The luscious aroma of flowers attracts lovers, and the biological role of that smell is similar: to attract pollinators. “Plants need to attract insects, bats and hummingbirds to transfer the pollen and create fertile seeds,” says Hugh Iltis, professor emeritus of botany at UW-Madison.
— From Curiosities: Why Do Flowers Smell, And Why Do Plants Smell, Too?, in Science Daily, with thanks to Ruth for the link and post title!
Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before. The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by about 13 percent.
— Another reason to spritz on some Une Rose before you go to bed, from the journal Science via today's New York Times (with thanks to Ruth for the link).
“The Quest to Bottle Happiness” in today’s Orlando Sentinel details recent research into how we react emotionally to different smells:
For years, sensory scientists had assumed that our reactions to smell were hopelessly entwined with our cultural background. “When I came to the United Kingdom, I was shocked that the smell of chrysanthemums evokes romantic feelings in people here,” says Phillipe Durand, a perfumer at fragrance development company Quest International in Ashford, Kent, England. “In France, we associate it with graves and death.”
However, there is mounting evidence from brain scans that our responses to some smells, particularly bad ones, are innate…
One of the earliest written documents on smell is a treatise known as De Odoribus, commonly attributed to Theophrastus of Athens (ca. 372 – ca. 287 BC). It dates back to the times when men wore white tunics, and sat under olive trees to ponder about life. Nature was a mysterious thing, and making sense of it (!) was based on experience rather than experiment. Although our outlook on Life and Nature has changed drastically over the course of centuries, we can still relate to the naturalist approach practiced in Ancient Greece. The huge popularity of Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses is a case in point…
It is lavender-harvest time in Provence. Read about the festivities in the New York Times.
An older but still interesting article in Popular Science discusses how the army is using the sense of smell to train soldiers:
Olfaction could be key. A number of researchers believe that smell, more than any other sense, can powerfully and immediately trigger emotions, memories and states of arousal—all of which, when manipulated adeptly, can boost the sense of immersion and thus the quality of training in VR [Virtual Reality]. In short, smellier simulators could produce smarter soldiers…