Diane Ackerman

defining one smell by another smell or another sense

Violets contain ionone, which short-circuits our sense of smell. The flower continues to exude its fragrance, but we lose the ability to smell it

How like Josephine, a woman of full-bodied if occasionally recondite sensuality, to choose as her trademark a scent that assaults the nose with a dam-burst of odor one second, and the next leaves the nose virginal, only to rampage yet again. No scent is more flirtatious. Appearing, disappearing, appearing, disappearing, it plays hide-and-seek with our senses, and there’s no way to get too much of it.

But the neurons in the nose are replaced about every thirty days and, unlike any other neurons in the body, they stick right out and wave in the air current like anemones on a coral reef

Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation.

Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.”

All smells fall into a few basic categories, almost like primary colors: minty (peppermint), floral (roses), ethereal (pears), musky (musk), resinous (camphor), foul (rotten eggs), and acrid (vinegar

Weightlessness makes astronauts lose taste and smell in space. In the absence of gravity, molecules cannot be volatile, so few of them get into our noses deeply enough to register as odors.

This is a problem for nutritionists designing space food. Much of the taste of food depends on its smell;

Or it may simply be that a lock and key is familiar imagery, one of the few ways in which human beings can make sense of the world around them (language and mathematics being two others). As Abram Maslow once said: If a man’s only tool is a key, he will imagine every problem to be a lock