationship to one another. Then she realized, with
a jolt, that she was smelling normally. People in that part of Scotland generally start their evening peat-bog
fires with coal, and the peat and coal fumes used to reek to her, make her mouth tingle horribly and her tongue go
dead as if it had been anesthetized by the dentist. People were starting their fires. And she could smell them.
They smelled like fires.
Cautiously, she got up and started gong about the house, smelling everything she could
get her hands on, opening tins, things she hadn't smelled in years, biscuits and fruits and flowers and clothing.
It all smelled as she remembererd, and her memeory triggered each smell with a strength that amazed her. She
couldn't believe it. She smelled water, opened a tin of pepper, then a jar of mayonnaise (but then closed it again
very quickly, the mayonnnaise smell took four months to come back), baked beans, and chocolates, which used to smell
revolting. Now they smelled lovely, and she had one, and then she got some vanilla ice cream and started eating it
(although that one took a tiny bit longer to come back properly) and drinking milk. She was over the moon. Her
husband was watching television, and she didn't mention it to him because she thought, I can't be be coming back!
It can't be... she was up and down all night. All these things she hadn't smelled in years. She went and dug the
shoe polish out of a box and smelled it, and smelled it.
The next day she decided to do the ultimate test and
smell the one thing that had the vilest stench of all: cucumber. Any cucumber, even a single slice without the peel
in a sandwich, would assault her with foul odors for hours. But she was in the middle of Scotland, and the nearest
cucumber was fifty miles away, so she got in her car and drove fifty miles to buy a cucumber. She took it home,
unwrapped it, cut it up, and fixed a nice cucumber salad on a plate. She leaned over it and inhaled. It smelled of
fresh cucumber. She ate it.
The day after that she said, "Right, Perfumes now". She got in her car, drove to
Aberdeen, went to a department store, and systematically smelled all the perfuems she hadn't been able to smell for
five years.
She called Turin, he asked, "How do they smell?" She said, "Oh, they're wonderful." But then she
told him some of the perfumes she loved, and he winced (her taste in perfumes was not exactly his) and raised an
eyebrow and said, "Mrs. Rippard, there's still somthing wrong with you nose." He sent her a bottlle of Apre
l'Ondee, Guerlain's 1906 creation. She loved it and wore it.
On January 5, Turin emailed Stewart" "Hi
Walter!!! The 'fog' lifted (her words). I feel so good about this I could cry!"
Scadding called Turin to ask
if he wanted to meet Mrs. Rippard in person, as she was traveling down to the hospital in London for a final test
before discharge. He found a lovely, solid, buxom woman in her sixties with, as he put it, "a twinkle in her eye
and a sensible skirt--you know, former nurse and all," jolly and pleasant. Seeing her, he realized why it had
taken so long for the sodium valproate to kick in. Mrs. Rippard was quite plump, and fat tends to soak up active
molecules. It had to be saturated witth the drug before there was enoguh to build up in the brain.
She said to
him, "Ach! Yerr a cleverr lad!"
He was beaming, Scadding and her nurses were beaming.
Close quote
The
book this story is quoted from chronicles Turin's attempt to publish his "vibrational" theory of olfactory response
in the journal "Nature". A good read on many levels. In short, he proposes that we we recognize scent on the basis
of electron vibration within a molecule as opposed to the molecule's shape.
See also "The Secret of Scent,
Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell", Luca Turin, 2006
Link to Turin's blog, discontinued but
archived here:
http://lucaturin.typepad.com/perfume_notes/
The more I learn about pheromones and
scent the more I'm interested in both. What is not known about either is how they are registered by our noses.
Smell is the last frontier of our senses to be understood, and I'm amazed at how little we know about it compared
to sight, sound, etc.
Pheromones of course are a special challenge, but I can't help but think that the way we
receive and initially process fragrance (primary reception) is tied to our ability to receive and process
pheromones, at least as far as a pathway is concerned. They both reach into and powerfully effect the mood and
behavior centers of the brain. Pheromones have a different effect than mere scent, but understanding molecular
reception and the tunnels to the brain is important to understanding the importance of each, whatever their
differences.
The molecule is the key, and receptors the lock, so far as I can understand. Vibration theory seems
to me to be a less limited method of reception. This may be stupid for scientists, but as a visual designer and a
trained musician, I know (believe) that music (pitch, tone, timbre. "vibration") carries more raw information than
dimensional drawings (3D space, "shape"). Color, texture and depth add to sight, but molecules have no sight.