On appreciating the olfactory sense

When God created man, He gave humankind five blessings to experience the beautiful world He created: Sight, to experience pangs of colour, texture and the way light dances and bounces off objects; Hearing, to experience voice, music, and calls of nature; Touch, in order to feel smoothness or roughness, softness or hardness; Taste, to experience bitterness, sweetness, saltiness and sourness; and Smell, to experience pungency, longing, and familiarity. 

At the Green School, Roger and I were given a project to test the extraction of plant essential oils with alcohol, to see if the Year 8 kids could perform an experiment making tinctures from various plants in the medicinal garden. Throughout this process we collected lemongrass, ginger flowers, mint leaves and basil leaves and soaked them individually in alcohol, leaving them covered in the sun for a few days. Upon opening the beakers, there was an overwhelming and unmistakeable scent of the four plants in the room.

The experiment gave me time and motivation to ponder upon the olfactory sense. I had read a book for school in 2011 called Perfume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, which was essentially about a young man born with a remarkably adept sense of smell, and yet without a personal smell himself. As a result, Grenouille is not regarded as a human by others around him (they are not consciously aware of his scentlessness). 

The olfactory sense is most understated. 

While it is possibly the most primal sense, it is also the most sophisticated. The sense of smell is neurologically connected with parts of the brain responsible for memory and sentiment.

Hence the smell of rain on dry ground will change the mood of many people as they subconsciously remember the first time they smelt that smell. If the memory was a happy one, the smell would make someone feel good and happier. Likewise, a bad or indifferent memory would reflect accordingly.

I remember when I first stepped into Neutral Bay Public School at the tender age of five, and walked into the kindergarten classroom. There was a distinct smell of freshly packed sandwiches in the room. I still remember the smell to this day, and whenever I smell the particular scent, I am reminded of the times I spent watching videos and building blocks in kindergarten.

People are only recently beginning to fully appreciate and understand the effects of smell on people. Some companies are using smell marketing to create a brand scent or use subtle scents to make stores more enticing (i.e. the smell of popcorn). By playing at a subconscious level, these companies appeal to the distant memories of potential customers. Smart. 

Bali, especially Ubud and surrounding rural areas, is somewhat an assault on the senses. The intensity of colour in market hawker stalls during the day, and occasional fires by night, the constant drumming twenty four hours a day, gamelan practices and bell ringing, the caution that is needed on every footpath to make sure you don’t fall into surging drains, the variety of different tasting Nasi Gorengs at every warung, and of course, the smells of sweat, incense and food mingled with the smell of rainforest carried down by the wind. In combination, these things form the vision of what Bali is, both culturally and physically, and the sensory overload is something that one must become accustomed to.

As I continue with the experiment in extracting oils for perfumery, I'll share my olfactory findings with you.